I’m pretty anti-Apple products. I don’t like the concept of iTunes, Apple’s monopolistic business model, and I have a very hard time working with their products. I find it totally counter-intuitive and not user-friendly. Mr. W is the opposite and loves anything and everything Apple. I would’ve taken pride in not owning or having to deal with any Apple products, which was true once upon a time, but thanks to him, I have to enter Allie’s stuff, play her music, etc. in his first-generation iPad which he’d passed down to her (it’s left at home for the nanny to use in recording Allie’s logs and for a portable babycam monitor), he’d bought me an iPad Shuffle many many years ago and it was the smallest wearable mp3 player at the time so I’ve just dealt with it (even tho I don’t have iTunes so it is so hard to update the music on it), and within the last year, for no good reason, he’d bought me an iPod Touch which I don’t really touch. It’s in Allie’s diaper bag at home for portability if we can’t have her iPad (yes, HER iPad, not mine) with us but need it for whatever reason. So the only claim I could make then, was that I would never spend a dollar of my hard-earned money on Apple crap.

And then the one weak point. The one way I would ever spend money buying iCrap. My mom really wanted an iPad last year. She was on the verge of buying one herself, so I bought one for her to save her the money and the trouble, had it engraved, and Mr. W set it up with a wallpaper of Allie’s photo wishing her grandma a happy mother’s day. My mom LOVES that iPad, took it everywhere. In all their vacation photos, that thing was a permanent fixture in her hand. She used it in lieu of a camera and filled up the space on it insanely quickly.

And now, my dad is newly retired and newly hooked on a Bejeweled-like game associated with the social network site, and he loves playing the game through the affiliated app on my mom’s iPad (which she leaves at home for him when she goes to work). But he complains that the iPad logs onto her social networking account automatically so it’s not his game he’s perpetuating; it’s hers. So he’d have to log her out and log himself in each time, which he found cumbersome, put he doesn’t like playing it on the PC because he likes to play it full-screen which is not how the game is displayed when playing through the social network site.

So last weekend, I presented my dad with a new iPad bundle, complete with cover and a speaker redirector thing (which is actually a clever little plastic piece you slip on the corner of the iPad where the speaker is and it’ll push the sound forward instead of backward, which amplifies the sound a lot). It’s the same generation as my mom’s so they could use it interchangeably, but it’s 64 gigs, knowing now how quickly my mom burned through her memory. My mom was SO jealous. They talked about letting my dad have my mom’s old one and letting her have his new one, but the back of my mom’s is engraved so they didn’t end up doing it. Just today, I signed them both up for a free hour-long basic iPad workshop and a basic iPhone workshop at their nearest Apple store. I hope this gives Dad an alternative to moping around at home waiting for my mom to come home from work.

Yeah, I said both the iPad AND the iPhone workshops. I got a text from my mom last week and I responded first, then realized it came from her cell #. I thought, “She doesn’t have texting on her cell.” And then it hit me. See below conversation.

I had already ordered my dad his surprise iPad by then, so I guess I’d already given up anyway.

P.S. At the same time my parents got iPhones, my mom bought my grandma an LG android smartphone. She was up half the night programming it first so she could teach my grandma, her mother, how to use it, and she said it was SO easy and such a great phone system that had she been able to play with it before buying their iPhones, they would’ve gotten that instead of iPhones. But it’s too late so I guess Apple still wins this round.