Sorry Mark, you're being very subjective on this one. Being a knowledgeable user doesn't give you industry knowledge. It's just a fact that Apple is charging premium prices for a proprietary brand, and everything Gene wrote is true. Apple's gross margin in hardware is higher than it's competition. That's fact. Research it yourself. The computer makers that get higher gross margins tend to be proprietary vertical market solutions, e.g. Bloomberg "market" information terminals used by hedge funds, or computers integrated into medical diagnostic systems.

BTW - virtualization technology has been around for years. Virtualization software loads BEFORE the operating system, and fools the OS into thinking it's running on its own hardware. That doesn't make the OS "open". Apple has always been closed and proprietary relative to any other platform, and no it is not generic Unix (it's a proprietary implementation of Unix). If you want to look at an example of Gene's reference to "sandbox" technology, just look at Apple's attitude toward Adobe Flash.