i have friends that struggle to pay rent and they're forced to pay apple's extortion-esque prices when something goes wrong or when purchasing their phones and equipment.

witnessing them suffer like this hits close to home for me because i grew up poor enough to ration out the government cheese & powdered milk along with asking extended family and begging neighbors for food so that we could stay alive until next payday and also because i'm tech savvy enough to understand how unscrupulously apple has behaved at creating this well designed trap of an ecosystem that's actively easy to fall into and passively difficult to leave; locking my friends into a seeming perpetually repeating cycle of new iphones and government cheese.

i think that the icing on this shit-cake is that they're all atleast vaguely aware that apple is screwing them over; but they still accept it because it either "just works" or it's "all they know" and that blows my mind because 5-year-old-me HATED government powdered milk in my cereal enough to switch to oatmeal for breakfast if it were an option.