Yes it is. Look at Win9x/ME. Barely getting a vote. I remember 98 being a complete pain to install.
I find OS X to be the easiest to install out of the various installations I have performed (Different Linux flavors, mac os 9.2, WindowsXXX, etc)
Apple may be losing "market share", but that is because their computers are used for a longer interval of time than PCs, because their quality is better, and they are not outdated so quickly. Businesses cycle through computers relatively quickly, hence the high volume of Wintel machines being...
Basically, Apple doesn't have to provide the computer at the lowest costs. However, something headless would be necessary. Apple basically doesn't want to mess with their margins. They don't want to squeeze out some sales based on some low margin. They don't want to become a Dell.
Actually, Apple's 'operating' profit, which is a better guage of how they are doing, is higher then Dell's.
But keep in mind, Dell doesn't just sell hardware. They are also a North American Microsoft Large Area Reseller (LAR) and an EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) LAR. So their revenues...
You may also want to restart the maching in Single User mode, and let the battery drain till it dies. This will sort of "reset" the battery, and once fully charged, may improve capacity.
You can get Virtual PC and do it on that. Albeit your compile time etc, will be slowed, but it should still work. When I was at the University, and had to build databases and frontends using Access and Visual Basic, I used Virtual PC as I had no windoze PC either. It worked fine. I still got...