[Semi On]

You really don't understand, do you?

Itâ₠¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢s to do with economies of scale; as production increases, the cost of producing each additional unit falls.

Their suppliers are not selling 1 million units to Apple and another 9 million to all the other companies, they have to design and produce their products exclusively for Apple (in the case of motherboards, etc.). The only things that are interchangeable are RAM, optical drives, etc. Video cards are Mac-specific, Power supplies are Mac-specific.

Then thereââ‚ƚ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s research and design. Apple has to fund the majority of their R&D in-house. There are no "competing" brands in that if you want a Mac-compatible machine, you buy a Mac, and Apple is the only one funding the OS to run on them. They have to pay the programmers, developers, marketing staff, etc. Michael Dell has been quoted before as boasting that Dell has an extremely low R&D budget - you just take the parts, slap them together into a pretty case, and sell as many as you can. And itââ‚ ¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢s the same if you build your own †“ you are the R&D team.

Put simply, it costs Apple more to produce a Mac than it does for Dell to build a PC or for you to build your own.