Mac Tax? How About A Vista Tax?

This guy right here, his name is Brad Brooks, and he works for Microsoft as corporate VP of Windows Consumer Product Marketing. That's the kind of title that means, when Apple is planning on making its products more affordable, you have to say things like this:

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.

While brushing off questions about relative viral infections between the two platforms, antivirus and firewall questions, and the competitivity of Apple compared to Microsoft, Brooks is dead set on his message: Apple is too fancy for you, and too expensive.

His company's latest OS, which I have the distinct displeasure of blogging upon at this very moment, has some taxes of its own: the frustration tax, the BSoD tax, the driver incompatibility tax, the constant-security-upgrade tax, the almost-always-comes-in-a-beige-box tax, the confusing configuration tax, the confusing number of essentially identical OS versions tax, and the massive slowdown while spinning the HDD tax - need I go on?

Not to mention the gamer tax, which mandates expensive perennial upgrades to play the latest games. I do so love to play those games, but let's not pretend that PC gaming comes at anything resembling a budget price.

Microsoft: Mac buyers pay Apple tax [CNet]