Apple thinks their decisions about what tech should be in your laptop or desktop is more important than your decision about what should be in it, which is just one of many reasons I've never bought so much as an iTunes song from them.

That's the joy of free will.  People are morons, so naturally when presented with the ability to be morons and buy a poorly designed PC, they do.  Of course, you pay a nice little 40% premium on anything but baseline systems for your pretty OS, so maybe you shouldn't use my theory.

I have a full size extended atx tower with a latching full side panel, front, rear and side panel ventilation, six small drive bays in latching cages, four large slide in drive bays, two more pop in case fan slots if I actually use six hard drives, four extra expansion slots, and plenty of room for the biggest workhorse of a cooling setup money can buy even on a dual processor board.  I put it together myself for half what an equivalent mac would have cost, and have done a full hardware changeout already for even less.

Mac only makes sense when you buy crappy computers, just like Dell only makes sense when you buy crappy computers.  Anything well above a baseline model will be significantly cheaper and probably superior if you put it together yourself.

If anything, your argument should be that Macs cost too much. There's no basis for the fact that Macs are crappily built. And, just to clear this up, how customizable and upgradable they are has nothing to do with whether they are built well. Built well means that they don't break easily and have very little hardware problems, both of which any Mac owner will tell you is true. Of course, just like with PCs, Macs do have hardware problems.

What most PC users like you think is that Mac users believe their computers are perfect. That's not true for the majority of us. Macs have downsides just like Windows computers. For example, I like the way Windows handles networks more than the Mac way of doing it. Also, Macs don't have many popular videogames, although that's slowly changing with companies like Aspyr and CodeWeavers. But, in my opinion, Macs are generally well-buit, reliable machines with a good operating system and more-polished 3rd-party apps. Note how I said "in my opinion" and not "it's true and everybody who doesn't think so is an idiot".

The serial port is a bit premature - as Net engineers are finding out.  Cisco has not gone to USB - yet.  Hard to console into a router with no serial port.  Possible yes. but the idiots buying the machines forget to include the USB to serial adapter.

Firewire.

Secondly, I think Firewire didn't work out like Apple hoped.

Then Stevey Jobsy saw that over at the PC market, USB 2.0 sucks balls.

So the turtleneck dude decided to take out firewire.  

Just my 2 cents [cannot be refunded]