Re: Apple spinning their wheels
"...what 'complaints' would those be..?"
Lack of keyboard backlight, keyboard feel, touchpad feel, display quality and resolution, like said above.. I am of course talking about the last Zenbook generation. What impresses me is that Asus is addressing the complaints and even exceeding expectations. If they continue doing this - removing pain points and delighting their users - Apple will have a real battle on their hands. After all, they are used to the competition just making incremental improvements - a faster chipset, faster RAM, faster SSD, faster USB, faster graphics between generations - something that just improves a few benchmark scores, basically. So from that perspective Apple is just keeping up with general technological progress with the 2012 Airs.
Why this particular case is annoying me is that Apple is overpricing their new Macbook Airs. Not against some nebulous PC competition which you can always dismiss, but against the very, very similar 2011 Macbook Airs. The base model euro price increased by 120 euros, for example.
In any case, this is the same crap AMD and Nvidia have been pulling for a couple of generations - a new generation card will cost a bit more and draw a little less power than the similarly-performing older model. And just look at what the hard drive producers are getting away with. Are these the first signs of Moore's law really breaking down - instead of getting more for less you get more for more? Or is this just a sign of a company or an oligopoly with pricing power just jacking up prices because they can?