Apple aren't any more evil than their industry competitors. They are owned by their shareholders. Those shareholders choose people to operate the company who make the most money for them. Hence the business becomes all about making money.
The thing we (or I) like about Apple is that they hold the strangely unique notion that you make more money by making better products. The rest of the industry, perhaps because it's the significant potion of the technology market, try to increase profits by cutting costs. For example, Dell or HP might use a cheaper quality plastic or spend less time on design or install bloatware to subsidise the cost of the machine.
Apple tries to grow profits by making an even more outstanding machine. They think if they build an even faster, even better designed, even more amazing product, they'll sell more and make more money. I like that because it means each product, individually considered, is better than its competitors.
Unfortunately, Apple's prices are out of step with their current position. Apple needed a lot of money to keep afloat. Because it was able to rely on its core user base to keep buying products, it increased the margins significantly to make enough money to survive. This was designed to give Apple a cash cushion should it ever fall again.
It worked. Apple now has $25Bn in the bank, and Apple is in excellent health. The idea of Apple falling now seems ludicrous. Yet those margins are still high, because Apple has managed to grow despite them. It's the most profitable OEM on the market. There's no pressure on Apple to lower margins (and hence prices), so it simply won't.
Now that Apple's healthy, they are in a position to experiment with low cost, high volume sales models. Unfortunately, I don't think Steve Jobs can think like that. He's great at picking markets to enter, but perhaps because of the work he had to do to bring Apple back from the brink, he's shown no signs of lowering the margin now Apple is healthy again.
