There's a good reason Apple users are so loyal.
I think that anybody who is "loyal" to a for-profit, publicly-traded corporation that cares nothing about them whatsoever on a personal level is horribly misguided.
Show me another iPod. Show me another iPhone. Show me another OS X. Show me another service like iTunes.
The only thing I have above is OS X and iTunes (because it cames with OS X). I actually use a wide variety of audio players.
The Apple cult started long before the iPod and iTunes. Apple stock was at $14 a share in the early 2000's.
Back then, it was all about a backlash to M$. Apple even had a paid position known as "Chief Evangelist" where the company actively pushed itself as a cult and/or religion.
Back then (90's), I hated M$ as well,and used Linux almost exclusively.
Why do I not use Linux now? Multi-media editing is weak at best and my current occupation requires better tools. Since Windows is pretty god-awful, my only other real choice is OS X ... which is just another Unix/Linux distro. Many of the "new" features you guys crow about (spaces, etc), I had with Windowmaker on X11 in 1998.
Nevertheless, I will admit that OS X is probably the finest COMMERCIAL OS out there.
The rest of it is hype, though.
I had a 2.93ghz Quad Core Dell in June of 2007 with an 8800GTX graphics card that until the 4850/4870 cards were released, ran circules around everything offered by Apple save for very expensive pros.
Apple uses the same commodity hardware as everyone else. Intel CPU's, Nvidia GPU's, cheap Hynix memory (I upgraded my iMac to Kingston), Seagate/Maxtor HD's, etc.
Not only that, but they have a HUGE history of hardware problems. Arguably more than any other manufacturer.
The hardware superiority is in your head. As all religions are. It is not quantifiable. You simply take it as truth, and that is good enough. That's fine.
Core 2 Duo is not revolutionary, though. Neither is the GT 120. Even when Apple downgrades, people sniff the doo-doo and declare it's scent divine.
This is not logical behavior. This is faith-based behavior.
Dollar-for-Dollar, you can get far better hardware from just about anyone else than you can get from Apple. I can get cheap Hynix memory from any discount electronics retailer on the planet. It only costs a pantload when they call it "Apple Memory".
Alas, I am wed to a large amount of software that I have that runs on OS X. I also happen to like OS X.
I also realize that it's the same Linux I used ten years ago, polished with ten years of technological innovations. It's not magic pixie dust. It's BSD with a swell window manager and some proprietary tools.
Yes, it's better than Windows in almost every way, but what isn't?
I pay more for hardware so that I don't have to run Windows, but I don't do it nearly as enthusiastically as everyone else. Apple isn't "giving" me anything. I am paying a premium for it. Apple's shareholders have done pretty well. There is no ultruism, and the company does nothing for my benefit. Everything they do is solely for their own benefit. If you sent Steve Jobs an email tomorrow telling him that you were dying, you would get no reply. Nobody at Apple cares about you in any way. I promise.
Unrequited loyalty is misplaced loyalty, and the fact that SOME Mac users still use some form of logic is of some comfort to me, although the percentage is not high.
