Apple makes some great products ... and they reap great rewards for doing so. I know that great design is hard. In a lifetime of engineering, I've only made a couple of designs that I thought were great, and I'm not sure how many people would agree with my assessment :) But the world abounds with examples of great design, though relatively few of them are in the tech world. With the example of Apple to validate the model, I'm surprised there aren't a host of Apple wannabes (that is, design-focused high tech manufacturers) visible to the consumer public. But there aren't...
On a trip I made recently, I had a three hour layover in Houston. I spent a good part of that time in a store that carried high-end laptops (Dell, HP, Asus, etc.). All of these laptops cost less (though sometimes not all that much less) than Apple's MacBook Pro, which I use. None of them, in my not-so-humble opinion, matched Apple's physical design, fit, or finish. They were very nice laptops, mind you – but they all had easily visible design flaws, or fit and finish issues. Then there's the fact that they all had Windows as their operating system (with one exception: a Dell that could be purchased with Ubuntu Linux). After 8 years of using OS X, there is no freaking way I'd go back to the nightmare named Windows. Not happening. And Linux's desktops, while much improved, aren't even close to being as usable as OS X yet.
So an Apple fanboi I shall remain, for now :)
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