alt Hacker NewsYour "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.