McRae's actually quite complementary towards Apple, saying that the Cupertino company “deserves a lot of respect for bringing design back into the consumer's purchase decision.” But his goal is to bring that level of detail and care to a lower price point in a way that resonates with consumers. “We basically built a $2,000 PC for half the price — that's how we approached it,” says McRae. “We didn't skip on a single thing. Then we take our efficiency as a company and our supply chain to price it at a number you can't match.” That's Vizio's TV playbook, almost verbatim — and if history is any guide, established PC vendors should take notice.

And Vizio is aiming right for the heart of the mainstream with its PCs, pricing them in what McRae repeatedly calls out as a gap between the cheap sub-$600 machines and Apple at above $1,200. It's a gap Windows OEMs have struggled to address — at Computex, AMD's John Taylor flatly told our own Sean Hollister that PC sales volume “disappears by the time you get to $899, and then they all go to Apple.” That's right where Vizio is focused. “We're not even trying to compete with Apple,” says McRae. “The gap in the market is premium Windows consumers.”

That's all very nice, of course, but the PC market is full of huge players who build every size and shape of machine imaginable — including, yes, some nice all-in-ones with HDMI inputs and 1080p screens. McRae is dismissive when I bring this up. “It's a huge market, granted, but it's packed with large elephants. That's exactly what the TV industry was eight years ago.” Matt's not the type to hold back. “There's not a lot of innovation” in PCs, he says. “At $599 and under, there's just tons of black plastic. It all looks the same. You can tell there was a motherboard designed first and then they wrapped plastic around it and shipped it as fast as they could.” His tone is calculated. “It's the same players pumping out the same product every six months. So that's ripe for disruption.”

Viewed through that prism, it's actually Vizio's new laptops that seem like the outliers — the all-in-one desktops are really just nice small TVs with a PC permanently plugged into input 0. McRae calls all-in-ones the “fastest-growing form factor in PCs" and says Vizio's are“designed to be a great TV experience, not just a PC. We have 2 HDMI inputs, 2.1 audio, a beautiful 1080p screen.” The screens on the new PC line are a source of pride, of course. “We're an HDTV company, we care about picture quality,” says Matt.

A global American company

One of the most interesting things about Vizio is that it is so very small — 417 total employees, 414 of which work in the US. It's almost unfathomable that a company that small can be so dominant in the TV market competing against the likes of Sony and Samsung, just as it's remarkable that the new laptops and all-in-ones appear to competitive with anything from Apple or the traditional PC vendors.

Vizio's secret is that it takes aggressive advantage of the global economy. It's a systems integrator at a whole new level — instead of packaging off-the-shelf components into a chassis like traditional PC and TV vendors have done for years, it creates products directly at the supplier and manufacturing level. McRae says Vizio is “the tip of the spear”: the company focuses on overall vision and product design, and relies on partners and suppliers to do nearly everything else. “I get to pick the best of breed technology in the world on every single product,” says McRae. “The downside is that it's a little chaotic: we have a team of under 10 people leading a meta team across many companies of maybe 1,000, and that can be a little tough from a management standpoint. Our founder often says that 50 percent of our job is orchestrating.” Making it all work is something of an art, and Matt's obviously proud of how successful Vizio's been at bringing companies together to build products. “People often forget who they work for,” he says. “I'll talk to someone as if they're one of my employees, I'll have someone else talking to me and they're really pushing me pretty hard. We're all one team in the end. It only works when you get everyone to agree on what the goal is.”

That stands in stark contrast to a company like Apple, which notoriously tries to design every element of its products. McRae tells me that he doesn't think there's a middle way to make great products — a company has to either stay lean and commit to fully outsourcing the commodity elements and manufacturing of its products while remaining focused on the unique elements, or it has to vertically integrate like Apple and take control of everything. “We'd have to have 10,000 employees to be as vertically integrated as Apple,” he says. He notes that while Apple and HP use the same firms as Vizio to assemble their laptops, “we use them a bit deeper. We use them for their design and electrical ability and other things, because they've learned a tremendous amount. It's a different way of going about business.”

Vizio's also perfected the art of moving products from the factories in Asia to retail shelves in America more cheaply than anyone else. McRae says the logistics and forecasting team are “the unsung heroes at Vizio. I think we're the most efficient company in the world at bringing a product from the manufacturing site to the consumer's hands.” That's a big deal when you're moving millions of delicate 65-inch LCD TVs around the world — and it translates directly into lower prices for consumers. It also makes Vizio extraordinarily fast: McRae says the company can go from conceiving a product to having it on store shelves within six months. “No other company can do that,” he says proudly. “We have an idea and we can execute very quickly.”

I ask Matt what it's like running a tiny American hardware company in a world dominated by large Asian OEMs who pump out endless variations of products and huge American firms who are entrenched in their own markets. “It's an advantage and a disadvantage,” he says. “We only have so many resources and we can only do so many things. It makes us focus.”