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that Macs are for girls:
"I've never heard a Windows user say they love their PC."
That someone can stand in wonder that people don't have a deep, personal bond with a pile of circuitry and metal is why Mac users tend not to be taken terribly seriously. When "which flavor do I get? I kind of like grape!" became foremost in the Mac shopper's mind, all was lost.
There's nothing wrong with the machines. Apple's industrial design is legendary, and the machines tend to be put together a bit more solidly (for twice the money, they'd better be). And if you can control which hardware is used (and charge a ludicrous premium for taking that choice away from consumers), you can spend a lot more energy making sure the system works end-to-end with that hardware.
That's a believable model for building a set of computers. The other model is to make everything interchangeable and hope that the 2000 different organizations building drivers and whatnot all work in perfect harmony. Chaotic, but that's capitalism for you.
It's the latter that's driven price drops all over the marketplace, a price drop which Apple is only too happy to exploit. You people don't think they make their own, special "Apple" disk drives, do you?
