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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

> what is your motivation for doing it?

For many of them, they identify with Apple. That is, part of their self identity is tied to Apple. To them Apple isn't just a for-profit company that makes good products, it's a philosophy, a way of life, a team, an identity.

If someone challenges or says something negative about Apple, it's a negative about their identity and they take it very personally.

To be clear, this tendency is not limited to Apple. Humans do it regarding all manner of companies/things. But Apple does have a particularly large and passionate following.

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I do t think this is necessarily true for many of the users here "defending" Apple. It's likely that many people just use their mac and find that the hardware quality, etc is nice compared to other competition. If the company now wants to make it possible to fix your computer, I would imagine that would typically be celebrated by HN, since apple has had such a history of lock-in/non-customization problems with the professional computing demographic. The note here about affecting small businesses is nonetheless a good point, and should be recognized for the potential problems it may bring; however I don't think discrediting the users by making it 'their identity' to defend some hardware is correct.

There are reasons to not like Apple products, but there are also quite a few great qualities about them as well. For example, the ARM processors they're making right now are excellent (best in class by a lot, as far as I can tell) - for battery life. While they may certainly have lower benchmarks than some i7s, they are doing fantastic for only using 15W. In today's age, few developers use their laptop for more than ssh and firefox, so it makes more sense for a good Linux dev to be on asahi Linux with an M2, while the 'typical business user' or 'creative type' would be more likely to use a Falcon Northwest TLX with a nice dGPU for their heavier workload.

So, again - there are plenty of reasons to not like Apple such as all the lock-in associated problems - but you can certainly use a device and it not be 'your identity'.

I personally love the Apple products I own. I also have many other products from brands I trust that I love. When someone has a bad experience with a product I love, I try to help them, I don't put them down for trying to destroy my preferred brands reputation.

I agree with you. I didn't mean that all defense of Apple is for identity reasons.

I am often an Apple critic because of their lock-in/closed/proprietary nature, but i think this is a good move. Personally I think it's a cave to pressure from the right to repair movement, and they won't be sad about killing independent shops, but that doesn't make it a bad move. I'm happy to see it.

He said they make good products.

When I switched from PC to Mac about 10 years ago, for the most part I was thrilled. But I missed a few features. The two big ones I remember are cut and paste files with Cmd-X/Cmd-V, and selectively delete specific files from the trash.

I can't tell you how many times fanboys told me that neither of those features made any sense, and I was silly for even wanting them. Yet within a few years Apple added both features.

apple is almost a 2 trillion dollar company, it is not inconceivable that they juat hire PR to defend them in comment sections

While it is possible that they hire surrogates to post on HN, the simpler explanation is that they have rabid fans that stick their necks out for a trillion dollar company. The proof is that this behavior has been around Apple even well before their re-rise to dominance.

It would be very interesting to pull a history of complaints about e.g. Apple’s white power cords and their failure rate from reddit and then examine the self-similarity of the “what are people doing, this has never happened to me” responses.

Of course to do this properly you also have to realize and account for the idea that others are just as incentivized to fund artificial critiques as Apple is to artificially defend themselves.

The even more simpler explanation is that it's both.

I disagree, the fewer assumptions means the simplest. I'd argue it's not worth the risk for Apple to hire people to shill for them, when there are so many who do it not just for free, but do it genuinely. Imagine if Apple hires shills, then they spill their guts to the NYTimes, that overall makes Apple look far worse.

We're both making the same number of assumptions. The difference is that yours is in the negative and mine is in the positive. Your example about the risk of someone leaking to the press shows we simply live in completely different realities, thus argument is impossible. Which is fine! In my reality people are leaking to the press all the time about such things and simply being ignored by most who don't want to confront how dark corporate and government PR and marketing has become.

> We're both making the same number of assumptions

Assuming BOTH Apple has surrogates AND rabid fans is one more assumption than just there being rabid fans.

Again, you're assuming they don't have surrogates. This is still an assumption. The miscommunication here is that you think I'm a conspiracy theorist or something, and I think you're naive. But so what? Sure, maybe I'm seeing phantoms where they don't exist. We've clearly had different life experiences though. To me the basic calculus of a multi-trillion dollar company perhaps throwing out a few million bucks a year to pay "surrogates" to influence opinion on popular online forums is not the claim that carries the burden of proof. I'd be absolutely shocked if they weren't doing this. But again, there's no way we can even argue if you think the burden of proof goes in the opposite direction. But at least understand that neither of our claims are "simpler" than the other. My original comment saying "more simpler" was a bit of sarcasm in case that didn't come through.

> you're assuming they don't have surrogates

That's the null hypothesis.

Yup. My hypothesis is unambiguously verifiable, and I've verified it to my own satisfaction through my personal experiences. Your hypothesis is not unambiguously verifiable, only statistically so (whatever that means). At least it's falsifiable, but there's a deep challenge there because falsification would unveil aspects of our society that most people don't want to know about.

Yes I suspect you are right, but it saddens me to see such an illogical approach.

Apple is following the Harley Davidson strategy. Their brand becomes a lifestyle and personality for their customers. Build quality falls, prices go up, and people who've bought into the brand-as-a-lifestyle defend it all while acting disturbingly hostile to everybody else who isn't in their club.

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