Microsoft’s latest advertising campaign is a slightly odd one in many ways—it thrusts dollars into the hands of normal people (well, actors acting out the role of normal people) and gets them to buy a new computer. Obviously, they look at Macs, spit on them and grab a PC. At the same time, Microsoft continues to crow about the so-called ‘Apple Tax’.

Aside from the obvious danger in an advertising campaign that puts forward the argument that the only benefit your product has is price, the Apple Tax argument is one that holds little water when explored fully. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to put into words a succinct argument why the Mac side is typically better, and therefore why someone can justify spending more on what many people initially see as the same thing—‘just a computer’. Phrases like “it’s just better” and “you won’t get it until you try it” only work when someone has tried it and then tries to convince someone else to ‘cross over’ at a later date.

One of the better attempts of recent times arrived yesterday, courtesy of Harry McCracken in his article Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a Mac. He says: “Next time I encounter a Microsoft executive tsk-tsking about the onerous ‘Apple Tax’ imposed by a Mac’s needless glitz, I’m tempted to ask him what car he drives—and whether he chose the model with the cloth seats and hand-cranked windows, or one with a few creature comforts.”

The thing is, even this argument often falls on deaf ears, which makes me ask the following question: why are computers still considered dreary, strictly functional devices to so many people? When consumers have the money, they want a flash car with nice stuff, a decent mobile phone with bells and whistles, a good-looking television, and a sparkly watch. They don’t want the near-junked car with manual windows, the mobile phone that barely manages to make text messages, a TV from the dark ages, and a 1980s Casio digital watch.

With computers and the internet becoming near ubiquitous in so many people’s lives, it’s strange that so many people, as Stephen Fry put it when I interviewed him, “spend their lives in front of a screen […] in a Windows environment, the equivalent of a ‘sick building syndrome’ office, with strip lighting, ugly furniture and no freshness, sexiness or imagination in design. People are dragging out their lives in the computer equivalent of a sink estate and no-one questions it.”

I regularly question it, but I still haven’t found any answers.