Branding in the strongest selling point of Apple products. They may have their flaws, but they're genius in their branding. They put an Apple logo in the back, for the same reason they give out Apple stickers for your car. For the same reason they put "sent from my iphone" at the end of an email. For the same reason their billionaire campaign insisted to "think different". Even their pixel placement choice has branding in mind. Apple engineering sacrificed multi-tasking to make sure scrolling could be displayed at 60fps, just so that holding a competing product "just doesn't feel like an Apple". That's ingenious branding being consistent at every layer of the company.
They want to you feel emotionally and better than others, and proud to show off the Apple logo. And they're the best in the world at doing this. That's why you saw all those posts angry at instagram when they launched for Android, claiming it wouldn't be as great now that the unwashed masses could touch it.
Maybe that's great for getting people to like the brand, but it's incredibly annoying to non-Apple users. Frankly, I think the whole "sent from my iPhone thing" is extremely obnoxious.
My roommate had a macbook freshman year. Whenever he used it at night (with the screen turned away from me), the stupid logo would light up the whole room. Really? Not only is it garish, but it's actively inconvenient.
I like what Thinkpad does here--they have a relatively unobtrusive logo in the corner with a red led for the dot over the i. It's cute and unobtrusive. My Vaio is also good in this regard--it has an elegant logo made up of metal on a matte blue background. Quite importantly, it does not light up. It might be a little pretentious, but it is elegant. It also has too many vowels, but that's not really related to the discussion :P.
There is a cut off for that, the moment the market hits a reasonable tipping point on that understanding, they will have to come up with something fantastic. Can't wait.
They want to you feel emotionally and better than others, and proud to show off the Apple logo. And they're the best in the world at doing this. That's why you saw all those posts angry at instagram when they launched for Android, claiming it wouldn't be as great now that the unwashed masses could touch it.