Apple's patent attack

While we're a MS-free household, my wife and daughter are both dedicated Apple users (I'm a Linux-based OSS dev). My daughter recently had trouble syncing her iPhone on our iMac, and asked me for help. After disclaiming that I don't know much about Apple stuff, I had a go at syncing the phone. Just by precisely following the on-screen instructions in iTunes, I wound up bricking the phone and had to take it back to the store to get it resurrected. The store's "Genius" wouldn't tell me just what he had to do to get the "reset to factory settings" to succeed, after it failed when iTunes tried to do it. Apparently mere users aren't supposed to know such things, even if they are interested in learning them.

So, while Apple's stuff usually does "just work", when things go wrong I find that the user gets very little useful information about how to resolve the problem.

It would certainly make me happier if I didn't see a sea of iProduct amongst audiences at free software get-togethers booing and hissing Microsoft.