[Sudetenland]

You miss the point entirely. With a PC I CAN build my own. I can customize it to be exactly as I want and as I can afford. Apple doesn't offer that capability unless you want to chance that you can build a "Hackintosh" and hope that you can kludge the OS into it and get it to work flawlessly.

As to the parts yes, as far as I am able, I buy high quality parts...just not overpriced parts...eg. 1TB SATA-II Western Digital (superior to the Hitachi's-IMHO-that Mac's use)hard drive - $100; Apple wants $300/drive for the same size.

[Mr. Blonde]

And you miss Apple’s business model entirely. They sell hardware with very good software on it. They make money from hardware. A lot of people do buy it because of the software, but it would take a lot of $129 OS X copies to equal one MacBook. Why would they trade a cash cow for almost no money. That doesn’t make any sense.

And how much is building a computer worth anyway? I have no desire to. I don’t think it is a particularly difficult but I still have no desire to do it and even if I did I highly doubt I would be as good at it as Apple’s engineers. That has to be worth a few hundred anyway.

I’m sure you can build a computer cheaper than the equivalent Dell or HP as well. Do you dislike them as well?

[Swordmaker]

1TB SATA-II Western Digital (superior to the Hitachi's-IMHO-that Mac's use)hard drive - $100; Apple wants $300/drive for the same size.

I won't argue your price... but my new 24" iMac has a Western Digital drive...