Born to Hand Jive

What’s more Partisan, shrill and exhausting than presidential politics? The eternal conflict between Microsoft and Apple, of course. While the race to the White House will, mercifully, be over soon, the decades-long battle between Macs and PCs–with the negative ads and trash-talking bigwigs–will persist until cockroaches inherit the earth. You think taxes are just a political issue? A few weeks ago, as Apple prepared to launch its new line of laptops, Microsoft execs were on the stump, criticizing what they call the “Apple tax,” the premium consumers pay for Macs with the same power and speed as lower-priced PCs.

Market-research firm NPD Group dug into the numbers and determined that, on average, you’ll spend up to $800 more on an Apple than you would on a comparable PC laptop. And in most cases, PCs come with more bells and whistles, like Blu-ray drives and more ports for special external hard drives and video connectors. So what kind of sucker would be willing to pay the Apple tax?

I would! Gladly. Where do I sign? After months of reviewing Windows desktops and laptops, I put the new $1,600 MacBook through its paces–and it was like returning from a backward country where nothing works only to find your homeland is even better than you remembered.

Apple specializes in mini-malist design that simply works better. Each MacBook, for instance, is carved out of a single block of aluminum, and this unibody construction creates a stronger, lighter chassis that looks like a work of art.

Likewise, while some of the PC laptops I tried have two separate sets of mice on board–in case you prefer one type over the other–Apple’s pointing system has evolved on the new laptops so that the (only) mouse consists of a single glass touch pad. Push the entire pad down to click, or configure it so a double tap does the same job.

Cooler yet is the touch pad’s iPhone-like gesture system. Drag one to four fingers across the surface to perform a variety of tasks–move your cursor, zoom, scroll through documents, even navigate among alternate desktops you can create on your machine.

Plus, with the Apple tax comes peace of mind. A major virtue of Steve Jobs’ control-freak ways is that if something goes wrong with your computer, you know whom to blame. You call Apple or go to the Genius Bar at an Apple store. End of problem. With a PC, though, you have to try to figure out if you’ve got a hardware problem or a software problem. Invariably, you will be wrong, and the Microsoft-support rep will refer you to the PC manufacturer. Or vice versa. Repeat.

The best MacBook feature, however, is the Leopard operating system, which I find so much simpler, more stable and more straightforward than Windows Vista. The only possible argument anyone can make in the latter’s favor is that, well, it powers some mighty cheap machines. And so, in summary, just as the political pundits have done lately, I’ll paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes: taxes are the price we pay for civilized computers.

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