If I'm paying double what I would pay for other brands
For starters, you are not. You are just buying the equivalent of top-tier machines from other brands. If you compare the equivalents hw specs AND build quality (from the external design to the materials like aluminum used, to the extra cost for an unibody construction, to the extra engineering effort and cost to pack things lightly and thin, to the thunderbolt ports, to the display quality etc), you either end up same price, or cheaper or the thing doesn't exist at all in the PC side. Even worse with iPads and iPhones, which have competitors struggling to compete on price.
I expect to have driver issues fixed in short order
Well, I guess you can go to an Applestore and have the machine changed if it doesn't work, or get your money back.
But in general "X issue fixed in short order" is not how it works, even when buying mainframes for top dollar. Sometimes you just have to wait until the engineers find the root of the problem and come up with a solution. Sometimes it even takes the next generation of machines for the problem to be fixed, if it's a HW bug. Sometimes it never does, if it affects some small percentage of machines with some strange setup (e.g with that brand of router, when set to those settings, etc).
I replied to someone talking about "zero driver or hardware comparability issues".
If anyone claims "zero driver or hardware comparability issues, he is clearly delusional or just speaks for himself. iBooks circa 2003 even had their logic boards fail multiple times, for example. Or G5's had strange goo coming out from their cooling system. I had a failed DVD on a Macbook Pro. Still, the same kind of things happen to PC runs all the time (I've had too many such cases from '91 to '05), they are just so fragmented as a platform that you never get to hear from them.
A Macbook run is 10 million machines of the same* specs. How much is an Asus 105-SH/i-mkII run? Or a Dell run, considering it offers 2,000 build to order configuration combinations? 1% of a Macbook run in hundreds of thousands of people, 1% of those runs is like nothing, so you don't get to hear much. Not to mention that they don't have forums and sites dedicated to the machines, anyway, just broad websites for all PCs.
Your way of comparing hardware is not very useful for me. It just shows your own personal preferences, and I don't share your preferences. For me, "unibody construction" adds about as much value as a gilded keyboard would.
So when I said "I'm paying double what I would pay for other brands" I meant it literally, including the "I". The set of machines that meet my requirements includes machines from the likes of Toshiba that cost less than half of Apple's cheapest offering.
The reason why I still bought from Apple is that I need a Unix system and I hate dealing with driver issues. So having to deal with unfixed driver issues is the quickest way to drive me away.
For starters, you are not. You are just buying the equivalent of top-tier machines from other brands. If you compare the equivalents hw specs AND build quality (from the external design to the materials like aluminum used, to the extra cost for an unibody construction, to the extra engineering effort and cost to pack things lightly and thin, to the thunderbolt ports, to the display quality etc), you either end up same price, or cheaper or the thing doesn't exist at all in the PC side. Even worse with iPads and iPhones, which have competitors struggling to compete on price.
I expect to have driver issues fixed in short order
Well, I guess you can go to an Applestore and have the machine changed if it doesn't work, or get your money back.
But in general "X issue fixed in short order" is not how it works, even when buying mainframes for top dollar. Sometimes you just have to wait until the engineers find the root of the problem and come up with a solution. Sometimes it even takes the next generation of machines for the problem to be fixed, if it's a HW bug. Sometimes it never does, if it affects some small percentage of machines with some strange setup (e.g with that brand of router, when set to those settings, etc).
I replied to someone talking about "zero driver or hardware comparability issues".
If anyone claims "zero driver or hardware comparability issues, he is clearly delusional or just speaks for himself. iBooks circa 2003 even had their logic boards fail multiple times, for example. Or G5's had strange goo coming out from their cooling system. I had a failed DVD on a Macbook Pro. Still, the same kind of things happen to PC runs all the time (I've had too many such cases from '91 to '05), they are just so fragmented as a platform that you never get to hear from them.
A Macbook run is 10 million machines of the same* specs. How much is an Asus 105-SH/i-mkII run? Or a Dell run, considering it offers 2,000 build to order configuration combinations? 1% of a Macbook run in hundreds of thousands of people, 1% of those runs is like nothing, so you don't get to hear much. Not to mention that they don't have forums and sites dedicated to the machines, anyway, just broad websites for all PCs.