Apple (well, at least the computer side of it anyway) is split in it's personality between her two main co-founders. The Jobs-ian side builds computers that tend towards appliances. They are what the mainstream user would like to have, if they had the money for it. They tend to be elegant in design. the Cube from the late Nineties is the personification of this. The colourful iMacs were the affordable version. They are typically only slightly expandable.
The Woz-ian side builds technically interesting and expandable systems. The Apple II series best express his side of the company.
Every now and then though, they produce machines that express the two sides in harmony, and they are usually workstations or servers. The Mac II series, the G3-G4 series starting with the Blue-&-White Mac and the Aluminium Mac Pros are all good examples of this fusion.
My only wish is that Apple would go for bigger market share with the Macintosh. Jean-Louis Gassée blew their opportunity to have a *much* larger marketshare in the late 1980s. Now that many are dissatisfied with Microsoft after all of their GUI changes to Office and Windows 8 onwards, Apple have the resources and the opportunity to get a Mac inside everyone's home — somthing like an expandable mini-tower that competes with the likes of Asus et al.
They won't do it, of course, because it would mean having to sacrifice their precious and needlessly high profit margins.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
