I was an early adopter of Apple products. I started with an Apple and two disk drives back in the 80s. It was a great little machine for its time, and a wonder to use to learn coding. One could even plug in an interface card to access a printer. Then came the Apple III fiasco: a fantastic operating system (SOS, or Sophisticated Operating System) coupled with with a system utilities program with which one could write one’s own device drivers to drive almost anything, collapsed in a frothing sea of acquisition costs and failed motherboards.

Their Lisa, which was the forerunner of the Macintosh, was another disaster, heightened by the release of the Macintosh. The Macintosh pretty much started Apple’s tradition of a closed box – it was based on 124 megs of ram – which remains to this day. It was virtually impossible to upgrade. If you wanted more memory, you had to buy a newer Macintosh.

I abandoned Apple because of the Lisa, and never looked back – until recently, that is. I’ve been considering acquiring an Apple notebook of some sort.

Not any longer.

Since their latest fiasco with the iPhone cash-back flip-flop, I wouldn’t touch anything that company produces with someone else’s money. Their modus operandi continues to be one of buyer beware, and that goes for their iTunes-playing gadgets too. Why would anyone spend money to own music that can’t be shared with any other device? Anti-piracy? Hardly. Anti-owner is more like it.

Welcome to Apple’s world.