I buy many products from food, clothing, gardening, and house supplies that practically advertises the "off-brand" "cheaper" point. I like my cheap crap t-shirt from walmart. In a consumer market quality is not always the thing people are looking for. I get frustrated with my 100$ vacuum cleaner plenty but never enough to go buy a 600$ one. I don't think Apple should get upset, I think they should provide some lower end products. Even if the cheap apple computers are running P4's with 256m of memory, putting some products in the price range people are looking to spend would kill this advertising strategy and I will finally be able to convince my mother to get a Mac. (maybe throw a monitor on a mac mini and reduce the hardware a little).

Just a note: the emachine I bought 2 years ago for 200$ is still running great.