Bob:
Thanks for that -- very good point.
I use almost all parts of iLife (except iDVD, don't do much of that anymore) every day. I use iPhoto, I edit videos with iMovie, I put together my podcast with Garageband, I publish my podcast's web site with iWeb, and of course iTunes (no longer technically part of iLife but it once was) is in use constantly. For me, iLife +
MobileMe is the "fun" part of owning my Macs.
chas, if I could motivate myself to really make use of the mobileme account I've been paying into for 5 yrs now and put up my own cheesy web site for friends and family, I'd be using a lot more of the apps there also.
There's just a lot of folks out there that have no use for them. My wife for example. Things she's never done on her computer since she started getting my hand me down rigs around 10 yrs or so ago - insert a video DVD into one, rip/shoot/create/encode a video, take/shoot/keep/store pics, I don't think she has ever opened iTunes on her Mac (in 4 yrs, sync her iPhone on mine), GarageBand or iWeb? - not a chance. Betcha if I asked her to open one of them, she'd ask me "What is that?".
So, what's the point of a Mac you ask? She got into a couple of those stupid social sites for a time. Her Windows rigs, it didn't matter how much protection I set up on them. Every 6-9 months the thing would be so infected with junk and unusable, I'd have to spend from 4 hrs to 2 days at a time fixing/restoring her machine.
Since getting her a Mac, 4 yrs ago in June, I have not had to spend 10 minutes fixing anything on her computer. I do keep it updated/upgraded for her. It's gone from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6 via the simple upgrade path. I love the thing for that. The extra $3-400 that bottom of the line MB cost over a similar Dell desktop has been worth every penny to me.