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People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand fo

People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.

fsckboy 1mo ago
[flagged]
bloppe 1mo ago
Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time
- brookst 1mo ago
  Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. 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.
  - jchw 1mo ago
    To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly. 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.
    - rustystump 1mo ago
      do people on here not know that things like forbes 30 under 30 are a pay to play game? do they not know that 90% of car influencer reviews are carefully curated by mrketing agencies? and yes apple is notoriously controlling about it too which is the reason to why it is unlikely to be apple driving this.
      - pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago
        30 under 30 is mostly just scammers (see how many end up in prison) so that tracks.
        PaulHoule 1mo ago
        If I had gotten into 30 under 30 I might have sued.
- pwthornton 1mo ago
  I'm sure there are people dedicated to marketing the Mac Mini, but seeing as Apple has had trouble keeping it in stock from demand, I doubt they spend too much on it. And considering Apple is supply constrained, there is no benefit to trying to increase demand above supply levels. 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.
mplewis 1mo ago
> Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand Most companies have that division. It's called marketing.
giancarlostoro 1mo ago
I was buying my own Mac specifically for LLMs around this same time, didn't care about OpenClaw, but people I knew IRL were immediately asking me about buying a Mac for OpenClaw, and whether they should get a Mac Mini or what, and these were not programmers or tech nerds. There was genuine hype. Macs are lower cost alternatives to Nvidia GPUs.
- andai 1mo ago
  Yeah, though most people weren't even running local LLMs, they just heard you need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw so they got one.
  - giancarlostoro 1mo ago
    I think it might have been a mix of the two to be fair, but probably a lower portion of devs. For example, I have a Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro but in about two more years once I've put aside money for a newer laptop I'll wait for the next "updated" models and buy another Mac just for the inference, the speed improvements and the unified RAM.
youniverse 1mo ago
I know multiple people who bought mac minis just to run claude cowork on them
jchw 1mo ago
You're suggesting there is no chance that Apple is engaging in guerilla marketing, which you discredit by referring to as a "psyop" when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice, because they sell a lot of iPhones? I mean, it's pretty much just blind conjecture that they may be marketing in stealth in the first place, so really who knows on that front. But you gotta be smoking something to think Apple doesn't want their low margin products to sell like hot cakes. I mean sure, they'd love even more for their high margin products to sell like hot cakes (like the Mac Minis that are useful for AI like in this story), but the low margin ones literally make up for it in volume so you'd sure hope they sell well. They are a trillion dollar company, that wasn't by accident. They are marketing and sales monsters. Arguably of the big companies, they are the ones that have mastered consumer perception the best of any company on Earth. They would like all of their products to like crazy always.
- reliabilityguy 1mo ago
  > when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice Practiced by Apple? Just because someone is doing it doesn’t mean that every company does it.
  - jchw 1mo ago
    Or an agency on their behalf, but either way, there's really no way for us to really know, due to the stealthy nature of this sort of advertising.
- bensyverson 1mo ago
  You're right, Apple has a long history with guerrilla marketing, especially gray-area tactics like bots and paid commenters. Even though there is no evidence of this, it "feels" true, so it must be true, right? Why wouldn't they do it, after all? They don't really care that much about protecting the brand, and these types of tactics have zero chance of blowing up in their face. Even though they can and do pay for the highest-profile placements, they also do shady guerrilla marketing "just in case," because they have a whole lab that just analyzes channel efficiency, and they've discovered that anonymous comments on Reddit in random channels have 8.7x the effectiveness of YouTube ads, especially among the coveted Pale Incel demo. This is how they got to be a trillion dollar company after all! It was marketing, not product.
20k 1mo ago
These companies absolutely do have people who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products, its marketing 101
- alsetmusic 1mo ago
  > who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products Oh shit, I didn't know Marketing exists! Different thing from what OP described.
- com2kid 1mo ago
  Having worked at multiple large companies more often than not the truth is there are 5 levels of approval for every tweet that goes out and writing a single blog post can take months. The smart companies out source their gorilla marketing to a third party, having realized their own inadequacies.
  - SturgeonsLaw 1mo ago
    The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return
    - simonh 1mo ago
      Guerilla marketing, but never mind, worth it for the bananas joke.
      - krustyburger 1mo ago
        The original comment had the typo.
        simonh 1mo ago
        It not the bananas joke.
    - MikeNotThePope 1mo ago
AnonC 1mo ago
> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.
- jiveturkey 1mo ago
  and there's a goddam ad at the start of every apple TV show, and macOS forces ads on you via the SETTINGS app! (both such ads are for other apple products ... still, it's an ad)
LtWorf 1mo ago
> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. That… isn't how capitalism works…
- watt3rpig 1mo ago
  Tim apple already has a few million dollars, why would he want need any more?
  - LtWorf 1mo ago
    He's in a competition with his friends on who gets the highest score.
etchalon 1mo ago
It's just hilarious the degree to which people see a thing happen sometimes and begin to believe, despite not just evidence but plenty of counterfactuals, that it's happening every time.
dannyw 1mo ago
The narrative — ie being associated and seen as an AI-winner — is worth billions of market capitalisation at Apple scale. I don’t think there’s a direct guerilla marketing division, but I would absolutely bet money that Apple’s marketing/comms team is encouraging creators, influencers, etc to promote Mac Mini and Mac Studio for AI. And when those teams brief and speak to people, even on confidential terms, they almost expect some things to get leaked; or will keep sharing it with more people until a third party leaks what they want leaked. So they may seed things like “super confidential, we were internally really surprised by the demand for AI”. Intentionally.
conradfr 1mo ago
> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. Why would they produce "low-end, low-margin Macs" then?
Foofoobar12345 1mo ago
Also many startups and companies are now building racks of Minis and Studios to automate build pipelines, testing, do local inference, run agents etc. I've personally seen this in at least 3 companies out of the half a dozen I've interacted with. The demand is certainly there.
beAbU 1mo ago
> Apple does not have a psyops division This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.
- bensyverson 1mo ago
  This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about. If you see red yarn between everything, you're impervious to reality. Honestly, I'm an Apple user since 1988 and shareholder. I use my full-ass name on hn. I wish they'd give me money to promote the brand, but in reality they have something even more valuable than paid shitposting: authentic word of mouth and devoted users. That comes out of the product, not the marketing department, and it takes years.
  - andai 1mo ago
    >This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about. This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.
    - bensyverson 1mo ago
      Flawless logic! I can’t believe I got busted again… The other lizard people are going to be so disappointed. I’m already on probation for leaking the fact that the Earth is flat and bungling the JFK thing. Now they’ll probably pull me off the microwave mind reading project too.
      - andai 1mo ago
        This is a beautiful example of a technique called poisoning the well.
  - nullbio 1mo ago
    I prefer the term "unwitting accomplice", others prefer the term "useful idiot".
eloisant 1mo ago
It doesn't matter how much cash the iPhone does, some people have "boost the sales of the Mac Mini [or other product]" in their OKR.
- bensyverson 1mo ago
  True, but so what? Is the idea that they sponsored the creation of OpenClaw and Claude Cowork, CIA-style? Or is the idea that this (presumably lower-level, given that they're working on the mini) marketing employee had a large discretionary budget and was able to identify the trend and immediately capitalize on it with no corporate bottlenecks, mobilizing a series of commenters to underscore the narrative that you need a Mac mini to get into AI?
irthomasthomas 1mo ago
- Sent from my iPhone
aa-jv 1mo ago
I have a friend at Apple, working in retail front lines. He was tasked by his stores' management to put his personal Mac Mini to use with OpenClaw in order to familiarize himself with what can be done with it, and then use that experience to inform his direct recommendations to customers. He even had an internal checklist to fill out once he'd done his own installation. I think you're radically misunderestimating the power of the retail front lines. Folks leave the Guru Bar with what they see as 'bleeding edge ways to use Apple tech', and Apple know it ..
mapt 1mo ago
Whether it not it takes the precise form that each person here is imagining in their respective heads? Every large corporation has a psyops division. It's called a marketing department.
logifail 1mo ago
[dead]
HumblyTossed 1mo ago
> Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. Of course not, they outsource that.
ismailmaj 1mo ago
Obviously they do not, the same way Amazon isn't treating their drivers poorly, it is just third party contractors "surprisingly" not doing their job well.
iAMkenough 1mo ago
Apple has a history of feeding rumors sites fake information to weed out leaks. They take it very seriously. Wouldn’t put it past them to pay strategic influencers to feed social media fake information to generate hype. As a way to make the leak ecosystem work in benefit of the marketing department (or psyops division if you want to call it that).
TallGuyShort 1mo ago
> Apple does not have a psyops division No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.
hliyan 1mo ago
Might not be in the particular case, but what are your thoughts on the following (just to name a few recent examples): Cambridge Analytica, Net Neutrality, DMCA?
nullbio 1mo ago
Occam's Razor would be that the tens of thousands of marketers that Apple hires (contractors or otherwise) utilize the most obvious and effective strategy for making sales: Spamming the internet and manipulating perceptions. Their marketing personnel don't sit there thinking "well I'm only hired to market the low-margin Macs, so I guess I'll do nothing today." Your argument is basically: Why would they try and make more money when they can just sit back and get rich off iPhone's. That's certainly not a tenable position.
Lord_Zero 1mo ago
Oh sweet summer child. These marketing firms(the ones Apple hires) in 2026 are beyond devious.
jjav 1mo ago
> People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. This is absolutely how how corporate America works. I don't know about Apple specifically, but most in companies with a marketing departement, you can bet eating your hat that they do.

fsckboy 1mo ago

[flagged]

bloppe 1mo ago

Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time

brookst 1mo ago
Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. 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.
- jchw 1mo ago
  To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly. 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.
  - rustystump 1mo ago
    do people on here not know that things like forbes 30 under 30 are a pay to play game? do they not know that 90% of car influencer reviews are carefully curated by mrketing agencies? and yes apple is notoriously controlling about it too which is the reason to why it is unlikely to be apple driving this.
    - pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago
      30 under 30 is mostly just scammers (see how many end up in prison) so that tracks.
      - PaulHoule 1mo ago
        If I had gotten into 30 under 30 I might have sued.
pwthornton 1mo ago
I'm sure there are people dedicated to marketing the Mac Mini, but seeing as Apple has had trouble keeping it in stock from demand, I doubt they spend too much on it. And considering Apple is supply constrained, there is no benefit to trying to increase demand above supply levels. 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.

mplewis 1mo ago

> Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand Most companies have that division. It's called marketing.

giancarlostoro 1mo ago

I was buying my own Mac specifically for LLMs around this same time, didn't care about OpenClaw, but people I knew IRL were immediately asking me about buying a Mac for OpenClaw, and whether they should get a Mac Mini or what, and these were not programmers or tech nerds. There was genuine hype. Macs are lower cost alternatives to Nvidia GPUs.

andai 1mo ago
Yeah, though most people weren't even running local LLMs, they just heard you need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw so they got one.
- giancarlostoro 1mo ago
  I think it might have been a mix of the two to be fair, but probably a lower portion of devs. For example, I have a Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro but in about two more years once I've put aside money for a newer laptop I'll wait for the next "updated" models and buy another Mac just for the inference, the speed improvements and the unified RAM.

youniverse 1mo ago

I know multiple people who bought mac minis just to run claude cowork on them

jchw 1mo ago

You're suggesting there is no chance that Apple is engaging in guerilla marketing, which you discredit by referring to as a "psyop" when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice, because they sell a lot of iPhones? I mean, it's pretty much just blind conjecture that they may be marketing in stealth in the first place, so really who knows on that front. But you gotta be smoking something to think Apple doesn't want their low margin products to sell like hot cakes. I mean sure, they'd love even more for their high margin products to sell like hot cakes (like the Mac Minis that are useful for AI like in this story), but the low margin ones literally make up for it in volume so you'd sure hope they sell well. They are a trillion dollar company, that wasn't by accident. They are marketing and sales monsters. Arguably of the big companies, they are the ones that have mastered consumer perception the best of any company on Earth. They would like all of their products to like crazy always.

reliabilityguy 1mo ago
> when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice Practiced by Apple? Just because someone is doing it doesn’t mean that every company does it.
- jchw 1mo ago
  Or an agency on their behalf, but either way, there's really no way for us to really know, due to the stealthy nature of this sort of advertising.
bensyverson 1mo ago
You're right, Apple has a long history with guerrilla marketing, especially gray-area tactics like bots and paid commenters. Even though there is no evidence of this, it "feels" true, so it must be true, right? Why wouldn't they do it, after all? They don't really care that much about protecting the brand, and these types of tactics have zero chance of blowing up in their face. Even though they can and do pay for the highest-profile placements, they also do shady guerrilla marketing "just in case," because they have a whole lab that just analyzes channel efficiency, and they've discovered that anonymous comments on Reddit in random channels have 8.7x the effectiveness of YouTube ads, especially among the coveted Pale Incel demo. This is how they got to be a trillion dollar company after all! It was marketing, not product.

20k 1mo ago

These companies absolutely do have people who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products, its marketing 101

alsetmusic 1mo ago
> who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products Oh shit, I didn't know Marketing exists! Different thing from what OP described.
com2kid 1mo ago
Having worked at multiple large companies more often than not the truth is there are 5 levels of approval for every tweet that goes out and writing a single blog post can take months. The smart companies out source their gorilla marketing to a third party, having realized their own inadequacies.
- SturgeonsLaw 1mo ago
  The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return
  - simonh 1mo ago
    Guerilla marketing, but never mind, worth it for the bananas joke.
    - krustyburger 1mo ago
      The original comment had the typo.
      - simonh 1mo ago
        It not the bananas joke.
  - MikeNotThePope 1mo ago

AnonC 1mo ago

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.

jiveturkey 1mo ago
and there's a goddam ad at the start of every apple TV show, and macOS forces ads on you via the SETTINGS app! (both such ads are for other apple products ... still, it's an ad)

LtWorf 1mo ago

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. That… isn't how capitalism works…

watt3rpig 1mo ago
Tim apple already has a few million dollars, why would he want need any more?
- LtWorf 1mo ago
  He's in a competition with his friends on who gets the highest score.

etchalon 1mo ago

It's just hilarious the degree to which people see a thing happen sometimes and begin to believe, despite not just evidence but plenty of counterfactuals, that it's happening every time.

dannyw 1mo ago

The narrative — ie being associated and seen as an AI-winner — is worth billions of market capitalisation at Apple scale. I don’t think there’s a direct guerilla marketing division, but I would absolutely bet money that Apple’s marketing/comms team is encouraging creators, influencers, etc to promote Mac Mini and Mac Studio for AI. And when those teams brief and speak to people, even on confidential terms, they almost expect some things to get leaked; or will keep sharing it with more people until a third party leaks what they want leaked. So they may seed things like “super confidential, we were internally really surprised by the demand for AI”. Intentionally.

conradfr 1mo ago

> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone. Why would they produce "low-end, low-margin Macs" then?

Foofoobar12345 1mo ago

Also many startups and companies are now building racks of Minis and Studios to automate build pipelines, testing, do local inference, run agents etc. I've personally seen this in at least 3 companies out of the half a dozen I've interacted with. The demand is certainly there.

beAbU 1mo ago

> Apple does not have a psyops division This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.

bensyverson 1mo ago
This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about. If you see red yarn between everything, you're impervious to reality. Honestly, I'm an Apple user since 1988 and shareholder. I use my full-ass name on hn. I wish they'd give me money to promote the brand, but in reality they have something even more valuable than paid shitposting: authentic word of mouth and devoted users. That comes out of the product, not the marketing department, and it takes years.
- andai 1mo ago
  >This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about. This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.
  - bensyverson 1mo ago
    Flawless logic! I can’t believe I got busted again… The other lizard people are going to be so disappointed. I’m already on probation for leaking the fact that the Earth is flat and bungling the JFK thing. Now they’ll probably pull me off the microwave mind reading project too.
    - andai 1mo ago
      This is a beautiful example of a technique called poisoning the well.
- nullbio 1mo ago
  I prefer the term "unwitting accomplice", others prefer the term "useful idiot".

eloisant 1mo ago

It doesn't matter how much cash the iPhone does, some people have "boost the sales of the Mac Mini [or other product]" in their OKR.

bensyverson 1mo ago
True, but so what? Is the idea that they sponsored the creation of OpenClaw and Claude Cowork, CIA-style? Or is the idea that this (presumably lower-level, given that they're working on the mini) marketing employee had a large discretionary budget and was able to identify the trend and immediately capitalize on it with no corporate bottlenecks, mobilizing a series of commenters to underscore the narrative that you need a Mac mini to get into AI?

irthomasthomas 1mo ago

- Sent from my iPhone

aa-jv 1mo ago

I have a friend at Apple, working in retail front lines. He was tasked by his stores' management to put his personal Mac Mini to use with OpenClaw in order to familiarize himself with what can be done with it, and then use that experience to inform his direct recommendations to customers. He even had an internal checklist to fill out once he'd done his own installation. I think you're radically misunderestimating the power of the retail front lines. Folks leave the Guru Bar with what they see as 'bleeding edge ways to use Apple tech', and Apple know it ..

mapt 1mo ago

Whether it not it takes the precise form that each person here is imagining in their respective heads? Every large corporation has a psyops division. It's called a marketing department.

logifail 1mo ago

[dead]

HumblyTossed 1mo ago

> Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. Of course not, they outsource that.

ismailmaj 1mo ago

Obviously they do not, the same way Amazon isn't treating their drivers poorly, it is just third party contractors "surprisingly" not doing their job well.

iAMkenough 1mo ago

Apple has a history of feeding rumors sites fake information to weed out leaks. They take it very seriously. Wouldn’t put it past them to pay strategic influencers to feed social media fake information to generate hype. As a way to make the leak ecosystem work in benefit of the marketing department (or psyops division if you want to call it that).

TallGuyShort 1mo ago

> Apple does not have a psyops division No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.

hliyan 1mo ago

Might not be in the particular case, but what are your thoughts on the following (just to name a few recent examples): Cambridge Analytica, Net Neutrality, DMCA?

nullbio 1mo ago

Occam's Razor would be that the tens of thousands of marketers that Apple hires (contractors or otherwise) utilize the most obvious and effective strategy for making sales: Spamming the internet and manipulating perceptions. Their marketing personnel don't sit there thinking "well I'm only hired to market the low-margin Macs, so I guess I'll do nothing today." Your argument is basically: Why would they try and make more money when they can just sit back and get rich off iPhone's. That's certainly not a tenable position.

Lord_Zero 1mo ago

Oh sweet summer child. These marketing firms(the ones Apple hires) in 2026 are beyond devious.

jjav 1mo ago

> People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. This is absolutely how how corporate America works. I don't know about Apple specifically, but most in companies with a marketing departement, you can bet eating your hat that they do.