I don't deny the mac OS's huge advantage when it comes to academic tools. Having written essays and assorted academic papers for the past two years I came into contact with some great mac tools (not devonthink though).
They do not, however, justify the price tags on apple products (in my country you can pay the equivalent of £2000 for mac, or £500 for a PC that could do the same things and more).
The legend that macs are way better at handling graphics is also mostly gone. These days, only my friends who went to work in advertising (where one owns a mac as a fashion statement rather than as a productivity tool) use (their own) macs. Apple seems to recognize that, and has been focusing its marketing efforts to lure high-spending, fashion conscious buyers - not the practical person who needs certain tools.
This has let to an ever-dwindling market share in the PC market. They compensated for this with higher and higher prices. The design is great, granted, but macs were becoming so elitist they were dangerously close to extinction. Apple's exit strategy was two-fold: first, it tried to change its focus from PCs to multimedia.
But that presented them with a dilemma: are we really going to become the world's largest online music/media store, selling the gadgets that go with the content and sort of 'abandoning' the PC bussiness?
They knew they couldn't survive much longer as a 'designer PC' maker. PCs are becoming commodities, there's microsoft pressuring and copying everybody, and then there's the linux crowd with governments backing them... Apple, as I see it, saw itself in pretty much the situation as it was when Steve Jobs was called back.
The last time apple found itself in this situation (high-ish end products only, high price tags, marginal market share, worries about the future), it came up with the iMac. A "cheap" new mac would be the other part of the strategy, again this time.
Back when the iMac was launched, it was about the same thing as this new mac mini. A cheaper mac that still managed to look revolutionary etc. etc. I bought one. I can't say I regret it - it added 'Macintosh user' to my CV - but if I'd know I was going to leave Economics behind and become a journalism/communication student barely 18 months after (moving to a department full of Mac) I'd have saved a lot money and of trouble with that iMac.
Anyways. Back to Apple and Steve Jobs. He knew his designer clothes label couldn't survive in a market where people increasingly see the 'clothes' as commodities and move on to spend their hard-earned cash in other, 'more important/more distinctive' things. So he needed a cheap mac to compete with PCs but cashing in on Apple's strenght - design (both 'exterior' desing and interface/software desing).
On the other hand, a cheap mac with all (or most of) the functionality of its absurdly expensive brothers could cannibalize the sales of the very products that kept Apple alive. After all, the company feels distinctively Brazilian in its marketing mentality - sell a few items at a huge price and that's it. Problem is, unlike Brazil (where an inept goverment will guarantee you have the market for yourself by stifling competition), the world PC market is open and ferociously competitive.
So Apple always needs to find subtle ways to cripple its cheaper products to prevent them from competing with its own high-end systems.
In the Wintel/Linux PC world, this 'crippling' can be easily and cheaply overcome if you have even minimal knowledge of computers.
With Macs, you're stuck with a very limited machine that will be great for the first couple of months. After a year, you'd better throw it away and buy a new one, because it can't evolve (sometimes not even in software).
My advice? Unless you can seriously justify purchasing a mac - like deek, and he was smart and bough a used one - don't even come close to anything from apple that's not an iPod or a gadget like that.
Avoid their computers. They only
look nice.
