Oh, so you prefer Volkswagens! :^D

Much of even the price argument is dishonest, since people are comparing the Apple computer with a White Box or home built machine.

The reason that people pay more for brand names, beside getting a warranty, is that Brand Names provide some security that what you buy is worth it. “The quality goes in, before the name goes on,” was how one advertisement put it. That is, the product will last long enough that you can get the value out of it.

I won’t say that PC’s are junk, but much of the low priced PC’s are junk which get trashed in a year or so. One reason is that there is a wider variation in quality on the PC side. The PC manufacturers shave pennies to get the cheapest product. Quality must suffer from doing that.

You have to become an expert to know what is trash and what is not. That knowledge is not cheap to acquire, but is never amortized into the purchase price of the computer.

Then there are malware problems which render a PC very slow within a year. Sure, you can get an expert to clean out your machine, but that is expensive, so many people just junk it and buy another PC.

Meanwhile, the Mac’s have lower costs of ownership because they last much longer without any hardware, virus or software problems. If you have to buy three PC’s during the useful life of a Mac then your costs of ownership are, at least, three times higher.

What the Apple ads do is refute the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt which has been thrown at them over the years. The Ads note that Apple has been improving the Mac over the years when Microsoft Windows problems persist indefinitely.

The Microsoft pundits had check lists which would be used to down grade a Mac. Apple has been slowly removing its legitimate problems from that checklist. It is approaching an empty page.

Meanwhile, a checklist of Microsoft Window’s problems keeps growing. Hopefully, Windows 7 will take off many issues which were put there by Vista.

Paying a high price is no guarantee that you will get your money out of what you buy. Even so, buying cheap tends to be penny wise and pound foolish. Apple ought to be using that concept. But it probably won’t because the current Apple ads are performing well. You don’t fix what isn’t broken.

Remember Huey Lewis’ “It’s Hip To Be Square”? This is where Microsoft’s trying to go with its ads, with actors insisting that they’re not “cool enough” to own Macs. It’s cool to be not cool, in other words. Nice try, guys.

That said, I’ve been running the Win 7 beta on my HP Blackbird for some months, and they’ve made a lot of progress. We’ll see.

“The Microsoft Tax: Conficker’s estimated economic cost: $9.1 billion

“The Cyber Secure Institute claims that based on their previous studies into the average cost of such malware attacks, the economic loss due to the Conficker worm could be as high as $9.1 billion,” Dancho Danchev reports for ZDNet.”