For Apple fans, it's time to "Get the Facts", it seems.

In a recent interview, Joe Biden, the U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate for the Democrats equated paying more taxes with patriotism, saying that it was time for wealthier Americans to "jump in" and "help get America out of the rut".

Well, I'm glad to say there may be hope for the good ol' U.S. of A., since it seems that many Apple customers are just the sort of patriots that Mr. Biden was looking for. According to a recent interview with Microsoft's Brad Brooks over on the "Beyond Binary" blog - Apple customers are repeatedly, and willingly it seems as their market share grows, being "taxed" when they choose a Mac.

There really is a tax around there for people that are evaluating their choices going into this holiday season and going forward. There's a choice tax that we talked about, which is, hey, you want to buy a machine that's other than black, white, or silver, and if you want to get it in multiple different configurations or price points, you're going to be paying a tax if you go the Apple way.

There's going to be an application tax, which is if you want choice around applications, or if you want the same type of application experience on your Mac versus Windows, you're going to be purchasing a lot of software. And even at that you're not going to get the same experience. You're not going to get things like Microsoft Outlook, you're not going to get the games that you're used to playing. There's a technology tax--Apple still doesn't have HDMI, doesn't have Blu-ray offerings, doesn't have e-SATA external disk drives that work at twice the speed of FireWire. And so you've got all of these things that are truly taxes.

You've also got an upgrade tax. The only machine, as far as I know, within the Apple lineup that's actually upgradeable is the Mac Pro, the $2,800 version, which is (more expensive than) just about any PC configuration that you get from any one of our manufacturers.

The part I found interesting was when Mr. Brooks pointed out that products such as Outlook, Visio and Project are all unavailable on the Mac, as well as characterizing Mac Office as "stripped down". I mean, these are Microsoft products - no?

The only reason that these features and applications are unavailable on the Mac is because Microsoft doesn't offer them - intentionally, it would seem - in order to prevent or at least slow a mass exodus from their platform by keeping competing platform versions lagging technologically. Unfortunately, this behavior is nothing new for our friends from Redmond, just I can't recall them ever being so blunt about it.

Interoperability the Microsoft way: one-way, that is.