A lot of people buy on price alone. I've worked in Apple retail and people are genuinely interested until they realize just how much more they'll have to spend. Hardly anyone considers resale value because PCs don't have any so they can't believe Macs do. Likewise few think about the cost of dealing with malware. Unfortunately for all of us, millions of Windows users have no protection against malware at all because it's an added cost. These people are easy pickings for bot-net operators.
From my 3.5 years at an Apple specialist I believe they could gain a significant number of new buyers if they hit some "magic" price points. At the same time Apple has decided that gaining those people would come at too great a cost, both in real dollars and image. Too many buyers of $1200 Macs would go for an $800 model to be covered by new buyers coming to the platform and Steve's carefully crafted elitist image of Macs as the BMW/Lexus of the computing world would start to crumble.
It's the same reason we'll never see another reasonably priced tower from Apple (apart from Steve's hatred of towers): too many MacPro and high end iMac buyers would buy a $1200 tower instead, costing Apple serious dollars. With the desktop market in decline the number of new customers wouldn't be sufficient to make up the difference.
At the same time I believe one of the reasons why the desktop is in such decline is because Apple, the trend setter in the marketplace, hasn't had a competitively priced desktop since 2003. It's just not cool to use a desktop computer because Apple says so. I don't count the iMac because most people who choose to be tied to a closed, notebook-like design want to be able to carry it with them.
A year ago I did a little math to see if Apple could switch to being a software compnay. I used actual Apple financial reports to determine just how much profit they make on their hardware. I then took that number and divided it by the wholesale cost of OEM copies of Windows. Retail sales of Windows are insignificant compared with the OEM numbers.
That little examination ignored huge factors like the fact that large portions of the wholesale price aren't profit for Apple, the fact that Dell and HP pay even less per copy, the enormous increase in development and testing needed to support every brand of PC hardware and prevent widespread piracy, and the really big factor: what Microsoft would do in retaliation.
I was being extremely generous to the software side of the equation, but the results were still clear. Using those figures Apple would have to sell EIGHT TIMES as many OEM copies of OS X as they currently ship with their own hardware to make the same profit. Factor in all those ignored factors and the actual figure probably rises to somewhere between 10 an 15 times.
If Apple were to switch to being a software company they would have to gain a 30-50% market share almost immediately just to maintain their current profitability.
Nobody at Apple is that stupid.
Spotlight it useless to me as a search tool. I've long ago lost count of the number of times it's failed to locate a file for me. I've tried every suggestion I've ever seen online to no avail. I've even spoken to software developers who write plug-ins for Spotlight, but nothing helps. Using a decent freeware tool finds the same files instantly.
Unfortunately I've started to notice the same thing in Mail too. Last week I was looking for a message from IT with the subject "Re: Parallels license". I didn't know the exact subject line when I did the search but knew it contained "Parallels" so that's what I searched for. I got a lot of results, but none of them were the message I was looking for so I tried searching for "license". Same problem. Eventually I sorted my Inbox by From and looked through every email I'd received this year from IT. Talk about a serious waste of my time.
Entourage is a fine application with lots of features and an interface that anyone with an Outlook Express or Windows background will find comfortably familiar.
Entourage does have one serious flaw, however. The database file used to store all mailboxes and their contents has a frustrating habit of becoming corrupt for no apparent reason.
I highly recommend rebuilding frequently (hold down option when double clicking the Entourage icon) and keeping multiple backup copies.
Why you didn't see an $800 MacBook: The Dell Comparison
Memo to Steve Jobs: 7 Reasons to Decouple OS X from Apple Hardware Now
Work Life Balance: Don't Believe the Hype
Why I Stopped Using Mozilla Thunderbird