Dear Apple, when did you become Microsoft?

Dear Mr Cook:

I know that the chances of your reading this, much less responding are about the same as me winning next year's Academy Award for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, but I still have to write..

There seems to be a growing shift away from Apple being the company that is seamless to one that has more seams than all Frankenstein's creations combined. It started a couple of years ago when "the cloud" was introduced and people like me who had been early adopters of iTunes and had a separate id for their iTunes account (in my case my Yahoo! mail) and an a .mac account (which I was then paying for) which could not mesh.

Now it is the idea that we've bought into multiple devices and have told me that this miraculous "cloud" will make downloads instantaneous and wonderful and candy will rain from the sky when we're on our iPad or iPhone and want to download an app. But the (at least for me) reality means having to sign multiple times into iTunes (which since I've had the phone for for four years and the tablet for one I would hope you'd recognize) remember the intricate password you'd forced me to choose (written on a pad in my bedroom closet) and then get the security code on my credit card and enter that. I'm seeing seams. Lots of them.

Even worse is that you ask me to provide payment info for my work phone. Which I am not paying for.

All of these are for free apps.  Do I need to type this in bold face? FREE APPS.

What exactly is the reason for doing this?

I guess there could be some security reason that would keep terrorists from downloading a new version of "Angry Birds: Park Avenue" on my account, but then, since I registered all of my devices I assume that you know them. I also assume that this being 2014, and the fact that you sell multiple devices that you are in some way able to track them, attach them to a single user and track their purchases via location. So for instance, the fact that I wanted to download a Kodak Kiosk Free download at the Beverly Connection would not necessitate a trip home so that someone trying to download Angry Birds  Free in Sri Lanka would be thwarted.

Instead, I'm the one being thwarted.

Image: Wikimedia