(That said, personally I hate my MacBook Pro from work with the fire of a thousand suns, and have only used an iPhone for playing music on long plane trips since getting a Nexus 1.)
Assuming we are segmenting the Mac market from the PC market, it is much better to be in the PC market whether you are consumer or a producer. For manufacturers, it sucks to be in Apple's market if you are not Apple (PsyStar?). For consumers, they get a wider selection of products at lower price points, though they do not get the design cachet.
To make a belabored car analogy, would you rather be in the market for Italian supercars or that of the rest of the world? Both producers and consumers tend to choose the latter.
Most consumers would choose to be at the luxury end of almost every product. It's just not a choice for almost everyone.
As to producers, it isn't inherently better to be a luxury market or a general market -- it's highly dependent on your product, market, and competitors.
For consumers, they get a wider selection of products at lower price points, though they do not get the design cachet.
That's a kind way of saying that consumers have a very diverse pile of crap to choose from.
But other people buy fancy houses, fancy cars, fancy computers, fancy holidays, fancy clothes etc. by virtue of choosing what is important to them and spending less on everything else. You can't spend more than average on everything unless you have more than average money. On average, people don't.
Lower price points, but a Windows PC is cheaper than a Mac only if your time and frustration is worth nothing.
Actually, if you want a quality desktop (quality meaning zippy specs and at least a 27" 2500x1500 bright high quality monitor) you might find Apple cheaper.
Nobody else is really in Apple's market right now because selling high quality hardware and a great experience is impossible when you're wedded to Microsoft garbage. It's probably a worthwhile market, though, if you could get the millions necessary to start up.
Even though Apple was in trouble in the 90's, it was and is and has been since the 1970's the most profitable computer manufacturer in the world almost every year.
How much of that money is coming from iPods, iTunes, and the iPhone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
90-10 in favour of windows.
Android is not a single, tightly-controlled product line. It's an OS. Buy whatever hardware you think you'd like to run it on.
It's just a different approach than Apple's, and one that has worked well in PCs.