I think it's more basic than not wanting to be wrong. It's not wanting to be disagreed with, even if right/wrong doesn't apply. If I decide product X is the b

I think it's more basic than not wanting to be wrong. It's not wanting to be disagreed with, even if right/wrong doesn't apply. If I decide product X is the best because of features Y and Z, and someone else decides product Q is better than X because they don't care about Y and Z, we may have both made completely correct choices based on our preferences/goals. It's not as though I was wrong about features Y and Z, or about their importance to me. But another person disagreeing about their importance can trigger psychological defenses. The hate mail in the article concedes the phone has great hardware, but complains that it's a "nerd phone", "heartless", with "no vision". Posts on car forums might concede that a car gets great mileage but complain it has "wrong wheel drive". Blackberry guy thought it was important that he had a professional business phone that was designed with that role in mind. This is where that sense of tribalism comes in: someone has decided that a particular attribute is really important, and anyone who doesn't care about that is an outsider and a weirdo. It takes a certain degree of maturity to recognize that things are good for different purposes and that it's OK if someone else's purposes don't match yours.