We have students who WANT to buy Apple products like crazy at the school I work at. The majority of responses for why they want them is, "They look pretty."
Well, they do. But as a seasoned IT pro who cut his teeth on Sun OS and HP-UX back in the day, having a high end machine, with a great screen, great battery life and quite light to carry around that also has a friendly UI and runs a full blown UNIX underneath but also gets all major proprietary programs is nothing to sneer at either, pretty or not.
There's a reason even Linus Torvalds carried a MacBook Air (though I think he found something even lighter now).
