I see four reasons for PC laptop makers being so weird:
1) The illusion of control that options give. "My toaster goes to 11!"
2) Building to specs. "This laptop has 20% more pixels than the Macbook. IPS? What's that mean?"
3) Backward compatibility obsession. "I have to have VGA-out because my enterprise customer has VGA projectors. They have VGA projectors because laptops all have VGA-out." Apple will happily pave away old cruft every few years (OS X, dumping 32-bit support in Lion, move to Thunderbolt) for the sake of simplicity and optimal solutions.
4) Consumer confusion. These people aren't stupid, there must be some advantage to having such horribly convoluted online stores. I suspect that it's easier to unload undesirable machines by putting them confusingly next to more desirable ones.
1) The illusion of control that options give. "My toaster goes to 11!"
2) Building to specs. "This laptop has 20% more pixels than the Macbook. IPS? What's that mean?"
3) Backward compatibility obsession. "I have to have VGA-out because my enterprise customer has VGA projectors. They have VGA projectors because laptops all have VGA-out." Apple will happily pave away old cruft every few years (OS X, dumping 32-bit support in Lion, move to Thunderbolt) for the sake of simplicity and optimal solutions.
4) Consumer confusion. These people aren't stupid, there must be some advantage to having such horribly convoluted online stores. I suspect that it's easier to unload undesirable machines by putting them confusingly next to more desirable ones.