Funny how often this is repeated, yet no other laptop company has managed to walk in and take over.

Almost as HP, Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sony and co. don't want an easy few hundred million dollars. Or as if you're wrong and there's more than a logo involved.

He's wrong of course. Apple is operating at a scale far above these other companies.

But they weren't always. The major laptop players used to be IBM, Toshiba, Dell. Apple came in with more expensive laptops and killed them.

>You are simply paying for the Apple logo.

You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.

I'm paying for a high quality machine with many features already built in, integrated with a well designed, power-sipping, user security and user privacy optimized operating system that uses modern best practices under the hood that scale to current and future multicore processors, with a solid UNIX at its core with hardware drivers that just work. And amazing support like free replacement motherboards, hard disks, batteries, chargers, keyboards, screens, etc. under AppleCare if anything goes wrong.

You do realize they just dropped the price of the Macbook Air across the board by $100, right?

Which tell you all you need to know about how they want to "keep prices low".

    Apple wants to keep the price down so they can keep their margins high

OP clearly means that Apple keeps their costs down, not the retail price.