That would probably double their margins, don't you think?

They don't make money off the resale price, they make money off the wholesale price. Any money over the wholesale price goes to the retailer (or the distribution chain), not the manufacturer.

Not sure what has happened to Asus in the past few years, but the same laptop class at a given price range now has a significantly lower build quality than <2014. I don't know if it's them making retailers take these deals and getting lazy, Intel forcing higher and higher prices on them and them not being able to push the prices to consumers, RAM/SSD prices becoming higher, or what. Either way it's been disappointing to see them go down this path because they're going to lose whatever brand loyalty they had.

I've always associated Asus at the lower end of build quality with laptops that bits start falling off after a few years, cases that just crack and generally wear out from being lightly used. Much like Acer and a world away from HP or Dell, let alone Thinkpad or Macbooks.

ASUS doesn't have a response to the Dell XPS line. ASUS just has cheap feeling "gaming laptops" last time I checked.

I would say the Asus Zenbooks were generally the response to the XPS line. I must admit I haven't looked at them for a while, but the original Zenbook UX510 (I think) was pretty damn good, but rather pricey. I always felt that Asus were a step up from ACER.

Have both Acer and Asus. Can confirm. Acer is trash. Asus is as good as any I've used.

This thread has people hailing Dell and HP as quality laptops. In other threads, there is no end to the troubles people have with Dell XPS. HP has a poor reputation as far as I remember, without remembering any specifics, except that they had overheating issues at one time.

I guess the difference is probably between business and consumer laptops, where the former tends to be Dell or HP? Except Acer, as noted, because Acer is trash. Don't buy Acer.

Dell is also trash, I've purchased two Dell laptop, lots of problems come with them.

It's because it's expensive paid repair service so I bought it, but I don't think I really like to repair my laptop so many times. (And not to mention classic power adaptor problem with has built-in it for pretty long time)

For Asus and Acer, we always joked them with a "built-in timer", they will break when time is up. Just like all those eco-friendly things. Very environment-friendly company.

The Zenbook Flip S is relatively good competition for the XPS 13. Price fixing, or not, you can get an 2.4lb 0.5" thick 1080p 13.3" 8550U 16GB 512MB machine for about a grand, less if you find the right coupons. Can run hot with lots of disk traffic, but otherwise a very slick design and a joy to use. (I actually got mine for $700 as a manufacturer refurb on ebay.) It's NOT for gaming. But it's also not cheap feeling in the least.

They have ZenBooks that are in many ways better than Dells, worse in others. Let's not pretend either of those reaches Apple's 2012-2015 quality.

Just two datapoints: But for me Asus build quality was sub-par as far back as 2006. And I don't mean the GPU-unsoldering issue, no: The hinges on my 1300 Euro Asus A8Jp would fail after one year of normal (non-abusive!) use, resulting in wracked plastic around these metal parts. Needless to say, after the warranty period was over, I couldn't really use it anymore as a mobile computer (luckily, I got a free Dell D630 from a local institute).

I gave them a second chance, but the 419 Euro T100TA convertible also failed me after just about two years (doesn't turn on anymore; no idea why). Oh, and that device was probably affected by the price fixing.

So, my decision is simple: No more Asus. (And that's the nice way of putting my personal opinion).

Why would the build quality stay the same if it can be lowered, thus making production cheaper, and savings can be either pocketed or used to lower the end price (or some combination of both)? A competitive market will optimize towards lowest quality that still sells. And I guess there's still a lot of corners to be cut - from my experience, a typical non-tech laptop owner handles their device very carefully, as if it was a very expensive egg. It's mostly techies that run around carelessly with laptops.

I strongly dislike these nihilistic views of markets where consumer happiness (ie, reviews on Amazon, tech blogs, friends/family etc) is never factored in and people expect companies to merely look at price as the one and only factor. It's a very popular perspective today and common critique of modern corporate culture, but still ultimately a naive one that ignores how markets work and over-simplifies things to the point of being inaccurate.

That's not how markets work, except in the lowest of the low end (where margins are already awful).

That doesn't mean the entire company/product lines operates this way or the market as a whole is incentivized to do the least amount work effort possible.

> I strongly dislike these nihilistic views of markets where consumer happiness (ie, reviews on Amazon, tech blogs, friends/family etc) is never factored in and people expect companies to merely look at price as the one and only factor.

It is nihilistic, but is it any less true?

Also, not price, profit. Revenue minus costs. It costs company to make a product make user happy, so if they can skip that without impacting their sales, they will - doing otherwise would be leaving money on the table.

> That's not how markets work, except in the lowest of the low end (where margins are already awful).

I argue that's how markets work in any highly competitive space.

> the market as a whole is incentivized to do the least amount work effort possible.

But isn't it? As a company, you want to make money. Existence of competition causes you to make less money. If you don't fight back this pressure, you'll get pushed out of the market. This incentive structure applies to all your competitors as well. This is exactly how competition makes products cost less.

Shrinking PC market, oversupply of older models, Apple eating vast majority of profits. If you want them to build better computers, buy more of their expensive ranges to give them a room to operate. Otherwise expect penny-pinching.

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.