> What gives people the perception of apple being expensive is that other OEMs play tricks to boost numbers on a spec sheet that the common person checks while cheeping out massively on parts that don’t show on the spec sheet.

Yep! Like with dell: non-standard power supply size, non-standard motherboard size. And with most of the companies: a motherboard that uses whatever the cheapest USB, sound, SATA chipsets were in the bin that week.

The boards are designed and reworked constantly by the factories...as opposed to Apple who pour enormous engineering effort into refining, testing, etc each revision.