Wish you had Apple shares?

"Prop-up" does indeed have negative connotations, only a breath away from the old Apple journo mainstay of "beleaguered". Apple does indeed seem to be doing something right. Take a look at this:

http://finance.yahoo.com/charts#chart6:symbol=aapl;range=5y;compare=msft+dell;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;logscale=off

Wish you had shares?

> "Apple products have an extremely poor build quality"

Compared to? They're not perfect, but they are extremely good. My MacBook shows no signs of discolouring, and my PSU has outlasted three Dells. The Dell laptop I had literally fell apart (at least parts are cheap, though unfortunately in every sense), My HP PC is a mire of incompatible drivers and defective graphics hardware, but at least Ubuntu works on it better than Windows ever did.

Apple Stores

Yeah the iPod and iPhone have captured the attention, but the biggest key to Apple's seemingly ever-growing revival has to be direct selling via their own stores. Not that long ago Macs were only seen gathering dust at the back of most computer shops, with none of the salespeople having enough knowledge to answer any questions. Decent Mac retailers were few and far between.

These days with Apple selling directly, the resellers have had to raise their game. As a result customers don't feel as if a Mac purchase will see them abandoned when it comes to add-ons or support, leading to a record 2 million Mac sales in just 90 days.

Of course OSX being everything Microsoft said Vista would be helps enormously ;-)

BTW, George. Having installed Ubuntu 7.10 on two computers now I'm of the opinion that Linux is finally ready for the desktop. The refinements that have gone into Teh Gibbon really make it a nice system.