Am I the only apple hater?

Oh, this thread is still going.

Off topic.
Saw some cutting boards sold at the fair today, they had an Apple logo on it along with the name iBoard. I thought it hilarious. Did not check if they cost more than the "regular" boards, though.

More off topic.
In my experience, Apple laptops are better than other laptops. You can attribute it to chance, or extreme unluck with every other laptop I've owned (about ten in total); but no other computer I've owned has still been usable after two years, let alone three. No other has still provided usable hours of battery life. Only computer so far that hasn't flat out broke. I'm not going to comment on OS X versus other operating systems, because let's be honest, in the end that comes down to preference and preference alone.

On topic.
What you, Original Poster, have experienced, are simple validation charges. Many online establishments use those, including but not limited to Apple, Paypal, Hulu. Yours are about twice the amount I've seen, I'll give you that, but they should disappear in 2-3 weeks. If you cannot be bothered to wait so long, just challenge them with your bank (just tell them it's validation charges); no reason to hate a company over this little thing.

A friend said his mothers desktop computer broke and she needed help connecting her laptop to a WiFi router, and asked me if I could visit her and see what can be done. He lives in another city and it's important to her to have access to Skype, but she's not an experienced user.

I call her on the phone to check if she's home, and she says that someone from the service was already there, but could not help her because some important password was missing, and they could not read it from the router without connecting to it first. Also, her desktop monitor had no signal but the man from service said it's not monitor but some kind of a board. Her words.

My idea? Go there, connect her laptop with an ethernet cable to the router and leave an old AGP card with her, so it can be used to fix the broken computer if that's what's broken.

I go to their house. I suggest what we should do. The woman turns to me and says, "that is not going to be possible", and then shows me her laptop.

It was a Mac of sorts, with no f*cking ethernet port.

So, I open up her desktop, change the AGP card and desktop starts working again. She has Skype now. I did not even try to set up WiFI on that Mac.

Do I hate Apple? Not really. They are a company interested in making money, and that's what they do - make money. I'm just sad that there are people who are ready to buy their products for the sole reason that they have a nice appearance on the outside.

But hey, there are people who are not interested in how the cars work, and they give vast amounts of money to drive around in a car that looks pretty. That's just how people are.