I won’t say I’ll never get an iPhone, but when it comes to Apple, I’m not an early adopter. Why? Because they stick it to you on price if you adopt early. Even if you’re a late adopter, they’ll charge you a pretty sizeable chunk of change. Plus, I kind of like my phone to be, well, a phone. I use my phone to make calls. I’m not sure I really want my phone to have a camera, play video, or play MP3s.  When I want to play MP3s, I’ll use the iPod. If I want to take a picture, I’ll whip out my Nikon digital camera.
Now, I know there are more than a few haters out there, but I think I at least have some company in the world of Apple. I’m a computer professional by day, so I’ve used a lot of different types of laptops, and I can say that they pretty much all have their problems, Macs included.  I still wouldn’t really use anything else, because I can’t stand using Windows for 10 minutes before I want to use whatever machine its running on as target practice.
Linux, which I used for years as a desktop, makes a great server, and reasonably good workstation, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of user interface design, and tends to borrow the best and worst features of all the other systems out there.  I stopped using Linux on the desktop because every time I bought a new peripheral, I’d have to have to spend 20 minutes to figure out how to make it work with Linux.  Linux will actually work with most things these days, an they are getting pretty good at the plug and play thing for common devices, but when things don’t work, you better know what you’re doing.  On the Mac, things just work, and since I get paid to make things work by day, I don’t exactly feel like doing it when I come home at night.
I may not buy an iPhone, but I do think Apple makes genuinely good products overall. It’s not just marketing hype. Having to deal with Windows on a daily basis professionally, I wouldn’t even think of using it for my personal life. I was long of the opinoin that NeXTStep was one of the best operating systems ever engineered, but had the misfortune of running on underpowered and overpriced hardware. Apple hardware is still overpriced, but it’s worth it to me not to have to deal with the aggravation of Windows. I can understand why someone may not feel it’s worth the price tag; even I wince at the price of Apple’s hardware, but you can have my MacBook when you pry it from my cold dead hands ;)
I actually have four Macs at the moment; the first is a 600 MHz snow G3 iMac, which I got five or six months before Apple ceased production (the PMU fried a while back, though). My uncle gave me a 350-ish MHz PowerMac G3 Minitower for Christmas, and I also have two Performas I acquired within the last month.
My next desktop is probably going to be an iMac, but I hear they’re going to overhaul them soon – according to Slashdot, they’ll be brushed-metal, and the 17-incher might be ditched. I hope they don’t eliminate the cheap model.
My father caught the “Mac fever” and now recommends it to family and friends. Having been in the position of “home tech support”, I do welcome it as those spyware and virus problems on Windows had me doing major fixes every 6 months. (I know Macs are still vulnerable, but it has stopped me from getting annoyed in a long while — save a “PhotoShop for Mac crack” incident on a Windows PC.)
I know some people were hacking Mac OS X to run on generic hardware, but I don’t know if it has gone anywhere since.
They are still vulnerable, but the security and local user model is much better, and actually works. Users don’t really have any practical need to use root/administrator regularly. MacOS uses sudo to accomplish that when it needs it. So certain types of attacks just wouldn’t work on MacOS.