You see, heres the thing. Yes, that sticker may be pretty n all... but thats it, beyond the back of the screen, the "design" ends completely, flip it over on any other side and its the same, dare I say, ugly generic PC. See, what differentiates Apple from any other manufacturers is that they actually care how their product looks from all sides, including the bottom, I mean come on, lets be honest here, the bottom of a MacBook looks better then any other OEM's laptop's top....
I'm not trying to sound like a fanboy or anything, but being a designer myself, it really annoys me how everyone these days focuses on one thing without even bothering to think about the rest. Going back to the example of PCs, take a look at any desktop (with a few models of Dell XPS' and the hp Blackbird being notable exceptions), but look at any of the main stream PCs - beyong the first 1" of the front, they're all identical, take of the front of any PC desktop and you won't be able to tell a difference at all.
...and its the same attitute that carries over to the software. Not to jump on the 'lets bash Vista' bandwagon, but lets just take Vista as an example. Now before I go on, yes, I do use Vista every single day on my Mac so I'm not just blinding bashing it as most people are but...
Vista, very pretty at first, but open 5 different apps - they look nothing alike, they're incosistent, not a single app follows Microsoft's own UX guidelines - 3-4-5 generations of icons can be found thoughout the OS, multiple generations of dialogs etc etc... I mean yes, Vista is a huge improvement over XP in my honest opinion but just looking at it as a designer, its just such an unpolished piece of software.
You know, I honestly, sincerely believe that the only ones at Microsoft are the project managers, execs etc. The biggest problem is that their standards are so horribly low. Instead of telling their subbordinates "do this exactly like this and do it perfectly or don't come back" its more of a "ok, good enough, move along" - I mean obviously I don't work at Microsoft so I don't know how such a conversation goes exactly, but I could safely bet I'm pretty close...
Again I'm not trying to sound like an a-hole or anything, but being a designer, it just annoys the hell out of me when people and companies have the "its good enough" attitude towards their work, when it comes to software, hardware and anything inbetween; same story each time...
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