Interesting theory, but I don't recall this happening. As other commenters are saying, there were indeed patent-related issues around FAT and the like, and huge interoperability problems with NTFS (to name one, but that's irrelevant here)... but I don't remember anything around patents and the desktop style -- which may exist, but they were not the problem here.
From my recollection, the real issue was Mac OS X (as it was spelled at the time) gaining territory by being a real Unix with a good interface, thus attracting a lot of Unix/Linux users into the Mac. I'd even bet that many old-timers abandoned Linux on the desktop to move to the Mac, which in turn left room for the newcomers to replace the interface with something resembling the coolness of the Mac. But I'm only hypothesizing here.
For me it was a bit later in 2009 when I was giving a presentation for a position at Imperial College using my Dell laptop running Ubuntu and it crashed when plugging in the VGA cable for the projector. There was an iMac at the back of the room taunting me.
Got the job via the EU in the end and bought a 2010 13” MBP which was rock solid for many years.
For me it was this + small form factor + high pixel density. I always looked at System76 and the laptops were too big and the displays were disappointing. Other sellers seemed similar or were just refurbishing, except Dell briefly, but I never trusted them. Hardware integration is just very nice to have.
I don't like Apple in many ways but thank fuck they moved the market along in high resolution screens. 1920x1080 was the defacto standard for far too long and I was supremely agitated by the lack of progress.
“If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
When you KNOW the technology can do it sometimes you just need to give people the friggin' faster horses!
To this day High DPI displays don't work right everywhere. Even when they do, they don't look better than 1920x1080. Perhaps if I did a lot of image or video editing I would feel different, but as a human being it just isn't that important.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. But I'm still not buying a laptop without one. It's like if I said I want chocolate ice cream and people always have to bring up that they don't like chocolate.
It's a screen. I can see it. I'm quite confident that I want it.
That's fine, I think the other comment is actually quite salient though: no matter what laptop you get, you're going to get a blurry screen. MacOS' scaling is based on downsampling, which wastes a lot of processing power and renders a supersampled image that scales down to an arbitrary resolution. This is how a lot of UI elements on MacOS don't really look that crisp despite being high-res. YMMV based on scaling settings, though.
Windows gets the actual UI scaling side of things right, but the market of Windows laptops with hi-DPI displays is still quite small. Plus, Windows has a lot of bitmapped UI elements (particularly in old programs) that don't scale well.
Linux... I love Linux, but display scaling is a lost cause. On x11, you can hack things to sorta work, and fractional scaling will be fairly usable, but on Wayland, you're forced to either pixel-double or face a litany of Wayland/scaling bugs. Some hardware/software combinations can get it working, but it's anything but consistent.
So... you're certainly entitled to your choice of aesthetic preference, but all of these systems have flawed scaling implementation. I like high-res displays as much as the next guy, but not a single desktop was prepared to properly implement display scaling, and it shows.
While this is true, I don't want humanity to simply give up and stay on 1080p forever. If anything, this issue arose precisely because people were too comfortable with the "one true screen res to rule them all" instead of properly scaling.
And it was most frustrating to get phone and tablet screens MUCH better than a laptop or computer monitor!
At this stage I think a 27" 4K screen is ideal. Use highres when you can - particularly for reading text with a High DPI-aware app - and use 1080p for the legacy-rendering stuff or games.
From my recollection, the real issue was Mac OS X (as it was spelled at the time) gaining territory by being a real Unix with a good interface, thus attracting a lot of Unix/Linux users into the Mac. I'd even bet that many old-timers abandoned Linux on the desktop to move to the Mac, which in turn left room for the newcomers to replace the interface with something resembling the coolness of the Mac. But I'm only hypothesizing here.