apple being a good brand or not or respectable or not is highly debated in the design world. Coming from a design field I know this. Steve Jobs is a great designer though in all honesty he gets too much credit for things that apple brings to the market. Ipod, itunes, iphone wasnt designed by jobs. Most of what brought the apple brand back to where it is today wasnt designed by him. But what he did as a lead designer was approve of the designs and I'll add that he did a good job approving the correct ones to reflect what the new apple brand was becoming.
What a person has to know about the design industry (what apple focuses heavily on) is how a company or a person is able to convince the crowd of the "things" they are bringing out to the market. Steve Jobs did a wonderful job at that during product announcements. He brought the excitement to the conferences and got the crowd all hyped up. Unfortunately I didnt get the same vibe from Tim Cook when he announced the iphone 4s the other day. Dont get me wrong I dont hate apple products. I dont own one but I dont hate them, infact I use them for production purposes due to hardware optimization from adobe softwares focusing on intel chips that all new macs use.
Now if apple would actually show some real innovation in there so called "new features" I'll give them credit for the software design part of what they bring. (ill give them the multi touch thing) but other than that they are usually slow to the table with what they can bring in terms of new tech.
With all that mumble jumbo said, they offer great service products there limited hardware compatibility issues (all macs use the same hardware) unlike PC. So with that aspect alone they are able to eliminate so much issues that windows otherwise has to offer. Its the lifestyle that things are user friendly/none buggy/ easy to pickup and use that people buy into the apple brand. and which makes them the company they are today, respectful or not is subjective, its a super hard argument to win when it comes to this topic.
Ethical or not is a much better thing to look at if you want a comparison
