You're making a perhaps-legitimate case for why DF should never have ranked well at HN. But the data shows that the opposite is true: for 14 years it was very popular here.
1. Writing about Apple simply isn't interesting anymore. Nor has it been for close to a decade. They lost me around the butterfly keyboard fiasco.
I know this isn't the full body of your work, but it's plenty of it. As a professional in the tech space for over 25 years, I went from being a devout Apple follower (installed the OSX beta on my Tibook back in the day), to basically not caring. They've gone from being innovative and evolving, and the best mix of Unix+GUI, to just being a system I'm forced to use for work. I'd rather use a Thinkpad/XPS/etc with Linux for anything else.
2. Your writing has gotten dramatically more... cynical over the years? Maybe it's just a side effect of growing older, as I know I have too. But it's also why I stopped blogging on my blog, which was popular enough in enough circles.
Like I said, this is just my perspective, so you can call me full of crap or whatever.
I think this might have a lot to do with it. I considered myself a devout Apple fanboy a decade ago, but every software release and new product they've developed has been less and less interesting. It feels like they're abandoning me as a customer as I get older. And every former fanboy has that one "straw broke the camel's back" moment they can point to where they lost the faith. For you it was the terrible keyboards, for many it was the headphone jack. For me, it was a tiny change: They quietly dropped support for 1080i resolution around the time of macOS 10.5 or 11. Suddenly my Mac that ran my home theater could no longer drive my TV, just because Apple decided "fuck this guy, we're not going to support this anymore."
I still have an iPhone 7. No phone released since then have I really cared about enough to bother upgrading. I don't give a shit about emojis and chat stickers and more annoying notifications that butt into my life.
2006-present: 5th
2010-present: 7th
2015-present: 19th
2020-present: 29th
The Simpsons had far too many seasons, but Matt Groening eventually went on to create Futurama. I hope you figure things out.
It just seems the guy from DF can't accept that
Consider a sequence with an extreme drop-off: 100, 100, 100, 100, 40. Taking averages of all the numbers, then all but the first, all but the first 2, and so on, yields: 88, 85, 80, 70, 40. That might look like it includes a gradual decline, but clearly there's nothing gradual in the underlying data.
year rank
---- ----
2007 80
2008 13
2009 3
2010 1
2011 2
2012 9
2013 78
2014 14
2015 305
2016 363
2017 7
2018 65
2019 28
2020 7
2021 106
2022 353
2023 86
2024 82