For instance – at $799 – roughly 50% cheaper than the cheapest Macbook – you can grab and Acer Aspire AS6930 -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115539

Gigabit Lan, 250GB Hard drive, 64bit OS, 2ghz Core2Duo, Wireless N, 4 USB Ports, HDMI, 9600M Nvidida (compared to Mac’s 9400m), Webcam, Card reader, 4 GB memory, 16″ larger screen, and the list goes on. Nearly all these specs blow away the base Macbook, and the cost for this laptop is $500 less, more than 50% less cost.

And around $1600, you can get a Quad core Windows laptop, that will blow away the $2800 Macbook Pro.

Now the $799 laptop I used as an example was used to show how much MORE you can get for much less than a Macbook with the Mac Tax. But what about similar specs?

Roughly $499 – substantially less than half the cost of a comparable Macbook.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115537

Now, it’s a bit slower processor as it’s not the core2duo,although it runs at the same clock speed. It also doesn’t have quite as fast a graphics processor. But substantially more hard drive space and more memory helps to make up for that. While this isn’t quite as good as the $1300 base Macbook… But it’s damn close.

There is absolutely a Mac Tax, and it’s nearly TWICE the cost of a comparably spec’d windows based laptop.

You can’t just run around comparing the most expensive Windows laptops and pretend like they are all priced the same – that’s dishonest and misleading.

I have not had many issues at all with Windows and if my computer did lock up for whatever reason, I just turned it off, waited 30 seconds and then started it back up again.