As usual Martin has summed things up very nicely. The other thing to keep in mind is that Apple does not intend to compete at every possible price and performance point. Where they do choose to play they are viewed by the industry (not me) as being very competitive and their quality ratings (independent) are 10% above their nearest competition. Having said that any computer is a very complicated machine.

I fully agree with Martin that everyone should start with a command line, preferably on a "REAL" (tm) computer - you know one that uses UNIX or it much younger brother LINUX. Hmmm - I think I just dated my self there.

- Eric