[OD_]

The cheese graters cost between two to four times the price of an iMac depending on the era we're talking about (price fluctuations of the PowerMac/Mac Pro). Counting the fact that you do need to buy an external monitor to go along with it. That counts for something.

Apple never had a usable entry level desktop computer tower. Something with high performance on consumer class CPUs, rather than Xeon and ECC ram. The Mac Mini was always crippled to keep it from competing with the iMac and cheese graters among people who want something better performing.

The iMac is popular because it's the best performance to price ratio. Not because the form factor is any good. For the longest time the entry level MBP (and unibody Macbook before then) was also Apple's best selling laptop and they only recently cut it out from their line-up and replaced it with the Air as their entry level offering. The Air will also exist for as long as they keep selling the current Macbook at those prices because most people are not willing to spend 1449 euros on a machine that barely performs better.