The other issue is that if it blemishes too easily, why sue the company, why not just return it for your money back. If it's such a fault then a store person would gladly refund your money.
This screen scratching issue (unlike the screen cracking issue.) Is just a bunch of legal profiteering, they are suing apple and don't want just their money back, but they also want a cut of ipod sales. Yes you read right, they are asking for more money in return for having a screen that blemishes too easily. (Despite it being the exact same material as used on gen 4 ipods, where the problem isn't noticed)
A short but simple paradigm is that we can't make "better" and "worse" judgements, without actually comparing at least two items. (or one item over several points in time) So it's just flame bait to suggest that authors are somehow propping up Apple products soley with no basis on any other product out there. The decent reality is that Apple don't do much, but when they concentrate on improving a product they do produce a good result. (As does any company that focuses their efforts on a sole product.)
There have also been plenty of bad reviews for apple products, and to suggest that a journalist doesn't know outside their desktop is more than exaggeration. After all even in NYC where apples make up almost 50% of journalists computers, there is still plenty of windows PCs that must be interacted with regularly. Then of course, just because you like the operating system doesn't mean you're going to like every single one of the products that they produce. Which is also what Dvorak insinuates. That if you use an Apple computer, for any length of time then you must be biased positively to any apple products in existance. (Obviously someone who hasn't had to use a newton in their lifetime.)
It's good to see an open source implementation of the Photoshop "Extract" feature. (i personally feel the extract function is so poorly written, that it reaches the point where it's easier to deep etch the image by hand than to use the built in touch up/clean up tools to hope that it returns the desired result.)
It's funny that when it's a small company that MS is trying to squish, yet still equally innovative to symantec, we don't have any prevention movements. When it's MS squashing a big one suddenly we'll get pro-active government involvement. Instead of some reactionary stance of 'we'll see if you go out of business first, and if you do, then we'll give you grounds to file' (because shut-down businesses have lots of cash to sue mega corporations.)
I say let them squash symantec, and then because it will have a real financial impact on jobs in the country, they'll realise that they really should be regulating MS, as per much recommendation from the famous DOJ(and a few states) vs MS anti-trust case.
The music execs actions definitiely point at one common behaviour, one of continual rising greed. Where their various approaches to making more money each quarter are based entirely on attaching their goals to dubious means.
* Haul users into court and get settlements to hope a 'problem' in piracy results in more physical sales.
* Try to get extra revenue (because 80% isn't enough) from individual iTMS music sales, it's not like they actually pass on the 80% to the artist.
* Put up the individual cost of music where ever possible.
Never do they actually bother try to increase the quality of music available to the public or actually give them more of it. They have a culture of pushing celebrity status apon a few single artists and micromanaging their actions into the press hoping for follow on success.(britney/etc) When they know perfectly well that they can make a lot of money out of promoting (but not to gigantic international celebrity level.) smaller local artists who sell in smaller volumes. But this effort requires a lot of work that they aren't interested in, so they think suing you instead will help britney's sales.
Hooray! They'll also figure out a way that I can pay for it in my next device! (obviously a product that should be avoided.)
Hooray! One day we'll pay for "advanced" devices that let us do novel things such as "Duplicate" and "Read" (more than 5 times, and over my 30 day limit, and without a $14.95 a month license until the end of time aggreement.)
I don't really see the salt in arguments like Symantecs(and many previous arguments from different companies), simply because more faults are found in a product, whether severe or not, only indicates that there are people looking for faults. Companies such as Symantec are interested in blurring the line between 'faults found' and 'security'. An unfound and easily exploitable fault can make a product more prone to attack, i.e more insecure. Which is opposite to found flaws that are fixed.
So if a less skilled programmer is looking for faults, they are going to find less of them. So pretend we have two equally insecure products, by Symantec's paradigm one product would appear more secure than the other merely because less faults have been discovered. I'd trust a product created by many, rather than a product created by a recycled team.
To combat the same paradigm which Symantec promotes (i.e more flaws found = bad, instead of good.) companies such as Microsoft bundle multiple updates together(such as monthly updates) such that numerous groups of security flaws can be perceived as a lesser quantity of issues(Or in MS's case "one critical update"). The reality though is that security is based entirely on your track record, and not by how many faults you've discovered in your code. So we all know what the track record for MS products are versus Firefox.
Although a lot of attacks are technically possible(ideal conditions being that the computer can manage to stay alive and the user doesn't notice the security issue), they aren't very practicle. For example a lot of worms do their most damage because they are left unattended(and unnoticed) for large amounts of time, hence by including things to destroy the infected system this will render the system unusuable, this will result in the owner interferring or the system being so destructed that it is already unable to spread the virus. It's a gentle balance that mimics the actual spread of real diseases. More serious diseases don't spread far because they become noticed sooner and are contained naturally (i.e death.) While more subvert diseases are easily spread as the host can live, move about, give it to others unwittingly.
Our most effective viruses will be the ones that allow the system to live long enough to spread the virus, and as soon as it can't spread it anymore, or the rate of infection drops below a certain level, the self destruct button can be hit. Allowing maximum transfer, and then maximum destruction.
In the time between these two phases human interference should be able to pick up the CPU/network drain. (Or perhaps a software developer can make a program that realises when cpu usage + network activity is uncontrolled.)
Publisher isn't a proper wysiwgy program, it's very office like in it's reformatting (it's just less subtle that word's reformatting. )
Publisher is well known for it's draw backs, it's not a professional industry choice for layout and it serves the market of "People who want to lay out a page with more flexibility than word, but less technicality than a professional page layout program."
Using office products/publisher to create wysiwyg documents, is as trialling as using html 1.0 to create wysiwgy documents.
Mac OS X 10.2 did this as "Quartz Extreme", the requirements of which do not include massive ram endowed video cards, and last time I checked the Mac operating system is no less graphically complicated than Windows Vista.
As a refresher "NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and later, or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required", is the Quartz Extreme requirements.
I think you've hit the nail here... there is already a lot of hardware out there that will run windows vista beta 1 + mac osx86. So there is a lot of need for comparison. (Particularly because as a minimum the new apple hardware will be able to run windows, which is a bit of a hit to dell.)
Contrary to the authors review, we still need to note that vista beta isn't in use by the 'hundreds of millions' of windows users out there. (As we know there is still an amazingly significant number of w95/w98/me machines out there.) Additional to this Microsoft has had to use significant tactics to get the XP percentage up, some of which is unfair as many users don't want an upgrade they just want the bug fix.
So we seem to have two major demographics, the ones that don't want to upgrade, and enjoy the status quo of their pre XP OS, and the ones that want to try something new all the time(with subtraction of those that purchase a new PC and don't know anything about the OS that is running it.)
This article does not imply that Apple will continue with PPC chips, infact it implies the exact opposite, this sort of agreement is put in place when you ramp a product out of production(otherwise your vendor will just drop you leaving you dry as you drop to last position on their valued customer list.)
A little reading on Apple's website reveals that you can have a maximum 3 years warranty on current Apple products. So 2005 + 3 = 2008. So right away we know that Apple will need G4 chips from Freescale until 2008, but only current technology, nothing new (hence the claus covering current tech not future tech.) It is fair to say that Apple have no plans on having anymore freescale processors in any Apple products beyond 2005. (Freescale processors are G4's not G5's).
So it is also fair to say that somewhere between 2005-2006 Apple will not have any more Freescale G4 products for sale, which uncoincidently is what Steve Jobs implied when he said that Intel chips will be used in low end Apple Computers(i.e G4 computers), then ramp up to the higher end machines (i.e G5s).
Now this means that we can expect at most dual core G4s and a few more MHz to get added (as these are a current projects), but beyond that we should not expect anything else.
Steve Jobs pledged that all PPC chips will be gone by 2007, well this is exactly to this timeline.
So it'll go like this: Intels + some G4s + G5s, then Intel + G5s, then Intels.
The first thing you can expect to see in Intel form is the Mac mini. Contrary to rumours for september it is not feasible that Apple should engineer a G5 to fit in the mac mini form factor, as this is both contrary to the needs of the Powerbook, cost of r&d and the reality that the mac mini is the apple test bed as it is unimportant to the long term apple customer.(long term customers tend to buy more powerful hardware, while the mac mini is geared towards a try-before-you-buy market: buy the mini, then buy a more expensive mac next time.)
Additional to your point, accidents tend to be more serious on country roads as the lack of cars and long distances usually mean fatigue or high speed accidents. In urban settings higher speeds are not easily achieved due to traffic, while there may be more accidents in urban areas, they tend to be less serious and related more to disobeying traffic signals, rather than excessive speed.
Interesting to note is that red light cameras are not as debated as speed cameras, probably because a red light camera reduces the rate of the common accidents caused by people forcing more traffic through red lights.
Here are some interesting facts about the introduction of speed cameras in Australia.
There are more deaths on Australian country roads than city roads, yet almost all speed cameras are positioned in busy roads with relatively low death tolls.
Since the introduction of speed cameras in Victoria (second most populated state), the road fatality rate has actually risen, which is against long time trends in car safety.
Speed cameras net enormous income for the state governments in Australia, the highest earning speed camera(sydney harbour tunnel) target area has been enlarged to include the entire tunnel. As a result earnings have improved dramatically.
The speed camera argument is similar in most nations, they are revenue raisers, as a speed camera does not pull you over and stop you from hitting that pole or pedestrian, instead it fines you 3 weeks (or here sometimes up to 7 months later) in your letter box. When you can have long lost your life or license.
The cost argument is a difficult & complicated battle ground, and thus I wouldn't just discard the mac platform like the author does based on the systems being prohibitively expensive.
When it comes to the cheapest computer you can possibly buy that runs windows, then you can definitively buy a PC at your local computer store for only a few hundred dollars(In the Mac OSX world this would be like buying a base amiga DIY system and loading OSX on it). However if you actually want to make alot of use for your computer, and not just run IE+iTunes, then you're going to have to fork out more cost for hardware.(Reality is that if you only use the net and play music, then you don't need a new computer anyway, anything from the year 2000 will be more than adequet.)
So you want to do more with your machine than the most basic of tasks. This is where the apple comes in, with cheaper laptops than comparably spec'd laptops from dell, apple is the less expensive choice.
Also unless you are buying twin 30" displays from apple, then chances are your g5 will cost less than a comparably spec'd dell machine.
Now with the mac mini, which has been around alot longer than this article, you can transform that old dell machine, into a new mac machine, for a slight cost of a new computer.
Where I ask is this prohibitively insane cost of buying a Mac? There isn't, the author was just looking for a quick out as to not have to compare windows with mac os, as they serve a similar market.
Linux however was first designed and still mostly drives a totally different market. In this market, users care more about stability and secure features that aren't prone to the most basic text book vulnerabilities, instead of having features like a soft button looking calculator or animated solitaire cards.
The reality is that if windows did serve all customers as the author dictates, then there would be no need for defensive articles, that are written with too little scope(probably due to the authors lack of knowledge.) designed to debunk the need for other operating systems and justify the windows OS to any complaint.
There is significant difference between PearPC emulation and running Mac OS X Intel natively on beige hardware. First of all PPC Mac OS X is trivial to run on almost any PPC hardware (such as offerings from IBM and Amiga hardware.) As apple has put in no roadblocks against this. So writing a PPC emulator yeilds significant success in running Mac OS X (although slowly.)
Running the final version of Mac OS X Intel on beige hardware would be considerably harder to implement. Apple are certain to avoid single security measures such as dongles. But rather employ a slew of hardware requirements, from dongles-like hardware which are benign to the system, to deeper hardware requirements which will require emulation in the beige hardware. Combine this with driver requirements of the beige PC and it becomes more difficult. Apple here will likely implement checksumming/dongles/hardware checksums, so updates and drivers can not be installed on non-Mac hardware.
There are almost endless possibilities which can effectively "lock" the software to the platform. These possibilities come about because Apple have full control over the hardware and thus can implement some rather serious (yet inexpensive) security measures.
Apple continue to be a hardware company, from which most of their income is driven, they wouldn't allow the software off their machines without a very serious fight.(As it basically spells bankruptcy.)
To add to your point. Apple have an advantage when it comes to keeping their OS on their hardware, which is that their motherboard designs are still in house, meaning that while the Intel chip is the same as Dell machines, the underlying structure of the computer is still sufficiently different that it's less about hacking around a software block, and more about having to emulate the remainder of the apple hardware.
Additionally Mac OS X would be designed to work with a number of specific video cards (and other hardware configurations) which other than increasing Mac OS X's stability, will make it difficult to produce a similar beige box.
Macs may also still use an inexpensive PPC unit to help the Rosetta software.
Ultimately the mac will still be sufficiently different despite being based around the x86 chipset.
A good example is to compare the new game consoles all of which will use PPC chips, but will most definitiely not be compatible with each other.(It's a similar argument to IntelMac versus IntelDell.)
The existing apple suite of software performed fine with a single button mouse.
With recent software aquisitions and large players such as Alias coming/arrived to the platform, an apple two button mouse (or 3 even) is required to satisfy the software demands of the more recent releases. It's far easier to introduce a multiple button mouse now, than convert all existing software and entice all other companies software(such as Alias Maya which needs 3 buttons at least) to change their software for single button ease of use.
firewire 800 is still not in mainstream use, and the same goes for gigabit ethernet.
Actual users of the 12" will note that it's more of a small portable aesthetically pleasing computer rather than a serious power users machine. This is particularly high lighted in the poorer display used (it's view angle is not only limited and high on the colour shift, but the screen's resolution is probably a little too small)
What they are though are great for having enough panache to do things that the desktops can do, but with the size advantage. Such as burn DVDs, or (something I've been seeing alot recently) use it for DJing. I find they are a great laptop for those that want a little more than the iBooks, but still want something that is rather consumable. (I know plenty of people that don't use their larger powerbooks to their full potential.) Ultimately at the end of the day they are apple's smallest laptop, that alone attracts it's own market base.
the real customer base that keep apple in business will not only will buy this powerbook, but the next one that comes along. finnicky and frugle purchases aren't really the apple bottom line, for the most part because they buy once every 2-5 years. it's the power users who have a lovely budget set out for these sorts of things that keep apple going. they're also the ones that actually choose the secondary 30" display on the online store.
Slashdot Mirror
This screen scratching issue (unlike the screen cracking issue.) Is just a bunch of legal profiteering, they are suing apple and don't want just their money back, but they also want a cut of ipod sales. Yes you read right, they are asking for more money in return for having a screen that blemishes too easily. (Despite it being the exact same material as used on gen 4 ipods, where the problem isn't noticed)
Where users will get together a class action lawsuit for their ipods being too scratchy.
A short but simple paradigm is that we can't make "better" and "worse" judgements, without actually comparing at least two items. (or one item over several points in time) So it's just flame bait to suggest that authors are somehow propping up Apple products soley with no basis on any other product out there.
The decent reality is that Apple don't do much, but when they concentrate on improving a product they do produce a good result. (As does any company that focuses their efforts on a sole product.) There have also been plenty of bad reviews for apple products, and to suggest that a journalist doesn't know outside their desktop is more than exaggeration. After all even in NYC where apples make up almost 50% of journalists computers, there is still plenty of windows PCs that must be interacted with regularly. Then of course, just because you like the operating system doesn't mean you're going to like every single one of the products that they produce. Which is also what Dvorak insinuates. That if you use an Apple computer, for any length of time then you must be biased positively to any apple products in existance. (Obviously someone who hasn't had to use a newton in their lifetime.)
It's good to see an open source implementation of the Photoshop "Extract" feature. (i personally feel the extract function is so poorly written, that it reaches the point where it's easier to deep etch the image by hand than to use the built in touch up/clean up tools to hope that it returns the desired result.)
When it's MS squashing a big one suddenly we'll get pro-active government involvement. Instead of some reactionary stance of 'we'll see if you go out of business first, and if you do, then we'll give you grounds to file' (because shut-down businesses have lots of cash to sue mega corporations.)
I say let them squash symantec, and then because it will have a real financial impact on jobs in the country, they'll realise that they really should be regulating MS, as per much recommendation from the famous DOJ(and a few states) vs MS anti-trust case.
* Haul users into court and get settlements to hope a 'problem' in piracy results in more physical sales.
* Try to get extra revenue (because 80% isn't enough) from individual iTMS music sales, it's not like they actually pass on the 80% to the artist.
* Put up the individual cost of music where ever possible.
Never do they actually bother try to increase the quality of music available to the public or actually give them more of it. They have a culture of pushing celebrity status apon a few single artists and micromanaging their actions into the press hoping for follow on success.(britney/etc) When they know perfectly well that they can make a lot of money out of promoting (but not to gigantic international celebrity level.) smaller local artists who sell in smaller volumes. But this effort requires a lot of work that they aren't interested in, so they think suing you instead will help britney's sales.
Free BSD just needs a pretty lady drinking coffee from Getty Images and a fake 'switcher' story.
Hooray! One day we'll pay for "advanced" devices that let us do novel things such as "Duplicate" and "Read" (more than 5 times, and over my 30 day limit, and without a $14.95 a month license until the end of time aggreement.)
Companies such as Symantec are interested in blurring the line between 'faults found' and 'security'. An unfound and easily exploitable fault can make a product more prone to attack, i.e more insecure. Which is opposite to found flaws that are fixed.
So if a less skilled programmer is looking for faults, they are going to find less of them. So pretend we have two equally insecure products, by Symantec's paradigm one product would appear more secure than the other merely because less faults have been discovered. I'd trust a product created by many, rather than a product created by a recycled team.
To combat the same paradigm which Symantec promotes (i.e more flaws found = bad, instead of good.) companies such as Microsoft bundle multiple updates together(such as monthly updates) such that numerous groups of security flaws can be perceived as a lesser quantity of issues(Or in MS's case "one critical update"). The reality though is that security is based entirely on your track record, and not by how many faults you've discovered in your code. So we all know what the track record for MS products are versus Firefox.
Our most effective viruses will be the ones that allow the system to live long enough to spread the virus, and as soon as it can't spread it anymore, or the rate of infection drops below a certain level, the self destruct button can be hit. Allowing maximum transfer, and then maximum destruction.
In the time between these two phases human interference should be able to pick up the CPU/network drain. (Or perhaps a software developer can make a program that realises when cpu usage + network activity is uncontrolled.)
Publisher is well known for it's draw backs, it's not a professional industry choice for layout and it serves the market of "People who want to lay out a page with more flexibility than word, but less technicality than a professional page layout program."
Using office products/publisher to create wysiwyg documents, is as trialling as using html 1.0 to create wysiwgy documents.
As a refresher "NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and later, or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required", is the Quartz Extreme requirements.
This feature is absolutely essential! It allows users to be updated long before vulnerability exploits are despatched to the internet.
Contrary to the authors review, we still need to note that vista beta isn't in use by the 'hundreds of millions' of windows users out there. (As we know there is still an amazingly significant number of w95/w98/me machines out there.) Additional to this Microsoft has had to use significant tactics to get the XP percentage up, some of which is unfair as many users don't want an upgrade they just want the bug fix.
So we seem to have two major demographics, the ones that don't want to upgrade, and enjoy the status quo of their pre XP OS, and the ones that want to try something new all the time(with subtraction of those that purchase a new PC and don't know anything about the OS that is running it.)
A little reading on Apple's website reveals that you can have a maximum 3 years warranty on current Apple products. So 2005 + 3 = 2008. So right away we know that Apple will need G4 chips from Freescale until 2008, but only current technology, nothing new (hence the claus covering current tech not future tech.)
It is fair to say that Apple have no plans on having anymore freescale processors in any Apple products beyond 2005. (Freescale processors are G4's not G5's).
So it is also fair to say that somewhere between 2005-2006 Apple will not have any more Freescale G4 products for sale, which uncoincidently is what Steve Jobs implied when he said that Intel chips will be used in low end Apple Computers(i.e G4 computers), then ramp up to the higher end machines (i.e G5s).
Now this means that we can expect at most dual core G4s and a few more MHz to get added (as these are a current projects), but beyond that we should not expect anything else.
Steve Jobs pledged that all PPC chips will be gone by 2007, well this is exactly to this timeline.
So it'll go like this: Intels + some G4s + G5s,
then Intel + G5s,
then Intels.
The first thing you can expect to see in Intel form is the Mac mini. Contrary to rumours for september it is not feasible that Apple should engineer a G5 to fit in the mac mini form factor, as this is both contrary to the needs of the Powerbook, cost of r&d and the reality that the mac mini is the apple test bed as it is unimportant to the long term apple customer.(long term customers tend to buy more powerful hardware, while the mac mini is geared towards a try-before-you-buy market: buy the mini, then buy a more expensive mac next time.)
Interesting to note is that red light cameras are not as debated as speed cameras, probably because a red light camera reduces the rate of the common accidents caused by people forcing more traffic through red lights.
There are more deaths on Australian country roads than city roads, yet almost all speed cameras are positioned in busy roads with relatively low death tolls.
Since the introduction of speed cameras in Victoria (second most populated state), the road fatality rate has actually risen, which is against long time trends in car safety.
Speed cameras net enormous income for the state governments in Australia, the highest earning speed camera(sydney harbour tunnel) target area has been enlarged to include the entire tunnel. As a result earnings have improved dramatically.
The speed camera argument is similar in most nations, they are revenue raisers, as a speed camera does not pull you over and stop you from hitting that pole or pedestrian, instead it fines you 3 weeks (or here sometimes up to 7 months later) in your letter box. When you can have long lost your life or license.
When it comes to the cheapest computer you can possibly buy that runs windows, then you can definitively buy a PC at your local computer store for only a few hundred dollars(In the Mac OSX world this would be like buying a base amiga DIY system and loading OSX on it).
However if you actually want to make alot of use for your computer, and not just run IE+iTunes, then you're going to have to fork out more cost for hardware.(Reality is that if you only use the net and play music, then you don't need a new computer anyway, anything from the year 2000 will be more than adequet.)
So you want to do more with your machine than the most basic of tasks. This is where the apple comes in, with cheaper laptops than comparably spec'd laptops from dell, apple is the less expensive choice.
Also unless you are buying twin 30" displays from apple, then chances are your g5 will cost less than a comparably spec'd dell machine.
Now with the mac mini, which has been around alot longer than this article, you can transform that old dell machine, into a new mac machine, for a slight cost of a new computer.
Where I ask is this prohibitively insane cost of buying a Mac? There isn't, the author was just looking for a quick out as to not have to compare windows with mac os, as they serve a similar market.
Linux however was first designed and still mostly drives a totally different market. In this market, users care more about stability and secure features that aren't prone to the most basic text book vulnerabilities, instead of having features like a soft button looking calculator or animated solitaire cards.
The reality is that if windows did serve all customers as the author dictates, then there would be no need for defensive articles, that are written with too little scope(probably due to the authors lack of knowledge.) designed to debunk the need for other operating systems and justify the windows OS to any complaint.
Running the final version of Mac OS X Intel on beige hardware would be considerably harder to implement. Apple are certain to avoid single security measures such as dongles. But rather employ a slew of hardware requirements, from dongles-like hardware which are benign to the system, to deeper hardware requirements which will require emulation in the beige hardware. Combine this with driver requirements of the beige PC and it becomes more difficult. Apple here will likely implement checksumming/dongles/hardware checksums, so updates and drivers can not be installed on non-Mac hardware.
There are almost endless possibilities which can effectively "lock" the software to the platform. These possibilities come about because Apple have full control over the hardware and thus can implement some rather serious (yet inexpensive) security measures.
Apple continue to be a hardware company, from which most of their income is driven, they wouldn't allow the software off their machines without a very serious fight.(As it basically spells bankruptcy.)
Additionally Mac OS X would be designed to work with a number of specific video cards (and other hardware configurations) which other than increasing Mac OS X's stability, will make it difficult to produce a similar beige box.
Macs may also still use an inexpensive PPC unit to help the Rosetta software.
Ultimately the mac will still be sufficiently different despite being based around the x86 chipset.
A good example is to compare the new game consoles all of which will use PPC chips, but will most definitiely not be compatible with each other.(It's a similar argument to IntelMac versus IntelDell.)
the only thing this article didn't have was a pretty woman drinking coffee.
With recent software aquisitions and large players such as Alias coming/arrived to the platform, an apple two button mouse (or 3 even) is required to satisfy the software demands of the more recent releases. It's far easier to introduce a multiple button mouse now, than convert all existing software and entice all other companies software(such as Alias Maya which needs 3 buttons at least) to change their software for single button ease of use.
Actual users of the 12" will note that it's more of a small portable aesthetically pleasing computer rather than a serious power users machine. This is particularly high lighted in the poorer display used (it's view angle is not only limited and high on the colour shift, but the screen's resolution is probably a little too small)
What they are though are great for having enough panache to do things that the desktops can do, but with the size advantage. Such as burn DVDs, or (something I've been seeing alot recently) use it for DJing. I find they are a great laptop for those that want a little more than the iBooks, but still want something that is rather consumable. (I know plenty of people that don't use their larger powerbooks to their full potential.) Ultimately at the end of the day they are apple's smallest laptop, that alone attracts it's own market base.
the real customer base that keep apple in business will not only will buy this powerbook, but the next one that comes along.
finnicky and frugle purchases aren't really the apple bottom line, for the most part because they buy once every 2-5 years.
it's the power users who have a lovely budget set out for these sorts of things that keep apple going.
they're also the ones that actually choose the secondary 30" display on the online store.
It does come with one track pad button though :)
And they're off to troll again about buttons and UIs.