Most of the confusion is because of the lost meaning of "love". In my mom's world, things should be liked, and people loved.

Your mom is right. The degree to which people personify brands and get emotionally invested in them is unhealthy.

Apple tries to convince people it isn't a brand, but a lifestyle or an identity. So if you identify as part of this lifestyle, you must love Apple, or you don't love yourself. Some take it a step further and hate Apple's competitors. Perhaps this is related...

Part of that story of course is their execution, thoughtfulness and great taste to pick “just the right” technical ideas.

MacOS X Panther with Aqua’s basically artifact-less and butter smooth postscript based rendering capabilities, the beloved (!) BSD shell I could drop into at any point. All of that in 2003 … a true OS from the future and for the masses!

Battery runtime of PPC 7xx also was stellar at the time. AFAIR nothing could compete in relative comparison.

Humanistic and design oriented engineering at an excellent level and consistently so. Of course I aspired to be exactly like that as a professional!

Too bad they have strayed from that in many ways over the years. They IMO mostly still, but only barely hold the functional high ground these days.

When you destroy local institutions and local relationships you replace them with consumerism and materialism.

Not healthy for society, but really good for the economy.

At least in the short to mid term?

There are things you can love. It might sound silly unless you've climbed mountains in the winter, but I love my ice axe. It's let me go places I'd never be able to go otherwise.

That said, it is different from the love I have for people. When my son was young and would treat people poorly over things, I told him there are three kinds of things we can love: people, places, and things. When there's any conflict, the priority should almost always be in that order.

As with all words, it's all in the context. "Love" can mean really, really like, or it can mean the emotion of love, depending on how it's used.

I think what is meant by "should love" is that it would be natural to, or for our emotions to prompt for affection towards, Apple for its good deeds. but the point is to resist that because Apple is just an emotionless business entity.

It's rather clearly worded and I see no contradiction.

Don’t love something that can’t love you back. It’ll only end in pain.