The technical process of making people lose all sense of reality and simply consume whatever is most successful at telling them "buy me because I'm cool, and you can be too" is pretty straightforward to describe, but actually quite complicated to implement. It's called marketing. Apple is a marketing company that also makes electronics, they are quite adept at their core business, such that people don't even realize that they are pretty mediocre when it comes to their secondary, and in fact believe them to be the absolute greatest of all time.
Think about it: Macs and iPods crash all the time, they require special software which is incompatible with other hardware to operate, they cost a ton of extra money, they are not measurably better for any particular use or application than competing products, and yet they still have legions of fanatical users who couldn't even imagine using something else.
Once you take off the sex appeal, Apple's actual devices don't have much going for them, yet they still dominate because the marketing is so good.
All the people making comments like the above are just clueless. Get your head out of your ass, for Pete's sake. A ton of people using Apple computers are intelligent geeks (some probably a lot intelligent than this clueless poster above) who don't care two hoots about being cool. A computer (be in a Mac, windows or linux or *nix) are a tool. Use the one that fits you the best. I don't get why people waste their time belittling people who choose Macs over their chosen platform. It is not that big a deal. If you do not want to buy/use a Mac, just don't. Nobody cares. I use Windows, linux, Solaris professionally. A couple of years back, I bought my first mac. Having used the "evil mac" for a few years, I don't get what the big deal is. It does everything that one would want to do with a computer. I do not get the reason why these haters get all riled up when Apple (or Mac) is mentioned in any article. I do not get the hatred.
The first time I saw an iPhone, I thought to myself that it's clever and works fairly well. Then I tried to make a phone call. Ooops. Then I looked at the music capabilities... another ooops. Every time the device added lock-in or required that I jump through hoops to use it with Linux, it's coolness factor dropped by at least half.
You couldn't figure out how to make a phone call with an iPhone? You think there is some problem with the "music capabilities" of an iPhone? Give that millions of people are able to use the iphone well as a phone and as a music player, I think the problem might be you..!?! I don't even know what the last sentence means. But do you whine and complain that an xBOX360 game does not work in PS3 too? No one cares if you do not buy one, but your opinions about products that you do not use are so factually incorrect it is embarrassing.
Passwords are implemented as a result of insecurity.
