Love/Hate

So my hands have finally found a little time to be the devil's playthings, and I was all set to do a huge catchup/summer-in-pictures type of affair here, but a rude awakening in the middle of the night put the kibosh on. More on that in a moment.
Matt showed up on Friday night with the announcement he had something in his pants I was going to want to play with. Our long-distance status same as it ever was, one would think this was not necessarily newsworthy. Faster than I can say "not tonight dear, I have a headache," out comes the 8GB iPhone. Knowing Matt as I do, I can't say I didn't exactly see it coming, but ever since it was introduced a few months ago the device has taken on such a mythical status I didn't think I'd ever see one in the wild, so to speak. Especially not a mere six hours after they became available in my time zone, and certainly not fully functional (the telecommunications black-hole status of my domicile notwithstanding). After the initial glee wore off...scratch that, it hasn't yet. The thing is way more awesome than I expected it to be, and I expected a lot. Leaps. Bounds. But I'm not here to review the thing. There are thousands for your perusal. I merely want to say, damn, Apple got that shit right. Ladies and Gentlemen, the future has arrived.
Which brings me back to my rude awakening. When I first got my iBook I spent weeks just discovering all the cool little extras and customizations that could be enabled at the mere click of a button. I was in love, and I wanted the world to know it. Soon I pasted the logo on my car, and joined the elitist chorus of Apple fanpersons, loudly decrying the vastly inferior machines and OSes barely tolerated by the huddled masses. I evangelized bathed in the cool glow of the apple logo on the front of my sleek, white, perfectly-functioning machine. I've done everything I can to talk my friends into joining me in this dreamworld of computer bliss and, save for the few who are enslaved by Windows as a means of earning a living (you know who you are), I think I have been largely successful.
Sure, there are the downsides. Google is slow to port the cool apps to us, Netflix shows virtually no interest in letting us in on the "watch now" fun (I know because I recently sent them an angry yet thoughtfully worded letter and the response was eerily similar to the form letters I receive from my conservative political representatives when I share my lefty feelings with them) , and I can't file my damn FAFSA from my own computer. However, I still see these as mere annoyances, not really the fault of Apple, and not really harming my enjoyment of my life in macworld.
Imagine my distress, then, at being jarred awake around three this morning by a polite computerized voice (one of the many awesome features of the Apple OS being the ability to have your alerts read to you in one of a host of voices and with your preferred interupptive phrasing) "Excuse me," a woman's voice states "you are now running on reserve battery power."
Even in my somewhat confused state I thought that odd, given that the computer was plugged in and was emitting the lovely green LED glow that told me the battery was entirely charged when I retired for the evening. Now, however, there was no glow, and my battery was at 5%. Too asleep to care that much, I shut the thing and resumed snoring.
I'll break here to mention I had to beg for a new power adapter for Christmas last, as the damn things are $80, I am a poor student, and my first one was on its last legs. The one I am using currently (or was until three this morning) was the replacement, which had already cracked in several places at the insertion point, and overheated so badly once that the plastic on the brick actually melted. This morning I discovered that sometime during the night the wires connecting the plug to the cord (easily visible due to aforementioned cracking) not only shorted out, but burned and severed themselves completely from the plug.
So here I am, having ordered my third power adapter in as many years using approximately 80% of my current net worth to pay for it. My computer is dead until July 11th or so. While on the page for the shoddy product, I read some of the 100,000 or so reviews, most of which rated the thing at no more than 2 stars and none of which did not contain the word "sucks." How is it that the same company responsible for the iPod, a host of amazing notebooks and personal computers, the most functional and user-friendly OS I've ever had the pleasure to use, and now, the life-altering iPhone continue to make us, its loyal and enthusiastic fans, invest such a hearty sum in such a perpetually pathetic peripheral? The only answer I can come up with is "because they can," which breaks my heart and boils my blood at the same time. I don't even have balls, and yet they've got me by them anyway.
The moral of this overly long missive is that I'm damn impressed by Apple's recent achievement and yet so mad at Apple I'm borderline homicidal.
It's a feeling I've come to know increasingly well in the past three years.