The $20 iPhone

Let me make this very clear: I absolutely hate Apple. I hate it for the control it has over all of us. I hate that its products are so beautiful and smart and good. I hate that it is constantly making its beautiful, smart, good products irrelevant by coming out with products that are more beautiful, smarter and better. I hate that when something goes wrong with one of its products it's expensive as all get out to fix.

On that last point, take for instance my shiny MacBook, which I purchased just over six months ago. It's beautiful, smart and good and something has already gone wrong. Granted that something was my own fault: I had the MacBook at the dinner table one day while I was in Florida and got really animated about some story I was telling and knocked over my lemonade glass (really that's not out of the ordinary for me ... I should have known better than to have a glass of anything near my computer). Lo and behold, the up and right keys stopped working on contact.

Minor annoyance, yes, so I take it into the Apple Store. What do they quote me to fix it? Only about $700 because to fix those two tiny keys, they're required to fix the whole damned keyboard, whether or not the whole keyboard is damaged. The dude at the Genius Bar recommended going to one of the authorized non-Apple Apple stores since they could probably just fix the keys that were broken. Have I? No, because even if it costs half that to get those keys fixed, it's a minor annoyance I'd rather just live with.

So what do I do instead? I get an iPhone.

If any other company had pissed me off with their outrageously priced repair work, I would have never sought products or service from them. But not Apple. See why I hate Apple?

But, but, but, in my own defense I have these things to offer: 1. Sprint's crappy coverage had irritated me one time too many (see, I had no problem walking away from THAT company). 2. My texting and internet capabilities on my other phones left much to be desired. and 3. I got this particular iPhone for $20.

Yes, $20.

Where does one get a $20 iPhone? From a friend of a friend who just happens to be a techy nerd who lost his original iPhone one day and decided to buy one of the new iPhones to replace it and then promptly found original iPhone and just wanted to get rid of it.

When I took it to the AT&T store to have it activated, the dude working there told me it shouldn't be working from the sight of it. I don't know where my new techy nerd friend "lost" this phone but it had to be somewhere on the outskirts of Baghdad. The silver casing appears to have been shot at at least five times and the screen looks like it's got some sort of tiger stripe skin on it because so many pixels aren't working.

But you know what? Screw you, Apple, because it works. It makes phone calls, texts, checks Twitter and Facebook, plays my on-the-go playlist and lets me watch bad '80s music videos on YouTube in bed on a Saturday morning with the best of 'em. And just because the guy at the AT&T store was so sure I was going to want to buy the new iPhone in a couple of months, he didn't force me to sign a contract with them so that I could easily upgrade.

Here's something Apple and AT&T don't want to hear about the Modern Gal: She hates spending more than $100 in a single sitting when she absolutely doesn't have to. I was still listening to my original iPod Mini (college graduation gift) until my Dad bought me a new Nano for Christmas. The $20 iPhone? Just like the arrow keys that don't work on the MacBook, it'll do just fine.