A big part of the recent debate over Apple pricing and that alleged Apple Tax is whether Apple is forcing you to pay for loads of options that you don’t want. This is certainly the most significant argument about the whole issue, because even if a comparably equipped Mac and PC are similar in price, it doesn’t matter if Apple isn’t building the computer that best suits your personal requirements.

This is one of the reasons why I suggested a possible business configuration. Now it’s clear to me that it’s far cheaper for Apple to supply Bluetooth and Wi-Fi preinstalled on the logic boards, and the extra money you pay is probably not a large figure. If you had to buy specialty daughter cards to get these features, Apple would have to design and test separate components along with an interface that allowed them to connect properly. It would mean that the majority of people who want one or both would end up paying more for their new Macs.

That’s a critical point. Despite the erroneous claims in a recent issue of Consumer Reports that Apple’s new iMacs delivered more without a “hefty” price increase, Apple generally keeps the price the same or delivers higher-end configurations for less when they upgrade products. Bundling everything as standard equipment reduces their production costs, and thus the retail price if Apple chooses to pass on those savings to you.

So in constructing that business-oriented Mac, I’d leave in the wireless networking. Then again, if you include the MacBook, MacBook Pro and iMac, all of which have built-in Web cams as well, eliminating all three might indeed produce a slight savings, which I estimate to be $50 to $75 per unit. That may mean very little if you’re buying just one, but when you order up hundreds or thousands of Macs similarly configured, pretty soon it adds up.

However, I think most of you realize that Apple has not invested much time or energy devising an enterprise strategy. Instead, they expect businesses to simply use the same Macs that are sold to consumers. In large part, they’ve been successful, because more and more businesses have at least some Macs around the office. Indeed, there appears to be less resistance on the part of IT people who traditionally favored Windows. But I suspect part of that is due to the fact that corporate executives end up buying new Macs and then telling the systems people that they just have to accept the situation and deal with it. It’s also true that Apple has made it easier and easier to integrate Macs into Windows networks with each Mac OS X upgrade.

The other question is more serious in its implications. Does Apple provide the products you, as a consumer, want to buy, or are you compromising big time to go Mac? This is the real issue raised by that Apple Tax claim, because Apple sells fully loaded personal computers, brimming with the latest and greatest technology. The average sales price is way above that of the average PC. Indeed, roughly 50% of the money spent on personal computers in the U.S. retail market goes to Apple. But their actual market share is still between eight and nine percent overall in this country.

This doesn’t mean Apple is building overpriced gear. They have opted to pick and choose the market segments in which they operate, avoiding the cheap PC playground, where bottom feeders fight relentlessly for higher and higher sales, profit margins be damned! There’s no way Apple expects to be successful playing that game, anymore than they will build a standard wireless handset. When it comes to mobile phones, the big money is in the smartphone segment.

After all the bad moves Apple made in the 1990s, their present strategy is a good thing. Sales are high, profits are high, and most customers love their iPhones, iPods and Macs. Why should it be otherwise?

This doesn’t mean that Apple will never produce the exact computer you want, if you can’t find it in their current lineup. It’s still all about sales and customer demand. At the end of the day, if Apple sees sales tanking in a particular market, they’ll do something about it.

Consider, if you will, Mac desktops. Sales are down industry-wide, not just with Apple. Some three quarters of all Macs sold these days are note-books, at least according to the most recent quarterly financials. So in creating a new iMac lineup, Apple gave you larger screens and also a special quad-core configuration that, for now at least, trumps the Mac Pro in many performance benchmarks. Indeed, I expect many content creators who found the Mac Pro too rich for their blood are opting to select quad-core iMacs instead. This is a move, by the way, that I’ve seriously considered, and I’ll let you know my decision soon.

Meantime, if you still want Apple to make a computer that’s not in their current lineup, such as that mythical midrange Mac minitower — basically an iMac without the integrated display and extra expansion capabilities — some of us have written about, the best you can do is tell them what you want. If they get enough requests, they might consider it, but if desktop sales don’t improve, don’t bet on it now or ever.

There is an unfortunate impression, no doubt one that Microsoft strives hard to convey, that the Mac OS and Windows are just two fairly comparable ways of doing the same thing, only the Mac OS is prettier. That may be why the arrival of the Aero eye candy on Windows Vista and 7 were both greeted with such enthusiasm by Windows fandom. After all, now they could claim to possess the same fancy visual effects offered on a Mac.

Unfortunately imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but it doesn’t mean that the knock off is anywhere near as good as the original, or even close. But this isn’t a Windows bashing session. It’s a reality session. You see, I’d very much like to see Windows compete in terms of quality with the Mac OS. Healthy competition is good for the soul, and especially for the customers. Unfortunately, here’s where Microsoft falls down on the job big time.

You see, holding a vast majority of the operating system market doesn’t mean Microsoft builds the best product. If you used that logic, such as it is, McDonalds would have the finest food on the planet since it’s the most popular restaurant.

Microsoft’s usual excuse when they deliver junk is to promise something akin to “don’t worry, we’ll get it right next year.” If that’s true, why did they release an inferior product in the first place? Why not wait until they were able to deliver the real thing? Do they truly expect customers to simply accept more mediocrity when there are better alternatives available?

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All right, a new report from the NPD Group says that 48% of the retail dollars spent on personal computers in the U.S. now goes to Apple. However, that doesn’t add up to a 48%% market share by any means, because of the price of admission. But, folks, I still maintain there is no Apple Tax.

So how does Apple gain such a huge percentage of the money? Well, obviously, the average price of a Mac is way higher than the average price of a PC. Without going into the numbers specifically, the answer why is obvious: Apple won’t play in the cheap PC playground, because they don’t think it’s worth it.

You have to wonder just what Apple is thinking here and why it’s not going for the jugular in the alleged battle to the death with Microsoft, but the answers are crystal clear. Despite the fact that such industry giants as Dell and HP sell way more units than Apple, the latter makes higher profits and has loads of cash in the bank. So who can argue with that?

More to the point, with the great popularity of netbooks, it’s clear that millions of buyers are struggling to compute on the cheap. With products selling for less than $300, including a basic Windows OS license, it’s clear that the PC makers who sell such gear aren’t making a whole lot of money from each sale. They hope to make it up with volume, or perhaps entice you to customize your box and stock up on high profit extras, such as more memory, larger screens, extra software and other goodies.

Contrast this to Apple, which basically sells fully-outfitted Macs with very limited, carefully defined configurations. Yes, there is a “build-to-order” option that allows you to customize your new Mac with extra memory, a larger hard drive and a handful of other goodies, but your choices are limited. That is, other than the Mac Pro, where there are far more selections with which to cater to the needs of the content creators who are willing and able to afford expensive workstations.

But even the basic Mac mini, at $599, comes with a pretty decent bundle of software, including the latest iLife suite, plus components that may be optional on a low-end PC, such as gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A common scheme the PC makers pull to keep prices low is to scrimp on the Windows OS licensing. Although there is but one fully-featured version of the Snow Leopard client product, there are several variations of Windows 7. Most of the time, the cheap boxes come with a Home version, but you need to buy Ultimate to unlock all the features, and that’s usually $100 to $150 more.

Apple just won’t sell stripped machines, even though I can see a need, particularly in the enterprise where some of the usual frills, such as a Web cam on the note-books and iMac, and even Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, may not be needed for obvious reasons, such as office security. Forget the cost of the software, since it’s just a disk image that entails no extra expense for Apple when building the product.

But Apple’s main sales focus is on the consumer. Yes, that consumer may run a business, and it’s very common for people these days to want to bring their Macs into the office. There are countless stories of corporate executives taking their Macs and iPhones to the IT departments and demanding they support such gear. When the boss says do it, the IT person must say yes, even if they are wedded to the known trials and tribulations of Windows machines.

As I’ve said before, when you actually equip the PC with something comparable — or mostly comparable — to the Mac, you find the cost differences largely vanish. The Mac is sometimes a little more expensive, sometimes cheaper. PC makers are more inclined to tout instant discounts to grab a quick sale, and that’s where they might offer an added price advantage. But there’s no evidence that there’s such a thing as an Apple Tax. That was long ago and far away.

On the other hand, there is a Microsoft Tax, even though Windows fans usually can’t handle this uncomfortable truth. It comes in the form of the annual subscription fee paid for name-brand security software, and the higher level of maintenance the PC box usually requires.

Also consider the plight of the PC user with Windows XP installed. If they want to upgrade to Windows 7, which is actually a pretty decent operating system despite still being saddled with such land mines as the dreaded Registry, they are forced to do a clean install. By clean, I mean wiping the hard drive after backing up your stuff to an external drive. Microsoft’s migration utility is limited to your own documents, not applications, such it’s of little help in dealing with the real issues, which involve reinstalling all your apps and hoping all your settings will still work even if they are restored to the same location on your PC’s drive. Yes, that’s not a given.

If you can’t handle that clean install yourself, you are forced to pay someone to do it for you, or just buy a new PC. Either amounts to added expense — a Microsoft Tax. Is it even worth it? I don’t think so.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that AT&T was once this huge telecommunications conglomerate that encompassed the entire length and breadth of the U.S. before an antitrust action separated Big Bell into Baby Bells. Well, mergers and acquisitions have fattened what was left of AT&T and Verizon, and left smaller players on the fringes. Qwest, another Baby Bell, continues to struggle to justify its existence.

However, AT&T and Verizon Wireless have mostly kept their hands off each other when it comes to advertising. Verizon stresses its network quality, where AT&T has the iPhone, and there’s always “an app for that” to buttress their claims of superiority.

More recently, Verizon has decided to go for the jugular and is attacking AT&T as the result of its well-known network shortcomings. So you know that Verizon has a much larger 3G network footprint when it comes to square miles of coverage, whereas they actually reach around 20% more people overall. However, their recent “there’s a map for that” campaign leaves the AT&T coverage map mostly blank, conveying the misleading impression that the competition has no coverage whatever in most of the country.

Well, AT&T’s efforts to get the courts to put a stop to the questionable claims got shot down by the courts. Verizon is simply claiming that its map is limited to 3G coverage, and is thus accurate.

To fight back, AT&T has contracted with actor Luke Wilson to deliver ads meant to demonstrate just how much coverage they have, although that coverage also includes the larger but slower EDGE network, and they really don’t draw the distinction. Apple has also jumped into the fray with its own ads demonstrating a huge flaw in Verizon’s 3G system, one that prevents you from talking on the phone and consulting  email or checking a site at the same time. Even though the iPhone is dinged for its lack of true multitasking support, there are a few areas where you can do two things at once, and this can be a huge advantage under some circumstances.

The problem with comparative advertising is that the parties involved will sugarcoat the information that favors them and exaggerate the competition’s shortcomings. The truth tends to lie in the middle.

So it is quite true that network quality on Verizon is superior to AT&T. Then again, Verizon doesn’t have an iPhone hogging network capacity, and I wonder if they’d feel so smug if they had anything near as popular. And the Motorola Droid, though it’s done fairly well out of the gate, doesn’t exhibit any evidence of matching Apple’s smartphone in terms of sales.

Indeed, fully 50% of mobile Web access can be attributed — or blamed — on the iPhone. In all fairness to AT&T, as it pours loads of cash into improving its network, I don’t think they anticipated just how the iPhone would emancipate its user base to huge much more bandwidth than any other mobile device.

On the other hand, they still have lots of explaining to do. In the January 2010 issue of Consumer Reports, there’s a fairly extensive roundup of wireless carriers, service plans and handsets. According to the magazine’s reader surveys, AT&T rates dead last when it comes to call quality and reliability in most major U.S. cities.

But there are some questions about these ratings that require further details. Usually, CR tallies these results based on its annual questionnaires, sent to all paid subscribers. Since there’s no way to predict which readers are actually going to take the time to fill out and return the surveys, which contain extremely nonspecific questions, you can hardly call the results scientific. Well, at least they’re random, and I’ll grant that CR is recording the data accurately.

However, there’s one huge mistake in another section of the issue, covering computer lab tests, where CR claims that “Apple increased the size and brightness of its new iMac displays without hefty price increases.”

In fact, there were no price increases. The new models cost pretty much the same as the old for most configurations, and for some, they are actually cheaper. There’s also a misleading comparison with a Dell Studio XPS SX8000-2361 desktop, listing for $1,020, compared to the $1,199 you pay for the basic iMac. The casual reader will think that the Dell, sporting Intel’s quad-core i7 processor, is a much better deal.

This calls for a reality check. You see the Dell Studio XPS is a standard minitower, not an all-in-one computer. Regardless, the price increases to over $1,600 when you configure that box with a low-end 21.5-inch display, a decent range of bundled software, but without a Bluetooth option. Leave it to CR to gloss over the fine details.

But in the end, the real issue on the table here is AT&T’s network quality. Even assuming the CR survey is accurate, the last reader questionnaire went out weeks before the April 2009 issue appeared, making it months old. AT&T claims asserts it’s working hard to improve network capacity, performance and reliability. Little of that, alas, would be reflected in CR’s ratings.

In the end, AT&T can surely do better, and I think they have had their shortcomings thrown in their face quite a bit in recent months. Maybe they’ll get the message before Apple does contract with Verizon to deliver the iPhone on their network, even if you’d be forced to use Wi-Fi to be able to talk and read email at the same time.