Sigh. Hello, Apple.

My relationship with Apple is long, dating to just a couple of years after it was founded (and only about seven after I was founded). Said relationship has also known great ups and downs.

To be sure, Apple and I were marvelous pals in my childhood and young adulthood. The sense of wonder I felt so often playing with pre-Macintosh Apple computers—at home, at Kemp’s Officenter, at school—has…well, I want to say it’s never been equaled. (If I think of a counterexample, I’ll edit the post.) I first played Colossal Cave Adventure on an Apple ][+. My first spreadsheet experience came from VisiCalc on an Apple ///. I used that Apple /// all the way through high school and college, blowing a huge volume of cigarette smoke into its monitor’s monochromatic green glow.

My experience with Macintosh was more erratic, but present. Dad’s office moved to Macs when the Apple /// revolution didn’t happen, so we had a Mac Plus in the kitchen. Plus, Madison Books and Computers, where I worked all the way through college and one year after, sold Macs.

That was pretty much it for me and Apple, day in and day out. I worked in Windows shops, so when Lea and I started buying home computers for ourselves they were all PCs. We did purchase iPod Minis in 2005, which we enjoyed until we figured out how deep in the nonsense we were trying to sort all of the issues with iTunes on Windows.

(I’m sure that’s better now, because mathematically, it would just about have to be.)

As the aughts progressed, I found the way Apple did business distasteful. They were haughty. Worse, I felt like they hated their customers and trained them to like it. And I couldn’t see that they were doing anything that wasn’t available somewhere else, both cheaper and sans attitude.

It took until last year for Apple TV+ to get on my radar. My family started bugging me for it, and the volume of well-regarded programming seemed impressive. Better, it was only $9.99 a month, or $99 per year.

So, late last month I pulled the trigger. I didn’t even wait the trial period out before I was changing the subscription to annual. And then—wait, what’s this?

“You must set up Family Sharing from an Apple device.”

Ah. I had to get this deep, but there it is—a requirement that is one of the Applest things that ever Appled.

Well, everyone was already excited about it. I wouldn’t be backing up. Oh, I know! I’ll buy a well-worn iPad on eBay. Good plan, right? Except, guess what? There are minimum operating system requirements. And said minimum requirements and my price range didn’t make much of a Venn diagram.

So, I gave up. I bought the least expensive new iPad so my family could watch Apple TV+ remotely. For the first time in 20 years, there is Apple hardware in my house.

(The punchline is I’m very highly into Apple News+, which will pay for itself more than three times over with the subscriptions I have canceled.)

I still feel like a whore.