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Apple Insider

Hoping to persuade possible Mac buyers that Apple charges an arbitrary “tax” for its computers, Microsoft has paid one analyst to create a report that portrays Windows PCs as less expensive — even if it has to artificially pad the Mac’s price and hide Windows’ costs to get there.
Analyst Roger Kay of technology research firm Endpoint Technologies was told to produce a paper that shows the “hidden tax” of buying Macs, both in the cost of the systems themselves as well as in the software and services to accompany them.

In the study, Kay claims that Apple has marginalized itself and its market share by producing a closed ecosystem that only allows users to buy Mac OS systems from Apple and thus prevents them from buying models that are potentially cheaper or in more appropriate configurations. The company has deliberately chosen to ask a premium for a small range of computers and, as a consequence, locked itself out of the wider market — a boon when the economy was doing well and Windows Vista poorly, but not in the current financial climate, the analyst says.

A great article, and I remember Stephen Fry talking about Macs and comparing them with Windows computers. This is a debate that is set to continue, the new adverts could be seen as effective dependent on your point of view, they hit home a message about Apple’s pricing strategy. But then, I’ve always thought when you buy a mac, you’re buying into a digital support platform, I accept the associated terms, but then I know nine times out of ten it will just work. The pc, due to the very nature that it’s open, open to hardware and software vendors, means that Microsoft have to accommodate, the very best and most affordable ends of the market.

There seems to have been an increase of colleagues I know that run a mac, but also use VMware or Parallels to run a Windows virtual machine, indeed, I have my Mac Pro and my Dell Optiplex simply because it’s nice to have the pc, to test things, to run apps that just work better on the mac or on the pc.

At the same time, I wonder if Apple aren’t missing out a market share by not providing a lower cost platform? Continuing to support the PowerPC processor machines in a Mac OS X Foundation form? The PowerPC machines are here to stay, they’re fast enough for many users, it seems a shame therefore to say goodbye to them?

Apple runs a challenging product line though, ship a slow, low spec mac and it could damage the ‘multimedia/super cool’ image, that the other vendors just don’t have to worry about – here’s a pc, we’ll put 512MB in it, last year’s processor, 40gb disk and Windows Vista Basic and sell it for $400. But then, isn’t that the very thing that in effect de-railed the Vista message? By offering Vista did we not encourage the onboarding of users that really shouldn’t be running it? The old Windows XP will run on a Pentium 233, yes technically, but from an end user multi click I demand everything now, it wont.

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