It is a central doctrine of the Apple cargo cult that you need to buy its expensive gear at every opportunity. It is also important that you lead others into the Apple way by trying to convert them. The fact that it is so overpriced should mean that it is off the list of products that civil servants are allowed to be offered.

According to Order Order  Apple fanboys at the UK cabinet office considered itself an acceptation to the rule and used the Choose Your Own
Device scheme to fulfil all that was required to get into Apple heaven.

Under the scheme they offered all the civil servants in the Cabinet Office an Apple MacBook Air or a more reasonable Dell or Lenovo laptop. While the Dell or Lenovo was easily able to do the same things as the Air, they were much cheaper and so  staff plumped for the £849 13? MacBook Air.

After all, they reasoned, you get what you pay for, even if it is not you doing the paying. UK civil servants cannot be expected to know that what they were given was an overpriced toy.

What is refreshing is that many of them realised that the Air was not fit for the purpose and opted for the cheaper, more serviceable machine.

But the question is how on earth an Air get offered alongside a Dell or Lenovo laptop in the first place? Not only is it super expensive but it is an underpowered and insecure little wonder.

What is clear is that the Cabinet Office knows that the decision was rather dodgy and is doing its level best to keep the whole thing secret.

After all if it revealed what a cost benefit system it used to provide an overpriced, and less secure netbook instead of proper notebooks the world would see what an appalling deal it was.

In its official statement it is saying that the IT market is hotly contested and the information has to be kept secret.

"It would be inappropriate for HMG to provide any indication of favouritism or indicate that another product is inferior it would have an effect on the market," it said.

In other words if the cabinet office has to explain to the world why it wasted money on overpriced netbooks everyone would suddenly be so stupid that they would low powered Apple gear instead of higher powered and cheaper stuff from Dell or Lenovo.

We expect we will find out all about the doings of the Apple fanboys at the cabinet office when someone hacks them.  After all we wonder what sort of security clearance the iOS has.