I assume you are talking about the internal components. I have found the components you actually interact with (screen, keyboard, trackpad, etc) to be really well done. Maybe if other Manufacturers spent more time getting these things right and less time on specs, they would have higher profits.

If Dell made an effort to promote non-Windows offerings, their margins would be a lot higher, but they seem hesitant to pursue this angle aggressively.

Example: http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/dell

The biggest drag on PC profits is paying the heavy Microsoft tax on every unit sold.

The Microsoft tax is more than offset by crapware. I don't know if there's crapware available for Ubuntu; perhaps Canonical can afford to pay Dell for every copy of Ubuntu due to the new Amazon integration.

If you can find some kind of citation for that, I'd be interested. It is offset to a degree, but probably less than $50 per unit. Windows 8 costs more than that to the OEM.

Also crapware makes your product seem crappier, so you have to drop the price to remain competitive. I'm not sure there's much to gain from it despite how prevalent it is.

Isn't being able to accomplish a high profit margin the whole point? Being able to do that while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction is simply excellent.

Huge markups on RAM, mainly.

You're not really paying for the RAM, you're paying for the RAM plus installation. It's cheaper to produce 2, 4 models on an assembly line and if you wan't to have 4x RAM just charge you a lot.

I just buy the model with the less RAM and upgrade myself, in some models it's covered in the instructions and are not too hard to upgrade.

Every vendor does this, especially on the enterprise side.

Apple's memory prices are somewhere between Dell's consumer prices and Dell's server prices.