Yeah, I can't stand HiDPI, I sorta like how the text looks, but the fuzzy edges on everything else are a complete deal-breaker. So for me, the 15" Retina machines are 1440x900 (way too small) or have fuzzy edges (ugh).
And yes, you're quite right. My demands are not what Apple seeks to satisfy.
But it used to be that Apple tried to target multiple audiences, by having significantly different product lines. The MBP line had higher-end features but wasn't as light and portable, the macbook was sort of middle-of-the-road, and the air was ultraportable at the cost of functionality even compared to the base macbook. And when they were doing that, the MBP was a bit disappointing to me, but basically livable; it could do what I wanted well enough most of the time. (And I actually had an Air, too, because sometimes I did want the ultraportable thing.)
Now, Apple's got three product lines, but no meaningful differentiation. They're all 100% devoted to thin/lightweight, no matter the cost. They don't have anything for people who would be willing to accept another mm or so of thickness in exchange for a richer feature set or increased functionality or power.
And it totally makes sense to target the largest market
first, but going from "targeting two different markets" to "targeting only one of those markets" generally indicates a loss of market share.
What does build quality has to do with maintainability?
Maintainability is a pretty significant functional goal for laptops. If my laptop's fan needs to be cleaned, what am I going to need to do in order to accomplish that? If the answer is "take it in to a store or mail it in and wait a day or longer to get it back", that's obviously much worse for me as a user than "spend five minutes on it". Things like "how easy or hard is it to replace the battery" or "how easy is it to upgrade later" are similarly pretty significant questions, and they are questions which engineers take into account when designing parts and putting things together.
Apple's engineers are not merely not considering maintenance. They are designing things specifically to
prevent maintenance. Go ahead, try it; find the special pentalobe screwdriver bit, take the screws out, and see how the bottom of the 2016 MBP pops right off... Oh, it doesn't. It has little sliding latches to prevent you from opening it. Those latches don't have
any purpose but preventing you from opening the machine. But that's okay, they also soldered on all the parts that used to be replaceable. Net result? Decrease in machine lifespan due to how the machine is built.
That's absolutely a build quality issue.
By comparison, since I happen to have it sitting open right now, I can look at the internals of the 5-year-old Latitude I got as e-waste from a previous job. It comes open easily, memory is socketed, the fan is immediately accessible if you want to clean it, and the socket where a cell network card would go if I had one has a nice clear "WWAN ->" label. Memory's socketed. Hard drive is swappable and you don't even have to take the cover off to do it, just undo two clearly-labeled screws.
So, let's take this away from the Mac question, since people can't have a serious technical discussion of Apple without feeling personally threatened.
I have an ASUS G55VW laptop. I have that Dell latitude. Similar ages. The G55VW has an m-SATA slot. To get to it, you have to take out something in excess of 30 screws. You have to remove a whole bunch of things from a bunch of places, mess with cables in precise orders, remove a keyboard held in by lots of little snappy things... And that gets you to the top side of the motherboard. Which isn't where you need to be. You then need to disconnect even more cables, take out more screws, and so on, to remove the motherboard, to get to the m-SATA socket. (In ASUS's defense, every screw you need to remove to do this, except for one row of them, is marked with a little triangle indicator.) And the thing is, the panel you open to get at the hard drive and memory sockets? It's
right next to the m-SATA port. If that panel had just been two inches larger, you could swap the m-SATA drive immediately by just opening the panel.
That's awful build quality, and lots of people complain about it, because it turns a reasonably straightforward task into a really complicated one, offering the user no real benefit. The difficulty of taking that machine apart got complaints, and justifiably so. There's no reason it should have been such a pain.
Dell's design is clearly better, and that's not an accident, that's a result of clear effort on the part of their engineers to make things work better. There's little channels for cables to run through when cables need to run somewhere, they don't just float about in empty spaces. There's a little slot for the third WLAN antenna cable to sit in if your WLAN card only uses two antennae. But the WLAN card is swappable, so you could also upgrade if you want.
Apple's engineers, by contrast, are neither working to make things maintanable as Dell does, nor ignoring the question as ASUS did (I think ASUS has gotten better since then). Rather, they're specifically putting design effort into making it
harder to do maintenance. And if "didn't even think about it" is poor build quality, "actively trying to make things worse" is definitely bad build quality.
And every hour the engineers spend adding features to make it harder to open the machine is an hour they didn't spend working on anything that actually benefits the user. So even if you don't otherwise care, there's space inside that machine (which we all agree is at a premium) being wasted by those latch mechanisms we don't want and didn't ask for, and every other engineering priority got less attention than it should have.
