Looks like all of you did an excellent job of explaining to Mr. Right why Apple is doing fine. I don’t agree with every aspect of their marketing plan, but I can’t deny they make excellent products and are extremely profitable.
Apple hardware and software is integrated to work very well together. Windows, on the other hand, is designed to work on a wide variety of platforms and pays a price for that.
I just wish Apple would use some of its profits to pay developers to port more best selling games to OS X. Games are pretty much the only reason I ever willingly run Windows. I’m not even a heavy gamer, but I’m forced to use a Boot Camp partition when I’d much rather stay in OS X.
I also want to add that I own Windows machines that would have been Macs had Apple offered a modicum of support to gamers. Games like Left 4 Dead could make Apple even more profit by selling more Apple computers. I don’t know how much it costs to port something like that over, but Apple has changed their core processor several times (680X0, PPC, to Intel). Seems to me it wouldn’t be difficult for them, but they are unlikely to listen to my advice (plus, it might be more difficult than I envision).