Oh you have got to be kidding me. Only cretins dumb enough to think price is the only consideration when buying products in the world would take this idiotic campaign at face value, and even a cursory glance into the fuzzy math behind the “study” reveals an obviously disingenuous amount of padding in these “comparisons.”

And gosh, despite having been a Mac user for a decade now I have never spent one red cent on any of these “mandatory” Mac expenditures: Quicken, Office, Mobile Me, Airport Extreme, Radeon 4870, external Blu-Ray drive — will the Apple Police Force be arriving at my door any moment to drag me away? In total all of those dubiously optional “mandatory extras” total a whopping $1864 of the supposed $3367 premium I spend to buy 2 Macs versus 2 PCs. And anyway… Quicken? What? Why would that be mandatory for… anyone?

Not to mention, nowhere is included the annual cost of the anti-virus software the average user is actively encouraged to purchase at point of sale by most retailers as a convenient method of “protecting” you from the nasty scammers that Microsoft sold you out to in the first place while writing the pile of crap code that passes for an operating system, that nags me to install very important upgrades to its software and restart every damn time I sit down at the thing, has me constantly trying to chase down auto-start TSR crapware from mysterious unwanted sources, stops processing network calls periodically for no fathomable reason (again requiring a restart), requires a “hardware test” every time I plug in a microphone and has a registry the size of Greenland — I could go on, but I have more important things to do. Like Actually Get Work Done… on my Macs.

I tried to leave a comment to this effect on the original blog post, but the comment form wouldn’t load — guess it only works in IE… jerks.