I'm surprised how little effort there is for product differentiation though. There are some good ways to decommoditize and get people to pay $399 instead of $3

I'm surprised how little effort there is for product differentiation though. There are some good ways to decommoditize and get people to pay $399 instead of $349. * "Modest Rugged". Robust hinges, maybe some sort of drop-protection. Not Toughbook quality, but at least "I can leave it with clumsy people and children and not worry about it". I get more of that out of a used-to-death X230 than from a new HP Stream or the like. * Premium packaging experience. I've bought some nicer-grade PC PSUs and they come with fancy fabric sleeves and pouches to hold the spare cables. Why can't my laptop come in a basic travel sleeve, maybe with a matching pen and mouse? It would probably add $5 to the BOM, yet make the product feel dramatically more premium. * Longer warranty. I know the Europeans get 2 years by law, but really, saying "here's our unit with three years of guarantee on it for $20 more than theirs with 1 year" at least provides the signals of quality. * Experimenting outside the touchpad. I can recall when you could get all sorts of different pointers-- side trackballs, eraser pointers, things with the buttons on the back of the case. There are a lot of people who prefer Thinkpads just for the eraser, or love Apple's touchpads... but there's no reason Asus or MSI couldn't come up with something to build the same loyalty. * Better out-of-box experience. Throw a 16Gb flash drive, worth maybe $5 in quantity, with a clean software image on it, so you don't have to pester the user to make a backup themselves. Install a decent set of freeware people will actually use. I can see there's probably incentives to push MS Office trials, so it's not surprising nobody pre-installs LibreOffice, but why not paint.net, 7-zip, VLC, Firefox? Think of how Microsoft's stores do a significant business on "you can get a laptop without a bunch of crap installed"as a selling point.