This is a fully paid up member of the Steve Club* speaking here. Each day I’m getting more and more dissatisfied with Apple.

First there is the iPhone. Over the two years I’m likely to be an owner it’s going to cost me about $1750 in extra data fees + the original price. And it doesn’t work as a phone. Pretty much 75% of the time I’m on a voice call for more than 10 minutes it drops the call. I don’t live in a big city, I live in Kansas City (the biggest small town there is) yet they can’t even make it work as a phone.

Then there is the iPhone store. You can buy Mein Kampf and an app that provides you with soft core pornography but not an app showing (very flattering) bobble heads of your members of Congress or a better version of the mail program. The very idea that you can review and approve each app is so out of tune with today’s web it’s just silly.

And now I’m onto iTunes and the Apple TV. At last, after several years, there is some decent content on the iTunes store: Star Trek, Up, free Sesame Street programs, etc. And here I am baby-sitting my two kids while the wife has an afternoon’s R&R. So you know, I’d like to watch some cartoons with them. Let’s drop $20 on the HD version of UP.

Most movies download a bit and you can start to watch them immediately. This was the case with UP but when I started to watch, it said I “wasn’t authorized to watch this content”. Hrm. A few Google searches suggest I should restart my unit, so I did. Now it’s 3 hours from being ‘ready to watch’.

What god-forsaken moron decided it should work this way? Why doesn’t it just fricking work? This is an Apple unit. You charge me 2x to 3x what everyone else does but it Just Works. If it doesn’t Just Work, then it’s called Windows or Dell or something like that.

If you don’t get your sh*t together you lose your value proposition. Get your sh*t together, please Apple, before you become just like the others. And send someone round here right now to keep my boys happy as they’ve got nothing to watch right now.

Grrrr…..

* “The Steve Club”: you pay $395 every month to Apple and they send you one of everything.

UPDATE: I’ve been inundated with the latest Apple Fail example: they won’t repair computers used by smokers due to claimed OHSA violations.