cattletruck,
I don't give a flying toss if you'd rather own a PC ....but don't waste my time asking for suggestions on Apple and pretending you're interested, and then just turn the tables and come back ranting and raving like an Apple bashing loonie .....
Really, just spare us the smoke & mirrors....if you want to buy a PC, then fine... go buy a damn PC, I really don't care ..... what I do mind, however, is unsubstantiated Apple bashing that is completely unsupported by any factual evidence....
Asked why and was told there was no money in it for them as Apple are reigning in there distributor list and want you to buy those items from their own Apple stores. They do however offer a repair service for them.
That is utter bull ****e.
The fact is that over the past 10 years, IT has become heavily commoditised. Margins have shrunk on pretty much everything ... on the sort of stuff the home-user buys, typical margin is 5% ..... if you're very lucky you might find one or two products in the 8-10% range, but 99.999% are hovering around 5%.
Business equipment has a larger variety of margins... but its on the sort of stuff that your home-user would NEVER buy (e.g. large network switches etc.).... business desktop/laptop type IT is also on tight 5% margins.
There is also no restrictions set by Apple on distribution ....any reseller can buy their equipment through distribution.
So your dealer is spinning utter nonsense. Unless you are doing large volumes, selling IT hardware is not a place you'll make money.
My local dealer talked about Apple becoming a closed ecosystem, and that reminded me of iTunes which is a concept I've hated since it was invented and seemed to be getting worse last time I used an Apple which was about 5 years ago.
No it is not a closed ecosystem, that is also bull crap.
Apple openly publish information on their developer APIs, so they're no different than Microsoft.... infact, in many ways their APIs and level of information they provide is miles ahead of Microsoft.
OS X is also based on BSD, so you can write and compile software as you would for Linux/Unix using many of the same low-level programming libraries.... so you don't even have to use Apple's high-level APIs if you don't want to.
Xcode is freely available for developers to code, compile and test software for OS X and iOS. Hell, you don't even have use Xcode... you can use a text editor and use gcc etc. to compile yourself on the command line.
You can run unsigned software on OS X without problems, you only need to sign software if you intend to distribute it to third parties (well, actually, you don't even need to do that.... but it does stop a couple of warning dialogue boxes coming up when you first install the software ).
You don't have to buy software through Apple... e.g. all of Adobe's software is directly distributed and not distributed through Apple App Store / iTunes channels !
For a small annual fee ($80 or something), you can sign your own apps and run them on third-party iPhones and distribute them on iTunes if you so wish.
Also with VMWare on OS X, you can run Windows and Linux to your hearts desire !
People who talk about Apple being a closed ecosystem have absolutley no clue about what comes out of their gobs.