my dislike of apple more has it's roots in the iphone.  i worked for years in retention for at&t wireless.  my pay was a base rate; plus a commission based on my "save rate"  your save rate was a metric that was the total number of lines you handled divided by the number of lines you "saved" minus your cancellations.  it produced a percentage scale that your commission was based on.  save 70% and you were at one rate.. save 85% and you were at another rate and so on.  with the release of the iphone 2, apple changed their return policies.  people were literally coming from china and russia to the states.. opening upwards of 10 family plans with 5 lines each(i kid you not.. seen it in action more than a dozen times) with iphones on every line. at first, you could cancel immediately, eat the early termination fee, and you still had a $275 iphone instead of a $600 iphone.  then at&t switched to no cancellations on iphone lines until day 31 of the contract.  that at least got them a month's service fees.  we (the saves team) would only waive those early termination fees before end of contract if the line holder died or in the case of us being able to verify that the persons address of record had no coverage.  what would happen is people would try to cancel their 30-iphone accounts the day after they bought the phones and opened the accounts, they'd get told to come back on day 31.  then they'd go to the apple store who would immediately cancel the line AND tell them they would waive their ETF.  what did they care?  they still got their money from at&t.  for those of us on the saves team, the releases of the iphone, iphone 2 and iphone 3 literally took thousands of dollars out of our pockets.  this was due almost entirely to apple's policies.  eventually, at&t allowed us throw accounts of more than 5 iphone lines off to supervisors(who weren't commissioned) in the event that the caller would not back off the cancellation.

 

as far as apple computers go.. specifically laptops, it's nothing but pure envy on my part.. .. they look good.. perform like beasts.. and hold their value.  if i had 2 grand to spend.. i'd probably be talking to you now on a new macbook pro instead of this 3yr old dinosaur.