<< given that apple has a 5% market share, it's more like 1 in 20 computers is a mac. that's not a bad share for one company with higher profit margins computers than the other manufacturers. >>
Actually, the last numbers I saw worldwide for Apple market share came in at under 3%--something like 2.78%, if memory serves. Can't recall which is which, but in certain geographical/national areas (for instance, in the US alone, or in Europe) Apple marketshare does hit 5% or so, but in other areas of the world it might well be 1 in 1,000.
But mainly, in sticking with the topic here, it's hard to see any advantages whatsoever in consumer-based closed end systems. What's a personal computer consist of, after all, except hardware and software?
Hardware: Closed architectures (like Apple) offer very little in the way of 3rd-party hardware choices for the consumer. There are two main reasons for this, I think, which are that the market for closed architectures is so small that hardware manufacturers have a tough time justifying the expense of designing products for it, and that the sort of consumers that closed systems like Apple attract are consumers who simply do not wish to make any additional hardware purchases after the initial system purchase; people, in other words, who do not have any interest in adding or changing out hardware components--they don't wish to be bothered with such things.
Software: To me, this is so obvious it's a no-brainer. While there is a decent amount of existing, traditional software for closed systems like the Mac (Photoshop, M$ Office, etc.), and a decent supply of aging shareware, the amount of new software being generated for the Mac in all categories, especially but certainly not exclusive to 3D computer gaming, is simply dwarfed by the amount of software being generated for the x86/Windows consumer marketplace. Traditional Apple consumers, for instance, not only have a disdain for adding or changing computer hardware in general in their systems, they also aren't very "picky" when it comes to software--"picky" in the sense that having a great number of choices to make regarding software is less appealing than being restricted to choosing between two or three pieces of software designed for a specific task. If they have one or two "decent" Word Processing programs to choose between, for instance, this type of consumer tends to believe he has "enough" in the way of choice and that having as many choices as are present in the x86/Windows market is not an advantage, but rather superfluous and confusing--for this breed of consumer having a lot to choose from seems almost a disadvantage.
When you add all of this up it's not surprising to see why less than 3% of everyone who purchased a computer last year chose a closed consumer system like a Mac. So it's really hard to see any "advantages" at all, IMHO.
The rest of it is pure marketing--color and shape of the case--type of plastics used--anti-M$ progpaganda, that type of thing.
But one additional point to make about hardware. Apple is increasingly being forced by economies of scale to abandon custom-designed hardware. Even though Apple systems are still a bit more expensive than comparable x86 systems, Apple knows there is a definite limit on what its customers will pay for Apple systems, regardless of their emotional ties to the company. In other words, people might pay a small premium for custom & closed consumer systems like the Mac, but they definitely will not pay a lot more for them. As competition in the x86 hardware market has put an ever downward spiral on the cost for consumer x86 hardware, Apple has had to react by actually incorporating a good deal of x86 hardware into its systems, so as to take advantage of the economies of scale that exist in the x86 hardware market so that it's overall pricing can remain competitive with x86 systems in general. Things like the PCI bus, AGP bus, IDE, etc., which years ago were not a part of Apple hardware back when Apple designed its own hardware. There was even a time when Apple designed its own graphics chips, but even then pricing pressures forced Apple to adopt graphics systems first by ATI, and now nVidia is making some Apple graphics cards---even 3dfx made a few 3D products for the Mac before the company went under. None of this would be possible, however, had Apple not started incorporating x86 bus designs in its systems years ago. Today's nVidia graphics card for a Mac is essentially the same card made for the x86 market, but with software drivers for the Apple OS environments.
Also, Apple is in a sense possibly hobbled by its reliance on Motorola for its core logic chips and its cpus--if Motorola doesn't make progress in these areas, then neither does Apple. That's one reason the new Macs can't use DDR ram, I believe--the Motorola core logic simply doesn't support it yet. But it will, and relatively soon I expect.
So when you get right down to it, there really aren't any more "totally closed end" consumer systems available today--as there certainly were in the heyday of closed architectures in the mid-to late '80's and early 90's, when you had machines like Commodore Amigas (which was simply too far ahead of its time) selling 1-2 million machines a year in a total world-wide market of < ten million machines a year. The annual world wide market for personal computers is 10X that size today. And Apple is the last of the closed-system consumer architectures left--the point being that with each passing day what distinguishes a Mac from an x86 box is not so much the hardware anymore, but rather the color and construction of the case and the OS. And of course the software, or rather the lack thereof, in the case of the Apple environment.
