For many years now, the notebook market has slowly been growing, and now it is at that critical point where retailers see more notebooks flying off the shelves then they have desktops. This trend has led to a wide array of notebook sales from cheap and cheerful offerings to those targeting the who's who in society. Over the past decade Apples notebooks have always retained the premium status in the market but now Dell with its Adamo and HP's new offering the Envy both manufactures seem to be out to make Apples pot of honey smaller.
HP's Envy particularly looks very similar to the new unibody MacBook Pro, theres no need to double guess when asking what segment of the market HP is trying to aim its newest breed of sexy laptop to, but the one question that lingers is, will lineups such as the Envy or Dell's Adamo stop consumers who are looking for sleek, sexy notebook in their tracks. My simple answer is NO!
Apple offers more then just a selection of beautifully designed products, If we look at their simple no nonsense interfaces it is easy to see why they have won the market over, over and over again. OS 9 was their first incarnation which dragged the first few PC users who were looking for something different away. Since then and after the sale of millions upon millions of iPods we know that Apple is here to stay. Ask any iPod user and they may identify their desire to own an iPod merely as a fashion statement, but ask them why they sill have an iPod and they'll explain to you the true beauty of each reincarnation, this being the simplicity of the product, whether the user is 10 or closer to 80, an iPod can be for them.
OS X also follows suit, with the recently released Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) expressing the perfect "it's whats on the inside that counts" motto. Little has Snow Leopard changed on the face of it, but on the inside a large chuck of code has been rewritten and the biggest giveaway of this is the fact that an average user will regain about 3-5GB of hard disk space.
Getting back to the HP Envy, and the Dell Adamo, yes it is true that both these notebooks have brought sexy computing to the windows world and thus consumers no longer need to give up windows to have a notebook which is sleek and sexy on the outside but the fact remains Apples hold on its own market is still just as strong as it was before, this being with or without the Adamo or Envy.
