I was the quintessential Apple hater. I ran windows and linux at home (actually I still do on one machine), and use linux at work. I'm not an admin, but I know my way around the command line and tools like vi, grep, find, ps, ssh, bash scripts and most of the other unix tools we love (most of which you can actually use on a mac because of its unix roots).
Like I said, I engaged in a lot of the "just toys for hipsters" sanctimony, then my wife wanted an tablet, and we got her an IPad. Sorry, nothing comes close, the Kindle fire is a friggin joke, and the Android tabs, while being extremely powerful, many just as fast, or even faster than the iPad, are a nightmare of bad design. The next week I bought 30 shares of their stock, and a macbook pro, I've never looked back, and the stock has more than paid for my purchases.
That's the thing Apple seems to get, that the rest of the world is now only, begrudgingly, getting.. The design informs the technology, NOT the other way round. Sometimes there obsession with simple/clean designs does seem a little overbearing, there are times when I've wished for a USB slot in the iPad, but it pains me to say this, but once you start doing things their way, you realize that a LOT of thought has been put into how they have done it. This attention to detail and design seems to permeate every thing they do..
To say their stuff is just "toys" is simply not true and/or misses the point entirely. If there is one thing I'd like to see them do is make a run at the corporate IT space. Anybody who has used windows desktop machine, managed by a large corporate IT support structure, with all its attendent bloat-ware, needed to keep the network stable knows that pain.
From a financial perspective, again, they've got 112 billion in the bank, and growing. They really don't need to sell another computer, ipad, or iPhone ever. A radical but arguable approach at this point would be to fire every employee, and become another berkshire hathaway, rewarding shareholders with the interest.