From the horse's mouth

Hi, was on travel for a while, hence, couldn't update the thread!

In the meanwhile, I got to know a little more about Apple from a colleague who is an ex-Apple employee! So, now I know a little from the horse's mouth, and will write down a part of it! [I am not supposed to disclose most of the things, hence, you have no choice but to accept my reasoning for them! ]

Alright, first things first, "Yes", I accept that gaming on a Mac is virtually non-existent except for the GNU-Chess, which seems to be the game that is the most "current" in development! Let's now talk about everything else, shall we?

Also, I don't understand your point about a Linux user switching from Mac to Linux! The Mac OS X is a full blown BSD-based kernel in itself! You don't need to install Linux on it separately unless you're exclusively developing something for some particular flavor of UNIX! There's the 100% POSIX compliance as well as native X11 support, apart from the availability of all sorts of compilers. interpreters, etc which are the staple of the UNIX world!

Now, from someone else's account:
There have been many decisions on adopting standards, and creating some, post Jobs' return. Hence, the adoption of MP3s, x86, 3G for the iPhone and Windows compatibility, because what 80% of the people in the world use, becomes a standard unto itself! Before that, it wasn't like that, and although they developed upto 2-3 different OSes, none of them matched the technology from Next that Jobs brought along with him! Every product that is made is not shipped! The first iPods and the iPhones were chosen from 3-4 different prototypes, which were developed parallely but independently! The best one was picked and the rest dumped in the quest of "perfection"! This, to me is good enough reason to command a premium for their products! Prototyping is frozen at stages till things are perfected, for example, even the shade of black to be used on a particular product was argued upon for ~6 months!

Now, coming to the cost of innovation! You may or may not already know that Apple has a significant share in the birth of ARM! They were the ones to start the PDA revolution with the Newton. In case you look it up, even though they were the dark days at Apple, they had managed to make something that failed simply because it was way ahead of it's time! Imagine, a PDA with hand-writing recognition in the earlier part of the 1990s! Do you know that Macs are not just featured as the computers of choice for the stars in the Hollywood movies, but are actually the most commonly used hardware for production and post-production, including mixing as well as for creation of special effects! Do you know why? Because, with Next, Jobs had developed technology which was supposed to make use of multi-core and multi-processor designs, and not get overwhelmed by them. Today's Mac OS X is not an off-shoot of patching and maintaining compatibility with an OS designed for a 4-bit chip way back in the 80s! (Read: MS-DOS) Even though Vista was virtually a write from scratch (what else were they doing for 5 years!!), it has not met expectations, and Windows 7 is already in the works! But, a new Mac user today gets an OS designed with mainframes and super-computation in mind, despite the fact that the same OS can be trimmed to run something as nimble as the iPhone! That, to me, exemplifies scalability in architecture as well as shows the amount of thinking that goes into every product that Apple makes!

I will spend my life driving a Maruti or a Hyundai, and upgrade to Honda maybe once! But, in the words of my own colleague, who is definitely not a Mac bigot:
"I can afford a Mac but I can’t afford a BMW...or I would buy one of those, too. It’s just a better product."


PS: RoI = Return on Investment
Mostly games + little bit of everything else = Windows [I choose a dedicated platform like the PS3/XBOX to play games rather than a PC, by the way!]
Few games + everything else under the sun = Mac!
Next version of the Apple Mac OS X, 10.6, Snow Leopard, is going to be completely compatible with Microsoft Exchange! Also, the iPhone could (the last time I heard) VPN into our office's network too! And many people use Macbook Pros as their business machines! Hence, the enterprise share is also coming. For such a small share, the expectation would be very high and not even small glitches would be forgotten! I am waiting for the day when I start designing on Macs!