Originally Posted by Internet Guy

When you understand Steve Jobs, the guy still responsible for the how do you say.. "personality" of Mac products.. ", the way stuff is kind of makes more sense. As a person, he was a very interesting guy.. Good/Bad/Whatever, no matter what you think of him, he lived a very interesting life.

He really valued design, wanted each users experience to be under his control - so he could make it "as good as possible". He was a total control freak, that really shows through in the products. He considered himself like an artist, one who loved making money and obsessed over the marketing of his products - from the user experience which started with how you felt when you "opened the packaging". The commercials were a huge deal, so were product unveiling events. Heaps of ego and talk of how awesome their products are, and they make a tonne of cash (huge margin on their products).. But really at the core, you have open source operating system - tweaked considerably (mostly turning functionality off, lol), hardware designed to work specifically with that software config so they can get better performance with older tech (smart, but they use that advantage to use older tech instead of making it as fast as possible), a really nice case/pretty looking product (usually).. For what it is, I think you over-pay for what you get. Clearly the marketing side has worked very well for them.