And you don't think they'd be able to sell much more than just 7 million units? I mean hell, I'd have maybe bought that TV for $300.

There was a chance they would not have sold 700,000, being no one before them had ever made a successful Tablet.

Also, they can't crank them out as fast as they can sell them. They still have not released outside the US. There is no reason to sell the unit for less, when the market is there.

It's the cost of early adoption. Today, you can buy a new iPhone for $99. When it came out, it cost a lot more then that. In 3 years the iPad will cost a lot less as well. You get to have something cheap, or something everyone wants that's in short supply. You can't have both. It doesn't work that way :)

This reminds me of when Nvidia was the only high end gaming card company (before ATI came out with the Radion 9700), and they were charging hundreds of dollars for something that costs then about 20 bucks to make. I say good for them.

What it did, was make other manufactures realize there is real money in this market, and ATI bought SGI and made a killer card. Because Nvidia made a lot of money, we all win.

Same will go here. If Apple makes a crap load of money on this, we all win. It means dozens of other companies will enter the market and we as consumers will have more choices.

Apple making money is a good thing, for everyone. 

If I earned a couple of million a year and had a huge amount of disposable income.

Then I'd buy one. Until then I have no need for one.

I have no problem with them making money. I have a problem with how they make their money, They make their money the way Harley Davidson saved their comapny, by making it some sort of symbol. I generally associate such fickleness and, for a lack of better word, stupidity with the markets of fashion, jewellery, and so on and so forth, not with technology. I also do not want such bullshit into the technology market because that is when quality stops being top priority. Somehow spinning a closed platform to be a positive, not a negative, is a perfect example of quality going out the window.

Them trying to sue anything and everythign that won't sue them back is not helping their case either, they are far worse than Microsoft in their attempts to create a monopoly, and I abhor Microsoft.

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2010/04/08/iphone-multitasking.html

Well, Multitasking is on the way. That's one pretty important upgrade.

Well, not sure I agree with your assessment.

Harley Davidson sells nothing more then an image. I can not think of a single area of Motorcycling where they are the "best". They sell an image. People buy them simply because they want one. There is no objectivity involved at all.

I am a geek, and love geek stuff. I don't care about image, or brands. The cloths I ware to work are mostly 15 years old. The shirt in my picture I still ware, and I think I bought it at Target 5 years ago. 

Let's look at the 17" Mac Book Pro:

• It's made out of one piece of machines aluminum. This makes it the most ridged 17" laptop on the market.
• it's less then 1" think. This makes it the thinest 17" laptop in the world.
• it has over 8 hours of battery life. this makes it one of the longest (if not the longest) running 17" laptop in the world.
• It weighs 6.6 pounds. This makes it one of the lightest 17" laptops in the world.
• it has 1920x1200 resolution LED backlit screen. There is no better looking screen on a 17" laptop.

Now you pay a lot for it, but what your buying is not style. It's substance. if those things are important to you, there is no better laptop made, by anyone.

Depending on what you want, Apple might not have a product for you, but if your interested in say, taking a 17" laptop on the road a lot, and needing great battery life, and it be very rugged, and display images at a very high quality, there is nothing better on the market.

Harley Davidson can not say that about anything they sell. That's why they have the slogan "if you have to ask, you won't understand".

What % of people who bought the new Macbooks, I guess they aren't so new at this point in time, actually bought it to travel around with? 17" is still a large area, so they are not your compact netbooks. I also know they come in larger sizes, nixing the portability argument even further. I have a 21", or maybe 22" Windows laptop, and not once have I ever wished it was thinner or lighter. I have always wished that it was smaller by area, or had better battery because after over 3 years it's down to about 50 minutes and I'm too lazy to get a new one. The macbooks address only one main issue of this notebook, which was also cheaper than comparably specced macbooks from its time. If you try to tell me that the macbooks back then sold as much as they did solely because of their portability, before the recent redesign, then I would call you a bullshitter. They sold because of a symbol. I feel like this paragraph is unreadable, but it's way late here sorry.

That also doesn't explain the tower PCs they manage to sell all over the place. They are still priced highly over similarly specced machines not sold by Apple and their ebenfits are even more marginal.

Well for you, a MacBook is not a good fit. That doesn't mean they aren't good computers for people who need them. Calling them shit because you don't need there specs is well... odd.

Back to the motorcycle analogy. I am sure there are people who own bikes that will go 180 mph who never plan do go that fast. It doesn't make the bike shit, or the company who produced it shit, just because someone wanted something with those abilities, who will never use them.

Same with the Mac Book. There are people who bought way more Laptop then they needed, because they wanted the best. It makes it a stupid purchase on there part, but not a shit laptop.

As for there desktop towers... they don't make desktop towers. They make workstations. They will hold 32 Gig of ram, 8 core Xeon CPU's, 8TB of drives, 4 video cards, (driving up to 8 30" dual link DVI displays).

The starting price for that is $2,500. You spec out the same computer from Dell or HP, and you are going to be paying the same.

if you want something like a nice gaming PC, Apple does not make a product for that market. They have either the consumer level iMacs, or the workstation class towers.

I think this is the biggest area that causes people to not understand Apple. People think of computers as things like Dell Desktops, enthusiast gaming PC's, and 500 laptops. If those are what you want (or all you need), Apple makes nothing for you.

For example, if you need a car that gets great gas milage, Ferrari cars will pale in comparison to Honda. It doesn't make Ferrari a shit car, or a shit car company because they have nothing in that market space. 

And I am sure if you went to Steve Jobs and said "I want the best gaming PC", he would say "I'm Steve Jobs. I think you want to talk to Michael Dell. he has what your looking for".

The topic is what would make me buy a iPad. Not what's better about other tablet computers.

This is the most realistic scenario where I'd get one as well.