I love Macs. The only thing I love more is a Wintel machine. The frogdesign blueprint of the Macintosh SE appealed to people with design sense. For them it was worth paying a bit more for the elegance. But most of the world does not think like that.
Most people buy ugly beige boxes because they cost less.
Because more people buy the ugly ones, software companies who want to make money write programs to run on the ugly ones. All that John Q. Public wants is a cheap computer that goes really fast and can run Quake . As an Apple owner, I agree that the company hasn't done a very good job educating the consumer market on why its OS is superior to Windows. Many consumers, like my parents, think that just because most of the business world uses IBM compatibles, they should, too. The thing is, my parents aren't businesspeople and will never transact business with their IBM that they couldn't with a Mac.