> Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
This wildly, comically untrue in my experience: all of the normal people I know loooooove how fast it is and charging a few times a week. It was only the people who self-identify as PC users who said otherwise, much like the Ford guys who used to say Toyotas were junk rather than admit their preferred brand was facing tough competition.
Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users". You're measuring the 0.1%! (Which, fine, is probably more like 15% or whatever. Still not a representative sample.) You're likely also only sampling US consumers, or even Californians, and so missing an awful lot of the market.
Again, real normal people can't tell the difference. They don't care. And that's why they aren't buying macs. The clear ground truth is that Macintosh is a lagging brand with poor ROI and no market share growth over more than a decade. The challenge is explaining why this is true despite winning all the technical comparisons and being based on the same hardware stack as the world-beating iOS devices.
My answer is, again, "users don't care because the laptop market is commoditized so they'll pick the value product". You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Historically that analysis has tended to kill more companies than it saves.
> Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users”
No. Remember that Apple sells devices other than Macs: they were all non-IT people who liked their iPhones and figured they’d try a Mac for their next laptop and liked it. One thing to remember is that Windows is a lot less dominant when you’re looking at what people buy themselves as opposed to what an enterprise IT department picked out. There are a ton of kids who start with ChromeOS or iPads, got a console for gaming, and don’t feel any special attraction to Windows since everything they care about works on both.
> You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff".
Huh? Beyond being insulting, this is simply wrong. My position is that people actually do consider fast, silent, and multi-day battery life as desirable. That’s not the only factor in a buying decision, of course, but it seems really weird not to acknowledge it after the entire PC industry has spent years in a panic trying to catch up.
This wildly, comically untrue in my experience: all of the normal people I know loooooove how fast it is and charging a few times a week. It was only the people who self-identify as PC users who said otherwise, much like the Ford guys who used to say Toyotas were junk rather than admit their preferred brand was facing tough competition.