[shanusmagnus]

I'm a pretty die hard Apple guy starting from the mid 80s, and I find a lot resonates with your friend's "they work" example. Me, I love the fact that the machines are beautiful, but also functional in these subtle ways. Like the fact that you can open the laptops with a finger -- they're balanced correctly, the hinges are and the closing mechanism are calibrated s.t. you can lift the lid without the base coming up. Such a pointless bit of design, really, but it's so satisfying that somebody spent a bunch of time working on that. To say nothing of the trackpads, which were just an order of magnitude better than any trackpad on any other brand of laptop I've ever used. Maybe high end PCs have caught up by now, I don't know. Yet.

There's something about things made with such passion, such attention. They stir up the religious impulse. I really feel that, for the first time since the Jobs comeback, I'm on the verge of losing that religion, at least wrt the Mac line. (The iPhones still seem obsessed over in all the right ways, as far as I can see.)