I like Apple products. I think they are ergonomically brilliant, visually compelling and fantastically easy to use.

And I don’t own a single Apple product. I have a Creative audio player, an Archos video player, a Blackberry and two parts-is-parts PCs. The reason I don’t own an Apple product is that the cost of those products together is about the price of a lower-end Apple desktop.

It has been forever thus. Apple likes to paint the PC vs. Apple battle as Drones vs. the Artists, but for me, it’s always been Bargain vs. Expensive.

Apple has a longstanding, virulent insistence on issuing proprietary products and trying to control the software pipeline that feeds those products. That’s not artistic; it’s something else entirely.

And although OS X is wonderfully elegant, Apple’s computer hardware has a long and illustrious history of breaking down, overheating and even occasionally catching on fire. As I often joke to people: Do you want your computer to crash occasionally (which really isn’t a problem with PCs any more, anyway), or do you want it to burn occasionally?

I became particularly bothered by this after Apple went to Intel processors for its Macs. It’s a small manufacturing step from that to what is essentially a PC platform, but Macs still cost 50%-100% more than their PC bretheren.

And one of the hot rumors these days is that Apple is about to come out with a netbook computer. The rumored price for a basic model: $500. That’s 66 percent more than a basic PC-based netbook. Apple, as always, remains Apple.