It just annoys me because, well, as phonejacks said, it's a major reputable retailer so you don't expect to have to have a full resource of digital protection armaments just to install a product. This boils down to a "HEY, THOSE NATIVE AMERICANS SHOULD OF BEEN MORE HARDY TO SMALL POX; THOSE BLANKETS WOULDN'T OF BOTHERED THEM" sort of attitude.
And, yeah, it costs an arm and a leg to upgrade their over hyped pieces of shit. If you want to pay 1,500-2,000 for a FreeBSD modified kernel, be my guest. But when the hardware you want to upgrade their machines with generally has to come from themselves, or overly exaggerated pricing from a third party retailer, it isn't worth the effort at all.
As far as I'm concerned this is just as bad as Sony installing rootkits on people's machines and then stating that people in general don't know what a rootkit is, so why should they be concerned?
While I was working at this crafty little Mom and Pop PC repair shop while I was in Texas, we actually did charge double to deal with Apple products for the same exact reason stated-- Because they have money to burn. Even more annoying was when the Intel line of Macs finally came out and people could put XP/Vista on their Apple, we had a flood of idiots asking us to do that for them. So they wanted the Apple boxing, but the shitty smell of Windows inside; which I guess is better than an OS that has virtually no third party support.
But I do own a Apple G4 that 'fell off a truck' back from when I was in high school. At a hundred bucks, it was worth it. But then I immediately lost all interest in it.