Apple News: They made $4bn profit

[kedawa]

Relentless marketing, boutique prices, and a meticulously managed supply chain are good strategies, apparently.

[kedawa]

Nonsense.  Software today is bloated as hell because making efficient use of space is no longer a priority, but bundling crapware is.  There are plenty of non-bloated programs out there for comparison, but most commercial software is full of unnecessary and unwanted data.

[kedawa]

Most modern games also have a few hundred megabytes of video splashscreens to remind you of who developed the game, what middleware and codecs they licenced, who published the game, etc. every single time you launch it.  That is bloat.  Many also install other useless or redundant bits of software that take up space and cycles.  We really can do without the GFWL client, GameSpy Arcade, etc.

[kedawa]

Pretty much every GUI has usability problems, but I would agree that OSX isn't really any more intuitive than Windows.  They both have their idiosyncrasies, they both have plenty of extraneous features that I prefer to disable, and neither one ships with a decent file manager.
Apple is just very good at marketing and packaging their products, and by avoiding the bottom end of the market, they create a false image of quality and reliability as compared to Windows PCs.  There are plenty of ugly, unreliable, crapware-filled Windows boxes out there making the PC look bad, but not so many junk Macs.