Yeah that's great and all, but what exactly comes standard on a mac that I would have to purchase for a PC?
There are lots of things that come standard on a Mac laptop that do not come standard on a PC laptop, and this is not including software, but if you want to include iLife and other built in software features and what it can do out of the box, then a Mac's value increases exponentially.
I have already listed a few of the features that come standard. Like for example, every Mac has BT 2.0 EDR, and ABGN Wireless. These are typically pay for upgrades on a PC notebook. LED back lit screens are more expensive, and yes they have lots of benefits. They consume less power, they are environmentally safe (don't contain any toxins in them, ie mercury), then you have the subtle built in features like the ambient light sensor. For example, I leave the room I am currently in and put my Macbook Pro in my back pack. I travel to building 3 and go into the room I am now going to work in for a while. I pull my laptop out and open it up, which awakens it from sleeping. The ambient light sensor automatically detects how much light is in the room and will adjust the keyboard back light (another standard feature) and the screen brightness to the most optimal brightness settings in my given environment. Do I need this feature, nope, is it pretty damn sick? Yes, it is very slick.
Bodaggit23
I was a lead tech in a warranty repair center for 6 years. No laptop is cost effective to fix out of warranty they are all over priced parts. This is due to the fact that most parts manufactured for laptops are for production, not for servicing them out of warranty. Most people, when their laptop dies, replace it since it is more cost effective, thus driving down the demand for such service parts, thus driving up the price. Also, every warranty repair shop marks up parts. Car shops do it, and so do computer shops. I can look up the actual cost of parts and I bet that $1200 logic board was probably around a $600 to $700 cost to the shop, the rest was marked up. The service industry does that, and that is just part of the gig.
Now your comment on RAID cards, dude I have RAID cards that are over $1,000 brand new in servers, and while I am on the topic of servers, Apple Servers are the best bang for your buck right now. I manage 33 Xserves at work, and we also have a crap ton of Dell servers as well, which are less spec and the same price. Then you want to look at rack mount RAID arrays, and look at Apple's XRAID, which is very competitively priced. Apple is definitely trying to gain some market share in the server market for sure.
Who needs to use a Mac Pro? Hmm, well companies like Pixar need them. They aren't play toys like your PC gaming rig, they are serious work machines that do serious work. Go to any high end audio/video industry where they do lots and lots of rendering and/or video editing/compositing and they will almost always have some if not most of their computers Macs. Are you going to buy a Mac Pro for gaming? Only if you are dumb and have money to waste.
Intel_man -
Yeah, come on dude, show me an iMac that cost $3k? Bulk discount? Yeah business sales you do get a bit of a discount but it would never drop the price from a $3k unit down to under $1k. I believe the iMac starts at around $1100 or so.
