I'm probably old by HN standards, and I've been fortunate enough to have and use a personal computer since the mid/late-80s. Throughout that entire time frame

I'm probably old by HN standards, and I've been fortunate enough to have and use a personal computer since the mid/late-80s. Throughout that entire time frame I have consistently seen the market be a race to the bottom. While that has been detrimental to my engineer's mind and my artist's soul, I also understand it completely. Without that race to the bottom, computers would never have seen as widespread of adoption as they have. There's a democratization to moving downmarket. The unfortunate effect, though, is that even many brands that were upmarket at one point have moved downmarket to build their business model around volume as economies of scale and commoditization have taken over the industry. I remember in the mid-90s when IBM stopped supplying mechanical keyboards with PC desktops, where other manufacturers had stopped long ago, thus removing another reason to pay the premium for an IBM. I can tell you as well that the current generation of Thinkpads are a far cry from the T60 and X30 of yesteryear. As it happens, I too have come to the same conclusion. I've been using Macbooks and old refurbished Thinkpads for personal computing devices for several years now. Luckily if you build your own desktop, you still have many high quality options to choose from in assembling it, but for laptops Macbooks are the name of the game, everything else is just grossly inferior from a craftsmanship, aesthetic, and build quality perspective. Frankly, I think companies stopped moving downmarket and started staying in place while cutting costs as much as possible, and somewhere along they way they just stopped caring. Apple is the only laptop-producing company left that seems to care about it's products, and I hope they stick to it.