I agree. Although I think OS X had a lot it do with it too...it's a pretty significant step up from OS 9.
But yeah, you're right. I've actually been in the Apple store and heard girls deciding which MacBook they want based on how cute they are.
Well, I'm no American so I really wouldn't know, but I was making that comment based on the fact that in the past, Macs didn't seem to really have much of a presence or a mindshare here in the Philippines.
That's probably because the Apple Corporation didn't really cultivate the same loyal consumer base it did in America with its well-known 'indie' roots and its heavily marketed countercultural vibe. That's why to me, Apple is largely a technocultural phenomenon limited to First World areas like Japan, UK and the US.
But now that we're living in an era of technofetishism --- sexy mobile phones, music players built to invoke hip cache and multimedia authoring applications made to make EVERYONE an artist no matter how amateur --- it seems like this is what is making Apple the bigtime company outside of America.
And I find this boggling, perplexing and absurd for people to 'discover' the desktop/laptop computers of the Apple Corporation SO late. By 'discover' I mean that in the Columbus sense of the word. And by 'absurd' I mean that Apple has long emphasized the importance of the user experience than the actual technology itself that for this revelation to occur so late just bothers me.
I mean when people tell me that it's so great to finally have a user friendly desktop and not worry about the technology under the hood, I get bothered because I think to myself, "It took you that long to know this stuff existed?"
...
But on a final note, I have no problem with teenage girls purchasing their computers based on aesthetics alone. It's great that they can buy something that's meant to be useful and have to only worry about their looks, because let's face it, not EVERY consumer needs to worry about the technology under the hood. It empowers the non-enthusiast computer user to actually buy a computer without needing to learn a completely new consumer language.