It’s vertical integration. The problem is can Macboys really justify paying twice as much to get something of lesser value? I know I can’t. From an economic standpoint, Macs are the cadillacs, and we all know how the big 3 did against smaller, cheaper and more fuel efficient vehicles.
Sure it might ‘just work’, but I’d rather not have to buy a new machine when it ‘just breaks’. It’s nice to be able to add the components that I want, and not rely 100 percent upon the largess of Jobs.
From my perspective, the answer is an easy “Yes.”
When I look back over my 20+ year career in computers, I can look at all the hours I’ve invested in fixing crap that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place. The two systems where I can honestly say I invested less time on crap I should not have been dealing with were the Mac and the other was VAX/VMS (another vertical integration of software and hardware, BTW).
Everything else, but most especially Windows and generic PC hardware, followed by several flavors of Unix, has been a huge time sink. These days, I merely multiply my last billing rate for consulting ($250/hour) by the number of hours I used to sink into Windows BS and Macs look very cheap.