iRony

I used to have a friend who loved his Mac.

He told me that we PC'ers were a foolish breed, enslaved by Bill Gates and his evil Microsoft corporation. Apple weren't like that at all. They understood their consumers. They cared about them. They had funny adverts with Mitchell and Webb (or John Hodgman and Justin Long in America.)

But as soon as the iPhone came out, we saw Mac for who they REALLY were.

Money grabbing tykes whose behaviour even Bill Gates would have found distasteful.

I mean, first off there was the iPhone itself. It was a lovely, pretty, shiny toy and if you wanted one, you had to buy it 'as it came' with a tied-in contract to AT&T, which ended up costing you about twice what a normal wireless phone package costs.

I mean, if you're a Mac customer, you should be used to their militant restrictions by now. I mean, surely you've all tried to use iTunes... But seriously, guys. The AT&T thing was just BLATANT. It's like waving a big banner saying: 'We know you suckers are going to buy our product anyway, so we're going to milk you for every penny we've got!'

But then it gets worse. A couple of months later - literally just weeks after they'd released their product - Apple drop the cost of their expensive iPhone by 33%.

They waited just long enough for those loyal Apple fans and the early adopters to splash out above the odds for the product - and then dropped the price massively to appeal to 'regular customers.'

Again, it was like waving a big banner saying: 'We SAW you suckers waiting in the aisles, with your fistfuls of money. Now we've got IT ALL we're going to drop the price for the people we REALLY care about - the new customers.'

Apple saw their loyal customer base, who loved and believed in them - and they screwed them. Twice. They manipulated, abused and walked all over those suckers and basically threw away all the good will their fluffy branding had earned them over the last decade.

This Christmas, if you're in the market for an MP3 player for your friends or family, I'd recommend you look beyond the blanket iPod marketing.

In Walmart, RadioShack and online, you can find a whole host of other MP3 players that can do everything iPods can do - like play movies, store thousands of songs and link to your PC - but they're cheaper, less restrictive and in buying them, you send a clear message to the likes of Apple that we consumers are not to be abused or taken for granted.

Apple? You suck.