A Microsoft executive expounds:

…we’re also looking at the different things that you can get with Windows, and understanding what is really involved with what we call the “Apple tax.”

There really is a tax around there for people that are evaluating their choices going into this holiday season and going forward. There’s a choice tax that we talked about, which is, hey, you want to buy a machine that’s other than black, white, or silver, and if you want to get it in multiple different configurations or price points, you’re going to be paying a tax if you go the Apple way.

There’s going to be an application tax, which is if you want choice around applications, or if you want the same type of application experience on your Mac versus Windows, you’re going to be purchasing a lot of software. And even at that you’re not going to get the same experience. You’re not going to get things like Microsoft Outlook, you’re not going to get the games that you’re used to playing. There’s a technology tax–Apple still doesn’t have HDMI, doesn’t have Blu-ray offerings, doesn’t have e-SATA external disk drives that work at twice the speed of FireWire. And so you’ve got all of these things that are truly taxes.

You’ve also got an upgrade tax. The only machine, as far as I know, within the Apple lineup that’s actually upgradeable is the Mac Pro, the $2,800 version, which is (more expensive than) just about any PC configuration that you get from any one of our manufacturers.

Ah, where to start.

The primary fallacy in this entire rant is to take two platforms, list the faults of one and not the other, and call those faults a “tax,” as if there are no faults on the other side. The faults listed are lack of variety, limited number of applications, limited technologies, and limited expandability. All valid points to a degree, though several if not all have just as valid counterpoints, all of which you could have read here previously. With Windows systems–and the exec is talking about Windows plus PCs built for Windows, so we can take that as a group–there are just as many if not more faults. Lack of originality and style, being behind a few years in many of the more key capabilities, a horrendous resource-hogging OS, compatibility problems due to mismatched hardware and software, vulnerability to massive onslaughts of malware… I could go on and on (that’s not an impotent boast, if you read this blog then you know I can because I have). What we are left with is the question of which set of “taxes” are more onerous. You can guess which answer I would suggest.

Then there’s the fallacy of presuming customer desire. The exec talks about people wanting choices like a myriad of colors–as if color were the only element of style (that explains quite a bit)–and volumes of configurations. Apple tried to have a multitude of configurations once, and it almost killed them. They discovered that you should concentrate on a smaller number of configurations, but make sure that you get them right. There are a multitude of digital music players out there, but Apple has the lion’s share of the market, something it won because it made its product right (not the way Microsoft clawed to the top). People like cool gear, not just more colors. Apple has the cooler gear.

Similarly, the exec talks about expandability. But honestly, how many PC owners actually do that kind of thing? I would guess that more than 90% of computer owners don’t expand anything, not even RAM (which most people should). At best, this is one of those things people buy a product for and then don’t use, like most of the features on a cell phone. More often than Windows boxes, Apple tends to identify what most people will really use. A fingerprint scanner looks cool at first, but honestly, do you really need it? After a while, it just becomes this useless thing on your machine that you never use. Most of this appeal is to the geekier high-end users, not the majority of users.

Then there are the plain false claims, like the Mac Pro for $2800 being more expensive than “just about any PC configuration that you get from any one of our manufacturers.” A former student just asked me a question about this the other day so I looked into it. On the PC Connection site, I looked for dual-quad-core Xeon processor desktops at 2.8 GHz or better–what the Mac Pro has–and you have to go to the 8th lowest-priced system before you find something that’s not a Mac Pro (and it has slower CPUs and smaller hard drives, for $240 more than the lowest-priced Mac Pro). Whenever I hear of these special deals for PCs, they usually require multiple mail-in rebates and tie-on deals, and are the exception rather than the rule.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Mac is not by any means perfect. It has its faults and weaknesses. There are many people for whom a Windows or Linux system is far more ideal.

But please, claims like this from Microsoft are just pathetically wrong.