Apple also provide educational discounts in the UK, so your pleasure should now be unalloyed

Of course you could, if you look around get a better specced laptop for less but then again it would be running windows and there is something wrong with that ?

Yes.

over-priced is also relative - if you remove the os (which to me makes no difference as I'm just as happy on os-x as windows) and just take the component parts you can get an equally well spec'd system for far less than what you pay apple for the white model. Even looking at the difference in the aluminium and white macbooks shows a difference for what is basically the same system.
If people buy apple products at the price thats their choice but you can see just how much apple can reduce the price by and still make a profit when you look at the 'refurb' grade resale products (the base macbook aluminium is 799 so 130 cheaper or 14%) - theres no way apple would sell it at a loss this early on. I would also put money on if apple knocked 10% off their prices they would increase their sales, even the apple faithful are expressing concern over the higher prices - just look what happened with the iPhone once they decided to use common sense and allow it to be subsidised.
I don't actually think the 15 macbook is too badly priced if you class it as a workstation, the problem for me is that a geforce isn't a workstation card, its a consumer card which then makes it look like an expensive (admittedly nicely designed except the free mirror screen) consumer machine.

If you take into account the new cost of the white one and compare with the aluminium macbook you can get a rough idea of how much the new metal/glass case supposedly costs over the price of the plastic one.
plastic (with larger hd) is 754, aluminium is 929 (old one was 700 versus 715 so say £15 for the firewire port/chip to make it easy) and obviously theres slight differences - ddr2 (which actually costs more to upgrade to 4gb) for example but that makes the case £190 retail so taking apples 50% profit that makes it about 100-150 quid (which I very much doubt it is) more expensive to manufacture over the plastic one.

Apple do educational discount in this country too but so do several other larger companies, some even specialise in schools.

Apple doesn't even do a laptop with the true specifications I would want (quadro/firegl) so if I was to buy one it would be for consumer purposes.

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... if you remove the os ... you can get an equally well spec'd system for far less than what you pay apple for the white model

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To use the tired old analogy, if you remove the [insert any up-market car marque] badge, you can buy an equally well spec'd car for far less. Buying decisions in the real world don't always work like that!

As I said, you are making a subjective decision not to pay for a MacBook, so it's only "overpriced" by your criteria. We have already seen responses from people who *do* consider the OS important, and I'll add my voice to that chorus. Your criteria are not shared universally, otherwise Apple would have to reduce the price to sell them. You may argue that anyone who does choose to buy one at the retail price is a fool, but there are clearly enough "fools" in the world, using that definition of the word, to justify Apple's pricing decisions.

I'm fully aware that education discounts are available in the UK, In the past, I have bought Macs on behalf of a NFP organisation via Apple's education sales dept. I only emphasised US education sales because I doubt if education in the UK is a major consumer of MacBooks, whereas I'm pretty sure it is in the US, so I would probably have been shot down if I had not qualified that statement. UK schools are mostly still hooked on Research Machines, who offer a set of value-added services and features for schools, and may well enjoy a bit of a price premium as a result to help offset their discounts.

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To use the tired old analogy, if you remove the [insert any up-market car marque] badge, you can buy an equally well spec'd car for far less. Buying decisions in the real world don't always work like that!

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Not only is the analogy tired, it's also completely inappropriate and bears no resemblance to the Mac/PC comparisson.

Apple hardware (nowadays) is the SAME as the non Apple equivalents in most respects, the chassis is different but the chipset, RAM, HDD, ports, CPU, GPU, Optical drive ...etc are all identical parts sourced from the same supplier.

Of course your other explanation of their being no shortage of fools is obviously fair enough.

No, it's NOT the same. Unless you want to run geeky, risky and possibly illegal experiments, generic PCs can't run Mac OS X.

If, like levi_g, you don't give a toss what OS you run then all this is irrelevant to you. But then, why are you even considering Apple hardware, except as an opportunity to troll in forums like this?

It is the same - if you think otherwise you are obviously clueless. The only thing Apple add is their custom BIOS replacement botched onto identical hardware. They do no development or design of their own. All the parts I mentioned are off stock from other vendors.

If pointing out that for identical hardware Apple Mac's are overpriced makes me a troll in your eyes then feel free to think that - I'll simply consider you a contemptible, clueless fanboy.

I think you need to move back to criticising the hardware rather than throwing insults around.

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The only thing Apple add is their custom BIOS replacement botched onto identical hardware

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The EFi (Extensible Firmware Interface) is *far* more complex that a standard PC bios for one thing.

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They do no development or design of their own. All the parts I mentioned are off stock from other vendors.

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If this is the case then why have several manufacturers attempted to produce close copies of apple hardware?