You should read up on what is a monopoly because you obviously don't know what it means. Your claim is essentially the same as claiming Burger King has a monopoly over the whopper and as such there is no competition.
Apple holds no monopoly.
Monopoly Mo*nop"o*ly, n.; pl. Monopolies. [L. monopolium,
Gr. ?, ?; mo`nos alone + ? to sell.]
1. The exclusive power, or privilege of selling a commodity;
the exclusive power, right, or privilege of dealing in
some article, or of trading in some market; sole command
of the traffic in anything, however obtained; as, the
proprietor of a patented article is given a monopoly of
its sale for a limited time; chartered trading companies
have sometimes had a monopoly of trade with remote
regions; a combination of traders may get a monopoly of a
particular product.
Webster.
mo·nop·o·ly
[muh-nop-uh-lee] Show IPA
noun, plural -lies.
1.
exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices. Compare duopoly, oligopoly.
2.
an exclusive privilege to carry on a business, traffic, or service, granted by a government.
3.
the exclusive possession or control of something.
4.
something that is the subject of such control, as a commodity or service.
5.
a company or group that has such control.
6.
the market condition that exists when there is only one seller.
7.
( initial capital letter ) a board game in which a player attempts to gain a monopoly of real estate by advancing around the board and purchasing property, acquiring capital by collecting rent from other players whose pieces land on that property.
Dictionary.com
Clearly it is you who doesn't know what a monopoly is. And yes, technically Burger King has a monopoly on the Whopper as McDonalds or Carl's Jr or any other establishment claiming to sell burger-like food products won't sell you one.
People still shouldn't pay it. Its truly outrageous, kind of funny though how much OSX gets over-rated. Its very good, not the end all of OS's though. If it blew me when I needed it then I can understand more of a premium.
Can;t wait for those magical integrated GPU announcements and the i3 in the 13' for 1199.00
The 15 and 17 should be even more amusing. No optical drive = 2 more hours of battery life LOL going to be great.
OS X is pretty rad. And yes, I'll pay the stupid Apple tax to be able to run it. Why? I don't want to have to do maintenance on my Windows machine to have it run fine and then STILL be subject to potential registry problems. Screw the registry. I'd do Linux if Linux could run even half the software I use for Mac and Windows. That leaves only Mac OS X. Though, given your argument, I should probably have a Hackintosh as that is pretty cheap and low on regular maintenance (just for point release patching).
Macs are only overpriced if you ignore some aspects of the product or compare them to out of segment products. If you compare Macs feature for feature to PC counterparts, they are very competitive. However, Apple limits the Macs to only certain configurations and combinations of features and as such, they limit their market appeal. The people that call Macs overpriced really just want a Mac with less features/different features for a cheaper price. Instead of realising that Apple just doesn't catter to them, they falsely believe that Apple sells overpriced computers.
The best example of this is the Mac Mini. It is a very competitive computer if you compare it to other SFF PCs. However, most people compare the Mini to entry level towers that do not share its most important feature : size. They then come to the conclusion that it's overpriced. Yet they go on to ignore things like the Dell Studio Hybrid, which is less hardware for the same price as a Mini, in the same form factor.
Take the 13" MacBook Pro. At its lowest configured cost, you can buy PCs that blow it out of the water. We're talking Core i7, 8GB of RAM, 500GB HDD, an NVIDIA card that puts the current 15" and 17" models' GeForce 330M GT to shame. The only spec that Apple has over those laptops is battery life. Evaluate the 15" and 17" MacBook Pros and you'll find that for those prices, you can buy a laptop the likes of which every Apple fanboy (your's truly included) would kill for (were it running OS X). And we're not talking piece of **** Dell, HP, or Sony laptops either.
If you want to make this argument on iMacs, I'll have to agree with you as most other PC all-in-ones with comparable innards to the iMacs are of comparable price. If you want to make the argument about the Mac Pro, I'll agree with you there too.
Otherwise, you're wrong about the Mac mini and wrong about every Apple portable save for the 11" MacBook Air, and even then, what if we want to buy an Apple laptop with either an Atom or a Peryn-based Pentium Dual-Core CPU?
Also, clearly if "there is no competition" to Apple, then you must like its products enough to justify the cost?
Eh... I've used Macs for 20 years so I think they're dirt cheap now. $7000-9000 is still what I remember the 17" PowerBook as. $6k for a 30" ACD. Everything today is just cheap. Then again my baseline has and always will be Macs.
I absolutely love their products to justify spending money on them. I can build a Hackintosh that'll leave even the 27" iMacs in the dust, and not even break a grand. I'd still happily buy one over said Hackintosh though. Though I have no idea where you pull $6000-9000 from, unless you factor the cost of said 17" PowerBook G4 and said 30" ACD and shipping to some foreign country.
