What the hell is wrong with Apple that they still give a damn about design and packaging and "feel"?

...This is the point. Detail and nuance and texture and a sense of how users actually feel, what makes them smile, what makes the experience worthy and positive and sensual instead of necessary and drab and evil.

These are the things that are nearly dead in our mass-consumer culture, things normally reserved for elitist niche markets and swanky boutiques and upscale yuppie Euro spas and maybe cool insider mags like I-D and Metropolis and dwell. They are most definitely not to be expected of mass-market gadget makers. This is why it matters. This is why it's important.

Oh sure, Apple's elitist. This is the common line. Sure they're slightly more expensive and cater to artists and designers and creative types and people who actually care about such pointless stuff as fit and finish and "feel."

And they command only a sliver of the PC market overall and despite how their designs and innovations resonate across the entire industry and in fact affect industrial design across all consumer culture, true PC/Windows geeks just scoff and snort and go back to trying to patch the latest of 13,876 "severe" or "drastic" security flaws in the nonintuitive bug-ridden hell that is Windows...
-SF Gate