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Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

This behaviour is the same on apple.de or apple.jp, so it's not just the UK site. Moreover, it was added only 2 days after the judgement was upheld:

    HEAD /v/home/n/scripts/hero_resize.js HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.apple.com
    
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server: Apache
    **Last-Modified: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:31:51 GMT**
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Content-Length: 632
    Content-Type: application/x-javascript
    Cache-Control: max-age=600
    Expires: Sat, 03 Nov 2012 17:04:23 GMT
    Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2012 16:54:23 GMT
    Connection: keep-alive

I believe this was before the homepage was altered to display the ruling. Moreover, this was also just 2 days before the iPad mini was announced. Far more likely this is just related to new product announcements than any nefarious scheme.

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Well, theres a screenshot here:

http://i.imgur.com/KH555.jpg

They fudged with the sizes, through this script here or not.

This only seems to occur on apple.com. The resizing behaviour happens on all country specific sites I've tried.

The US site alternates between two different promotions, the iPad Mini and the iPad with Retina Display. Every other language's site (I've tried quite a few) which promotes the iPad Mini is showing just a single promotion and exhibits the resize behaviour.

Yep. Here's an example from the Japan site, where you can see the repositioning of the iPad Mini graphic when the browser window is made larger. The UK site has the same behaviour. I don't think there's anything dodgy going on.

Before: http://imgur.com/5GgX3

After resize: http://imgur.com/8BW3T

I don't see how it matters that the behavior was added before the text itself. It's more relevant that it was added after the judgement.

So anything, any time, that alters the vertical spacing of the Apple homepage around the world, even if it's only 2 days before a major product roll-out is related to an 15pt font paragraph at the bottom of their UK homepage that no-one except the lawyers will even click on? Moreover, given that they've pissed off the judge once, their own lawyers won't have signed off on 5 times over?

I find that rather implausible, though I guess it's not impossible.

In other words, plausible deniability in action.

Considering the original snarky wording of their non-apology, I find it highly implausible that it's related to anything but.

You won't find the same behavior on the identical "hero" and product elements of apple.com; far more likely that they want nothing leaking below the fold, on the non-US sites, and inviting users to scroll.

http://apple.de – http://apple.fr – http://apple.it – http://apple.pl

http://apple.com is the outlier, always has been. It’s no surprise that it’s different.

Hum... I donno. My understanding is that apple no longer redirects to .co.uk for UK users since the ruling. This seems a little convenient to me.

That never happened anyway. Going to apple.co.uk, however, redirects to apple.com/uk

Well, that at least is fairly new. apple.co.uk was until recently an illustration agency: http://web.archive.org/web/20110517201243/http://apple.co.uk... (Now apparently http://www.appleagency.co.uk/.)

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