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Let's see. You can buy a PC from Dell, HP, ... how many vendors sell Macs?

Let's see. A vendor is not a manufacturer, it is a seller of the product. While Dell, HP and Apple all sell direct, they also sell through vendors. Apple sells through their Apple Stores, Frys, MacMall, OWC, BestBuy and others.

Exactly where do you go to buy a Honda automobile? Do you go to the Toyota dealer? Maybe you buy at the Ford Dealership? Honda, just like Apple, is a BRAND... and under our perfectly reasonable brand name system, it is not monopolistic to sell your brand through the channels that you prefer.

iTunes. Well, you can play your iTunes on your Apple Mac, your HP, your Dell, your Fujitsu, your Sony Vaio, your PC of any make... and you can play the MP3s you have ripped from your own CD using iTunes on any player you like. It is perhaps true that Apple is approaching a monopolistic position on portable digital music players... they have ~70% of that market. However, there are 30% of that type of device that are not Apple, that are competing with the iPods. As of May, all iTunes songs will be DRM free and playable on anything you choose. It may be a little more difficult to load on your third party player, but it is perfectly possible to do.

Let's see. You can buy a PC from Dell, HP, ... how many vendors sell Macs?

You buy a Dell from Dell, an HP from HP and a Mac from Apple. How many vendors, other than authorized Dell retailers, sell Dells?

BTW, there are lot of authorized Mac retailers around the country, not counting the Apple Store chain.

You can start calling Apple a monopoly when they start using their money or market position to leverage other OEMs out of markets. Let's say Apple starts undercutting everyone else's laptop prices, taking no profit, to educational institutions to sell to students. Then say they offer steep discounts to them for their IT infrastructure, making it all Apple. Then Apple starts making Macs less compatible with Linux and Windows so that students now have to have a Mac if they want to go to those schools. Then Apple stops the cheap laptop program and rakes in the bucks because every student at these universities has to buy Apple. That program would catch the notice of the DoJ when it starts getting big enough.

Wow, some of that brings back memories of how Microsoft operated its monopoly.

But Apple doesn't do that. They offer educational discounts like most other OEMs do, and Microsoft does (and Microsoft's educational discounts are rather steep).