A clever way to divert attention from your own shortcomings is to talk about someone else’s, real or imagined. In business, you focus on the things your competitor supposedly does wrong, hoping they won’t stop to look more closely at your own failings.

So we have Microsoft making a huge deal about an alleged “Apple Tax,” purported to be the extra price you pay when you choose Apple’s ultra cool Macs instead of an ordinary Windows box. Now regular readers know that I don’t believe there is such a thing. It’s a hype, a false claim from Microsoft and Windows fanboys to stem the ongoing erosion of PC market share.

When it comes to purchase price, a Mac and a PC, almost identically configured in terms of hardware and software, will be priced really close. The PC may have a slight advantage at the low end of the market, while Macs will beat the mainstream workstations by a surprisingly large margin at the high-end, with the Mac Pro.

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Several years ago, during one of their quarterly conference calls with financial analysts, Apple again dismissed the possibility that they’d ever build a cheap Mac. The reason, often stated, is that they didn’t want to build a crappy Mac.

Well, it is true that, in the 1990s when Apple couldn’t do anything right (more or less), there were some relatively low-cost and low-powered Macs that you might consider junk. I won’t name the particular models, bearing the moniker Performa, but I’m sure our long-time readers get the idea.

However, not a few months after the conference call in question, the Mac mini came out. True, it wasn’t quite like the PC boxes that sold for comparable prices. Indeed, the internals were pretty much based on Apple’s lowest cost notebook, which at that time was the iBook. As a side note, this was yet another example of Apple’s use of notebook parts in desktop computers. Much of that design strategy debuted with the iMac, which has been designed in that fashion pretty much from day one.

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Consider what some so-called tech pundits and industry analysts said in the long (some say endless) run up to Apple’s quarterly report. Mac sales are down and Apple has a problem. They’ve got to cut prices and rush out a netbook to save the business.

Perhaps the best comment I read about Apple’s quarterly financials, released Wednesday afternoon, came in an email in which a friend forwarded a link to their press release on the subject and said: “I dunno…Apple isn’t looking very beleaguered to me. ”

Indeed, Apple reported its best non-holiday quarter in the company’s history, with total sales of $8.16 billion, compared to analyst estimates of $7.96 billion. Net income increased to $1.21 billion, or $1.33 per share, compared to $1.05 billion, or $1.16 per share. To be blunt, as we previously predicted, Apple beat the street yet again.

Overall, some 2.2 million Macs were sold during the March quarter, representing a three percent decrease compared to last year. However, the desktop refresh in early March has apparently helped, because sales did improve markedly after that product introduction. In all, Apple regards actual sell through, which means units shipped to customers, as “relatively flat” year over year.

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Depending on which survey you’ve read, Apple’s market share has either gone up or down slightly so far this year. If you assume the more pessimistic results, you might be inclined to want to tell Apple what they need to do next in order to survive, although you just know they won’t listen.

Take a column I recently read, one that doesn’t deserve a link, claiming Apple needs to deliver a netbook post haste in order to save the Mac business. Regardless of the sales figures that will be reported this week, that conclusion is sheer nonsense.

Unlike other PC makers, Apple has not been known to make knee-jerk decisions about what products to sell. That’s not how they grew from the ashes of the 1990s and became as prosperous as they are today. I should also remind the critics that Apple has billions of dollars in the bank — a solvent financial institution we presume — and they are thus able to withstand short-term falloffs in sales without having to change long-term strategy.

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