Mac and PCs are becoming different product categories

Cars and motorcycles

Cars and motorcycles are a bad metaphor.

You can easily spend more for a Honda Goldwing than a Honda Civic.

Really?

You can easily spend more on a Windows box than on a Mac. What's your point?

Amazing

I take it you've never heard of TOC (that would be "total cost of ownership" for the unwashed like yourself).

My five year old plastic iBook still runs and looks like new - including the mechanical items like latching, keyboard, the touchpad etc. despite several unintended trips to the floor from heights of several feet (I did admittedly have to replace a bent bezel after one of those, but you'd never know by looking). I can only imagine how long a unibody MacBook Pro chassis will last.

I've never had to wipe it and reinstall the OS, never had an infection, spend no time on malware management, defragging, etc., etc. And amazingly I still get about an hour of use on the ORIGINAL battery (probably on its 500th or more charge).

I've also been to forget a lot of what I had to learn through trial, error, time and tears about troubleshooting, since I never have any trouble to shoot. And then there are the small touches like the dual length power cord and the design of the brick which fits next to other devices without blocking another plug, and the fold in plug tangs which simplifies moving.

And things in the OS are simply easier, faster and more intuitive to do. I recently had to transfer a lot of files on a Vista machine. Every new explorer window opened with a file name column that had to be dragged to read the file name. That was 50 or more navigate/click/drag operations that should have taken one.

And time, as you may have heard, is money. Or productivity. Or peace of mind. Or more time for the rest of life. All of the above actually.

And I wonder what you could sell a five year old Dell notebook for. I could still get a decent amount for mine toward a new MacBook Pro, if I wasn't going to keep it and dedicate it to other useful purposes.

Mac users bitch about the Finder, but Spotlight and other features still make it more intuitive and useful than Win Explorer in most respects.

So no, we're not spending a premium to accomplish the same task. We're spending a premium to accomplish more with less effort, less frustration, fewer undecipherable error messages, restarts, BSOD's, etc., etc.

WOW do I feel sorry for how clueless you are in your isolation and irrational mental cubbyhole.

Then ALL high end PC buyers are "dumb" too!

So according to what your saying, then, PC users who buy Dell's $2600 Adamo are also dumb. The Adamo, after all, does the same thing as any of their sub-$1000 laptops. If you haven't developed a taste for expensive laptops, that's fine. I won't judge you. Just please try to imagine that there are those of us who prefer them for various reasons that, I think, you can well imagine if you try hard enough.

Besides, there's always been this price myth shoved down your throat, which then regurgitates itself onto forums like this. Because even before Apple's recent WWDC price drop, look at the prices of any PC company who makes a laptop model that is "thin and light" and that's made of anything upgraded from plastic — it's often MORE expensive than an Apple, and almost never as attractive. Maybe that's one reason, aside from being able to afford an OS that doesn't have malware to contend with, that most of us buy Macs.

I know the price revelation sounds wrong, considering what you've always heard by all the astroturfers and Apple haters. But, take Dell's high end Adamo:

Dell 1.2 $1500 / Apple 1.86 $1500
Dell 1.4 $2300 / Apple 2.13 $1800

Until recently, when Apple dropped its prices at WWDC, the price difference was even greater.

There are other such examples, yet I still applaud Dell for one of the few worthy high end laptops they've made. The Adamo doesn't have a bunch of holes bored and slots cut out for peripherals, with stickers aplenty, along with various other ugly decorative elements and logos that try too hard, and in a case that doesn't flex and feel plastic-ey.

Dell has finally been putting out decent looking machines, though their less expensive models still look like bathroom scales (but still better). In fact, what you're seeing from Dell, Toshiba, HP, and others these days is a direct response to what Apple has been doing (no different from with the iPhone). Apple is making money — yet with pleasing, quality designs instead of uninspired assembly of generic parts.

Even during this recession, Apple enjoyed it's best non-holiday quarter in its history, while MS profits decreased 32%. Something they're doing works, and you'll be the beneficiary in a system that's tired of razor-thin margins, while watching Apple clean house at the higher end.

For a couple of years now I've been suddenly seeing laptops and phones I never thought I'd see from these uninspired, corporate commodity cash counters. So, insult Apple and its users all you want, but you're reaping benefits whether you like liking it, or not.

And I don't begrudge you any enjoyment that you (or others, if you're not so esthetically or aesthetically inclined) might discover. Most of the world has had to live with seven years of Fischer-Price Toys XP on ugly hardware that was also mostly unchanged.

But things are changing for the better, and for all Windows, Mac and Linux users to enjoy. Yes, even we poor Apple users who, according to you, pay for an OS and hardware that delivers no chance whatsoever in getting our money's worth. We all so vehemently deny this, and so enthusiastically love our Macs you'd think that one of you haters would eventually change your mind. At least about it not being worth our money, the spending of which, by the way, is really none of your concern unless you care so much about your fellow man that pointing out our folly is some nonjudgmental act of kindness.

Oh, gee, thanks. I'll take that into consideration when in Windows I can install 50 apps all at once, simply by dragging them (unzipped). And then drag any I don't like to the trash to uninstall. And when menu-centric Windows applications morph into elegant Cocoa apps, with their sidebars/toolbars layouts including gorgeous, huge icons.

See, there's more than one reason we fork over the money, some of us even spending less than $100 for used laptops, or the Mini. We LOVE our Macs, not just put up with them. And there's nothing you can say or do to convince us that Apple products "suck" or that our IQ tests were inaccurate or that our paychecks should go toward thick & heavy black, sticker-festooned, plastic slabs because you, anonymous, think we should only buy computers under $1000. (Make sure to keep us updated as the currency fluctuates, and continually adjust it for inflation.)

Hear, hear!!

Hear, hear!!

Cheap is clearly best for you

There's also a cheap stock out there that would be perfect for you. Look for MSFT.

Yeah I know. If I had

Yeah I know. If I had purchased into that stock about 20 years ago, I'd be retired by now.