For some it's a comfort thing, knowing the OS. For others, it's business associations: many businesses adopted Apple products early on and have yet to catch on to how that negatively affects their bottom line, but now are dependent on them for infrastructure.

Apple's hardware isn't BAD. Neither is its software. It's very well designed, in fact! It's just about a third higher price than it should be for what you get, and the only reason Apple can demand that price is because there is still a large enough portion of the market that will still pay a premium for their half-eaten logo.

Meanwhile, both Android and Windows are operating on licensed platforms. This provides a larger, more COMPETITIVE layout of hardware, driving market shifts and feature improvements toward what buyers want rather than just the whims of the companies producing the devices. This is why you see less emphasis on resolution in most non-Apple products, but better processor performance (in a way, we'll get to that in a moment,) as well as better RAM and storage profiles.

Hardware-wise Apple's only advantage is their integration of their software at a deeper level than Android or Windows. This means that Apple devices are, theoretically, more efficient than their competitors, and they do have lower input latency. In practical terms, though, the latency difference between the worst Android device and most efficient Apple device is single-digit milliseconds, so it's pretty much ignorable. And efficiency only gets you so far: the iPhone 5S was a dual core 1.5 GHz processor that came out during a time when quad-core processors were already taking over the Android side of the market, meaning that even with its 64-bit architecture Apple was running at a disadvantage in sheer pumped power versus its competitors, all in exchange for a smaller, sleeker phone, which they are now abandoning with the iPhone 6 series anyhow.

Apple's "retina" display is one of their biggest advertising points, but it's a non-issue, too, when you consider that a Motorola Atrix HD like I have has only marginally lower pixel density than the iPhone 5S, and when you add to that the complete pointlessness of resolutions above 480p or, at most, 720p on a screen less than eight inches across, and it really becomes a pointless bragging point of ANY phone to talk about resolution.

Talking the desktop or laptop hardware world, Apple... *sigh*. Yes, for some work they're better, such as graphics work, due yet again to the tighter integration of the OS and the hardware. HAVING SAID THAT, they STILL fail to justify their pricing point in any way when a 2000 dollar Macbook has the exact same hardware inside of it as a 700 dollar Windows laptop. I'm sorry, but the OS and aesthetics of Apple's products are not a 1300-1500 dollar feature, and again we see them trying to use pure resolution power to justify their costs here with their retina displays despite the fact that the average user will see little, if any, improvement in clarity on a 13-15 inch screen from 720p to 1080p, and zilch beyond that. Outside of graphics work (rendering, photoshop, etc.) nobody really needs hefty hardware to perform the work they will do with it, IE surfing the web, typing documents, or editing spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc. And if you're buying for gaming, you ain't buying a Mac.

Apple has its positives: I can't argue that. They just don't justify the price Apple charges for those positives, or the limitations Apple will place on you in exchange.

Melanie E.

And they were all reasonable, well-thought-out, and understandable.

You know my feelings about blanket statements concerning something's value, though, so when I saw the post basically saying anything non-Apple was broken or not worth consideration, I had to step in and provide counterpoints :P

I've said before and I'll say again: Apple has an EXCELLENT design department. That includes software. It's their rights management and business management that I have issues with.

Different viewpoints from different socio-economic backgrounds and different points of interest, I guess :)

Melanie E.