I wouldn't say Apple is getting crushed. Apple offers a good value in the laptop market and a reliability that surpasses any PC competitors in the laptop market. That's why people buy them: they look cool and they are bery reliable.
Besides, raw speed is not necessarily the number one priority on a laptop. I would argue that most laptop users do not use their machines to do highly processor intensive work. Most people use e-mail, internet, and and office suite of some kind. They want to do PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentations. Maybe some web editing or a little Photoshop (which all the laptops by Apple can do pretty well now that the iBooks have AltiVec enhanced G4s). People also want high reliability in laptops. In my opinion, MS has never done a good job of catering to laptops and making life easy for them. Although the plethora of laptop manufacturers doesn't make it easy. Overall, the Apples tend to be faster machines in "real-time" anyways. Most people think that memory or the hard drive are the biggest things that sap a processor's strength, stealing precious clock cycles. They do this, but human error and a poor OS actually hurt it even more. If it take 2 minutes to boot the OS and you've got to reboot it several times in a day after crashing, how much more efficient is a machine that doesn't crash all day?
I've never met a PC laptop that I liked. In fact, I've never found using a PC to be enjoyable. I switched to Apple (an iBook 700 - which still fits all my needs) over a year ago and I still am overjoyed to use this machine everyday. With the PC it was always ho-hum, but with my iBook it is always such a pleasure. If not for system updates and one technical snafu (which Apple fixed in less than 48 hours, shipping my machine from Tampa to Memphis and back), there has not been a problem. And I've found Apple support to be wonderful on the one occasion I needed it. That's why Apple laptops are the best on the planet. The processor doesn't mean so much to me. What means a lot to me is that this company cares about what it builds and does such a wonderful job making my life a lot easier.
If you use a PC laptop, please count how many times your machine has crashed in the last week, then the last month. I use my iBook everyday, at least for 2-4 hours getting some work done. Compare your crashes to my number (since beginning of August): 0 crashes. My only restarts have come from installing Panther and updating the system. I never shutdown and just let my iBook sleep. And my iBook always wakes from sleep instantly. Never seen a PC laptop do that. They all eventually hang. Mine has yet to do it since I got in in September of last year.
