Microsoft Pushes Idea of "Apple Tax"

ZD Net ^ | 10/14/2008 | Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

[Loud Mime]

With more people turning to Apple products, and the holiday season just around the corner, Microsoft is keen to emphasize the fact that users looking to switch from Microsoft face the “Apple tax.”

In an interview with CNET’s Ina Fried, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows Consumer Product Marketing Brad Brooks was keen to point out the hidden costs that face those making the switch. In fact, he outlines four different taxes:

* Choice tax
* Application tax
* Technology tax
* Upgrade tax

[antiRepublicrat]

Upgrade tax- Like the hardware upgrades to get VISTA to work right?

In comparison to Apple, Microsoft has the upgrade tax. Upgrading my Mac to 10.5 made things run faster, not slower.

[Wayne07]

Don’t project, I’m not angry at apple. An Apple ][+ was my first computer, I have an iPhone, and now a macbook. I just think that it is a valid argument to to say there is an apple tax. I also think that after the great iPhone experience, going to OSX was a let down. Not that special, not better than MS’s os, just different. On the other hand, the iPhone destroys MS’s mobile offering.

[SunkenCiv]

[related What if scenario] After his swearing in early in 2009, President Barack Obama pushes a “Conservative Tax”...

[Swordmaker]

I start typing in C.....A..... and I get

Calculator
Calendar

in an attractive menu, and I can key in immediately get what I want....that is AWESOME. To Vista’s credit I TOTALLY can’t help it but accidentally expect that when I use XP and even when I use Mac OS X.

XP doesn’t let me do that valuable thing, nor does the Mac.

Uh, KRB? Yes, it does... and the Mac's done it for almost four years now.

Microsoft ripped off, er, borrowed that quick search routine from Mac OS X. Apple calls it "Spotlight" and it is available in every Finder window and also on the desktop at the top right hand of the menu bar, many applications such as iPhoto, Mail, iTunes, Safari, etc... and has been since the release of OS X.4 Tiger. It was announced and demonstrated in June of 2004 at the WWDC.

Partial instant results for entering "CA" on my Mac

Pressing RETURN or ENTER after entering the "ca" will start the calculator. In fact, the Mac version (which Apple patented) is far more sophisticated than the MS copy.

[bmwcyle]

I want a Microsoft $50.00 refund everytime I have to reboot.

[krb]

I know it's supposed to be there, but it isn't on my system:

[Swordmaker]

I know it's supposed to be there, but it isn't on my system:

Look in your applications folder. Is Calculator there?

[krb]

Yep. It just doesn't show up on that Spotlight thingie.

I don't know why you seem to be taking it personally, but at least for me, the Vista people seem to have implemented a feature that I really like better than Apple did.

[Swordmaker]

I don't know why you seem to be taking it personally, but at least for me, the Vista people seem to have implemented a feature that I really like better than Apple did.

I'm not taking it "personally." You made the blanket statement that the Mac "could not do" what you had just described Vista "awesomely" doing and I replied that the Mac most certainly does... and has done it for a long time before Vista's implementation.

I maintain a lot of Macs... and every one of them has no problem with typing the first couple or three letters of an application in Spotlight and having it startup merely by pressing ENTER or RETURN. Yours appears to be broken.

You have indicated that you are a fairly new user to Macs. You may have overlooked Spotlight. However, from your screen shot, it looks as if you probably need to re-index. Here's how to do it:

• Go to System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy.
  
• Either drag the Macintosh HD icon to the privacy window or Click the + button to add a privacy area and browse to the Macintosh HD and add it as a privacy area.
  
• Close the privacy window by switching back to the search results.
  
• Return to the Privacy window and remove the volume you just added.
  
• Leave your Mac on overnight to re-index.

That should fix the problem of your system not seeing the Calculator in Spotlight.

By-the-way, you can bring up Spotlight by pressing CMD-SPACE.

[krb]

Thank you for your help. I hope that works.

But I also hope that you appreciate the irony that the list of instructions you just gave me looks no different from some of the arcane instructions that Windows experts sometimes give to people having trouble with their own computers.

All I was saying is that, to, to their credit, MS did an awesome thing and made their Start Menu indexed and responded intelligently to keypresses in a way that makes it easy to get what you want, whether you are a GUI person or a keyboard person.

I didn’t even have to know that there was some weird indexing scheme that needs to be managed. Apple seems a little complicated in that regard. Hell, almost Windows like :-)

In the larger picture, I don’t care if MS ripped it off of Apple. Apple ripped the mouse off of Xerox. I don’t care. MS ripped off the idea of IRQ driven mouse updates from Apple. I don’t care. All of the innovation is been good and amazing for all of us. What counts is the end product that these vendors are selling us, and how well they compete against each other.

[Swordmaker]

I didn’t even have to know that there was some weird indexing scheme that needs to be managed. Apple seems a little complicated in that regard. Hell, almost Windows like :-)

What can I say. They are both computers. Not everything is simple. I wish Apple had a button in the Spotlight preferences that says "Re-Index" that you click and forget. My point was that the "awesome thing" had already been done by Apple (and patented by them) two years before Microsoft included it in Vista... and the Apple version was also accessible by either GUI people or keyboard people.

By the way, Xerox did not invent the Mouse. Douglas Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute invented the computer mouse in 1964. Engelbart received the patent on the mouse in 1970, the same year PARC was founded. Incidentally, Apple ripped off nothing from PARC. Apple paid Xerox about 3 million dollars in pre-IPO preferred stock for two eight-hour visits to PARC and for the use of what Jobs and three Apple engineers learned there.

All of the innovation is been good and amazing for all of us. What counts is the end product that these vendors are selling us, and how well they compete against each other.

There we agree.

[Swordmaker]

I didn’t even have to know that there was some weird indexing scheme that needs to be managed. Apple seems a little complicated in that regard. Hell, almost Windows like :-)

On the other hand, over four years with Spotlight, and dozens of Macs, I have had to re-index a Mac only once.

[krb]

What can I say. They are both computers.

Of course I agree that's true, but come on. Apple made a mistake. They undeniably have the best application installation model. You drag a repository to your Application Folder. That's it. An application (and its constituent files) are one big .app file that contains all that is needed to run the app. No need for several dozen things that all need to be in the right place. And registry? Hell no.

They have the most brilliant application model and they screwed up by not letting the typie-thingie automatically know about YOUR APPS. Come on dude, that is foul.

It's almost like they are stuck in the days of their own failure. As if they don't expect people to have butt-loads of Mac apps.

Well that's not the case, at all.

[Swordmaker]

They have the most brilliant application model and they screwed up by not letting the typie-thingie automatically know about YOUR APPS. Come on dude, that is foul.

Why do you keep insisting on something that simply is not true?

I repeat, krb: Dozens of Macs... all of them with Spotlight working as well as you claim Windows Vista's awesome Instant Search works. I add an application to any of those Macs, and Spotlight knows about it. I remove it, it's gone from Spotlight. It works on every Mac I have and every Mac my clients have.

It's almost like they are stuck in the days of their own failure. As if they don't expect people to have butt-loads of Mac apps.

I have a couple of hundred installed applications, Spotlight has every one of them indexed. I merely have to type enough of the apps name to make it unique in Spotlight and it is at the top of the list and will start merely by pressing ENTER or RETURN.

YOUR index was/is broken. It is obviously incomplete. It's possible that your computer was interrupted during the initial indexing process by a power failure or someone forcing the computer to quit. That was the cause of the one and only time I had to force a re-indexing... and I caused it. I accidentally turned off what I thought was a light switch which actually controlled the outlet that was used by both the light and the computer. The process of indexing the new Mac Pro, after I had migrated a client's files to it, was interrupted before completion. Several days later she called and said Spotlight could not find files she KNEW were on the computer. I checked and she was right. Re-indexing Spotlight solved the problem. That was three years ago; her Spotlight has been working flawlessly since.

That is not an error of system design by Apple. Where is the mistake other than your mistake assuming that your particular problem with your Mac is universal to all Macs and therefore a failing in the design of the OS?

[TaxRelief]

Those are all “ca” responses...

I haven’t seen “spotlight” before, is that Leopard?

[TaxRelief]

I’ll have to see how this ‘spotlight thingy’ compares to ‘finder’... CA sure brings calculator up in finder...

Of course ‘dashboard’ is the instant way to access the calculator.

[TaxRelief]

Oddly, I never saw that spotlight thingy before... lol

Thanks for pointing it out. I was happy with Finder, though.

Calculator doesn’t come up in the “CA” search for me either. I guess I will have to try the reindexing, as well.

[TaxRelief]

Playing with spotlight here (having just found it—thanks for the morning’s entertainment—:).

Oddly, “CA” does not bring up Calculator, but “CAL” brings it up as the top hit.

Now I just changed the preferences to eliminate the categories I don’t want in the spotlight search, and calculator comes up using “CA” (due to the extra space available).

Can the algorithm is it using to allocate space for each category be tweaked?

[Anonymous coward]

In my business I own 5 Dells, including a laptop and the server. I also own an Imac, a Powerbook pro, a mac mini, and a Mac desktop.
The business software we run is Windows only.
The Mac tax MAY be a few dollars more at time of purchase, especially if you go for fancy Apple monitors, and if you pay full retail for Parallels software.
The REAL tax is TECH SUPPORT. $0 for the Mac, $250/mo for Windows.
BTW, at our last professional society meeting, I was flabbergasted to see our business software program being demoed on IMacs running VMWare!

[krb]

Yep...it’s Leopard.