.crazylegs..

Contrary to Some Opinions, Apple Doesn't Do Loss Leaders

Apple is kicking everyone's ass in everything they do right now because they have the most elegant software combined with extremely well designed hardware AND very smart marketing. A cash balance of $18.5B (and growing) provides a nice cushion too. Argue all you want, but I would rather bet on a company with low (and increasing) market share, excellent end user satisfaction, and sticky customers. I don't know anyone who has switched to a Mac and willingly switched back.

Their competitive advantage is in the end-to-end model where they create both software and hardware. Going forward the margin of superiority will increase as ALL of their products will fall under one core OS which will make all those devices play very well together.

The seeds for their future growth were sewn when NEXT was purchased by Apple, Steve came back, took over, and installed NEXT's unix OS as OSX. Watch as Apple uses this to push further ahead in innovative software with more great hardware while msft drags all of their legacy, bloated spaghetti code along. I guess Windows 7 is due out sometime in 2011? Ouch. I can't wait, because it will cause even more folks to choose a Mac than the nightmare they call Vista.