I think the Mac Mini is legit popular and is actually being used for local AI use cases, especially Open Claw.
Beyond that, Apple is at capacity for SoCs and ram, and the Mac Mini is going to have a ceiling of how much of Apple's allotment they are willing to give it.
If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider:
1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but something. Maybe drum up demand for products they can’t keep in stock anyway?
2. Media outlets chase clicks, and when fringe media finds a hit, mainstream media follows because you can always write a story about the fact that other people are writing stories. Low cost, proven clicks, nobody yells at you for missing a trend.
Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos.
And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product is and how much people are dying to have it.
The most serious point in favor of this being organic nonsense is just the sheer lack of any actual evidence that it isn't, but the case is being wildly overstated, in part because we're using the non-standard term "psyop" to describe what I'd consider to be mundane marketing practices.
At this point I feel like there is no reasonable way to draw a conclusion. However, viral marketing like this is common and in fact, incredibly easy. This is done through PR services (and even shadier sources) all the time... I'm a bit surprised people on HN are unfamiliar with how utterly common the practice is, it wasn't new when I first came into contact with the industry over a decade ago. The hallmark of this is very similar articles appearing suddenly through the Internet and in the news. It's often not just random plagiarism. This is why the news is constantly running stories about how suits are back in vogue and other vain crap like that.
It's not a “complicated psy-op”, promoting viral stories is the basics of marketing in the age of social media…
”Oh wow our product is so amazing we can’t keep up with demand you better buy before we run out”
You simply promote or finance marketing materials (blog posts, podcasts, youtube videos) with a clear idea of the kind of people you want to reach, and if your "Persona" (that is, ideal customer or evangelist) model is accurate enough, they will talk endlessly about your product for free without having to directly connect with them.
> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple [...]
It has nothing to do with "big-evil-corpo", it happens at all levels. For some reason you're trying to claim that "big-evil-corpo" are the rare exception, which is ridiculous.