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Every time a story like this comes along, a whole host of commenters tries to absolve Apple (or ${insert_other_company}, although the phenomenon seems to be esp

Every time a story like this comes along, a whole host of commenters tries to absolve Apple (or ${insert_other_company}, although the phenomenon seems to be especially prevalent when Apple is mentioned) from any wrongdoings, whether perceived or real. Why is this? It bears a remarkable parallel to the same behaviour often seen in discussions involving religion. An honest question to those of you who feel the urge to defend your favourite company from all accusations, what makes you do so? It is not as if these commercial entities have any loyalty to you, so why stand up for them?

snarfy 12y ago
I read a study (sorry no link) that says when people with irrational beliefs are presented with evidence to the contrary, it strengthens their beliefs.
jpttsn 12y ago
Something makes people stand up against what they think are unfair accusations. Otherwise trial by jury etc. wouldn't work.
shurcooL 12y ago
It depends on the difference between perceived rating by others vs your own. If you come in and see 10 people attacking Apple, you might start defending it. "It's not _that_ bad!" If you see 10 people saying Apple is completely innocent, you will try to convince people Apple is somewhat at fault.
Spearchucker 12y ago
It's about consistency. Consistency is our nearly obsessive desire to be (and appear to be) consistent with what we have already done (buying an iPhone, for example). Once we've made that choice, we encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. If you're interested in this sort of behaviour, you might try Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, the Phychology of Persuasion (http://www.amazon.com/dp/006124189X/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/006124189X/). [Edit] I'm an idiot. I forgot that I wrote a post about this a while ago - here's a summary of Cialdini's (and related) stuff: https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=439dc4d5-33db-45a3-9c32-176ad141b86f https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=439dc4d5-33db-45a.... It's about influence, and to that end discusses some of our behavioural traits.
- netcan 12y ago
  I agree, but I think it runs in other directions as well. People rush to attack companies and find unlikely conspiratorial and malicious motivations for companies' actions too. I think the reality is that we're not all that logical. We're logical too, but logic is only part of how we form opinions. A lot of it is some sort of habit. If you see bourgeoisie conspiracy and class conflict as a driving force in the world, your version of events is likely to be whatever supports that. If you see corporate conspiracy everywhere… If you see governments accumulating power everywhere.. If you see a Google conspiracy everywhere.. But I tend to side with you. There's something offensive about the loyalty consumers have to big brands. The relationship just isn't mutual, which gives it an unsavory slavish flavor.
  - jackweirdy 12y ago
    I think people just like looking right. Part of that is jumping on others' choices when something bad happens, and defending themselves when others do the same.
    - netcan 12y ago
      It's amazing how many desires of its own our mind has. The desire to be good members of a group. The desire to be consistent, even if it leads us to be consistently wrong. The desire for big explanatory abstractions at the expense of interpreting reality to fit into them. I don't know about you guys, but I'm struggling with this damned primate brain.
  - colomon 12y ago
    For my taste, brand loyalty is drastically less harmful and unsavory than the equally troublesome loyalty to political parties. (At least in the US, can't say about elsewhere.)
    - Yetanfou 12y ago
      Brand loyalty does more personal harm as it turns individuals into milch cows. As to whether loyalty to a political party or orientation is harmful depends on whether that loyalty is balanced - will the party stand up for issues you care about? The bigger the party, the smaller the chance they will. It does not get much bigger than the D/R split in the US while still maintaining the semblance of choice.
stinos 12y ago
the same behaviour often seen in discussions involving religion yup. Here's one of the best explanations I've read to date about why those discussions usually are useless and result in yay/nay but nothing more: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html In short: when beliefs take over, reasoning steps aside.
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  I love that article. In fact, it may be my favorite article ever written (although "What you can't say" is a close second). What I've come to realize though is that to a certain extent, it seems futile to try and overcome tying things to our identity. I've often been accused of being overly analytical in everything I do (including things like relationships, which apparently you're not supposed to evaluate using statistics). The problem is that my attempt to catch my own biases kind of drives me crazy in a way. I already have OCD, and all of my layers of meta-analysis toward my own arguments and viewpoints just ends up exhausting me. Add that to the fact that when I get in an "unwinnable" debate (you know the people; the ones who never give an inch) I just end up getting cranky and unhappy. So while I do think this primitive, illogical, emotionally biased soup of a thinking machine we call a "brain" is far from optimal, I'm not sure if it's much better healthwise to attempt to force it into the other extreme.
  - stinos 12y ago
    force it into the other extreme No. Extremes are always bad - except in one case: me making this claim is also sort of an extreme. But the only good one, lol :] For the rest: I think I know what you mean. I used to be self-analytical like that as well. Getting older though I found in the end it just made me unhappy because all this analysis (for me) led to mainly focussing on the bad points and ignoring all the good points. So now I'm easier on myself and instead of constantly trying to fix my whole self in one go I'm trying to do it rather gradually: firstly always try to do good and good only and secondly when I figure I'm not doing good (well, just admitting that and trying to fix it is already a good start and steps beyond what some ever achieve), or being way too biased, or wanting to kick people becasue they are being complete asholes, etc, etc, a short reflection going for example like 'ok, I'm too biased here, that's not so good, but it's also nothing to be ashamed of, just try better next time' or 'ok, the guys opinion clearly differs from yours and is possibly also completely wrong, but that does not mean he's a complete asshole. Better try to educate him instead of trying to kick his ass'. No idea if that makes sense to anyone but after some years of doing this I think I've actually become a better person. And definitely less unhappy. Nonetheless, sometimes I'll still be a complete ass myself mainly in online discussions. Working on it though :]
roel_v 12y ago
It's called 'cognitive dissonance': when two 'cognitions' (ideas, or feelings, or facts) contradict (are in 'dissonance'), we feel uneasy, so we resolve the situation by suppressing one cognition. To do so, we usually need to resort to convincing ourselves of what are really logical fallacies or sophisms. E.g. cognition 1: I only buy from companies that are good; cognition two: company I bought from did something bad. Fact is I have something from the company, so the only resolution is: accusation against company is false. An easy way to convince yourself of something that is not rationally true is by evangelism: telling others that yes, this is the best way or greatest thing. The more you repeat it, the more you will believe it yourself. This phenomenon is especially strong with something that people derive identity from, like religion or (especially for juveniles who have not yet developed a complete identity) psychological feelings of affiliation with subcultures revolving around a certain music genre or goods that project a certain lifestyle to others (designers goods like expensive hand bags, shoes or iPhones).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
bane 12y ago
People become really invested in brands and start to associate it with their identity. Apple has an amazingly powerful brand that people who identify with tend to do so very strongly and for reasons they're not quite aware of (think of all those "think different" type ads designed to make each owner of an Apple product feel like a special snowflake). Attacking the brand feels like attacking them and they get defensive about it.
archagon 12y ago
You like Apple (or Google). You think they're one of the few companies in the tech sphere who know what they're doing. You feel they respect their customers. You like their leaders. You want the future of tech to be in their hands. And yet, every time you look online, you see people talking about how horrible they are. People laugh at you for using Apple (or Google) products. A number of non-controversies about the company's products come up every year, just to give angry people another link to click on. And when the real controversies come up, all they do is reinforce people's established opinions. "How just like Apple (or Google). Fuck that company." You don't want this stuff to become part of your identity, but in the end, your hand is kind of forced.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Most people I know like Apple and Google. The carriers are the ones that have screwed up Android.
amelius 12y ago
> An honest question to those of you who feel the urge to defend your favourite company from all accusations, what makes you do so? Whatever psychological mechanism it is, I'm sure these companies are abusing it (or would if they could).
skc 12y ago
The Apple brand is really strong. I was reminded of this recently when I started seeing a lot of tweets along the lines of "Now that I've been using the iPhone 6 for a while, the iPhone 5 looks like a postage stamp. I can't go back to such a small screen" Only a little while back these same people would ridicule large phones. I think most companies would kill (figuratively) for that sort of audience.
- adamlett 12y ago
  Hundreds of millions of people have bought iPhones. How sure are you that the people who defended the smaller screen are the same as the ones who defend the bigger screen? My personal experience is that people who were sceptical of a large screen iPhone before Apple made one, mostly still are.
ntakasaki 12y ago
> It bears a remarkable parallel to the same behaviour often seen in discussions involving religion Apparently, the same parts of the brain are triggered. http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/19/apple.religion/ http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/19/apple.reli... "The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says."
- huxley 12y ago
  Note: a company put a single Apple blogger under an MRI not as part of a study or "a report", it was one scan that was paid for by a documentary series called Secrets of the Superbrands hosted and written by comedian Alex Riley ("Britain's Really Disgusting Food" and "Movies' Greatest Cars") http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2203728/?ref_=tt_ov_st http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2203728/?ref_=tt_ov_st
- unitygain 12y ago
  The next level of this may be that those parts of a brain that fire when considering a deity's will are more highly correlated with the parts that fire when thinking one's own desires, than when thinking of the will of others. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full Perhaps we're really describing the same mental faculty - conflation with brands, and religions, and political parties, are all just manipulations of the brain's habituated desire circuits, and to the person experiencing the "loyalty" just feel like being "true to oneself." This may be a tautology.
tomelders 12y ago
I'm sure a lot of people are fans of particular companies, but I think it's unfair to label anyone who expresses doubt in a class action law suit or newspaper headline as a defender of a company. In a world of spurious law suits and sensationalist headlines, it's a savvy person who doubts stories like this. And in reality, this really does sound like a bug right now. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't see any point in deleting a users music this way. Apple doesn't have a problem implementing unpopular policies that irk it's customers. So why be cloak and dagger about this?
Raptor22 12y ago
I'm only speaking for myself here, but I consider Apple to be fundamentally different from most other companies. Most companies seem to have their priorities in this order: Money, money, money, money, product. Whereas Apple seems to be: Product, money, money, money, money. The fact that they make such good products, and they are so far ahead of everyone else in terms of the focus on the product, that's why I'd treat them differently. I mean, if they do something illegal, they should get punished for it. But if another company does it, it's not the same - the other company was never thinking about the product or the customer, they were only thinking about profit. Whereas Apple truly seems to care, at least in some instances, about their products and their customers. Think about what I just wrote, and tell me what does that say about the current state of the corporate world?
- wnevets 12y ago
  >Most companies seem to have their priorities in this order: Money, money, money, money, product. Whereas Apple seems to be: Product, money, money, money, money. Everytime someone mentions this I cant help but recall the iphone that couldn't make phone calls unless you held it correctly.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    That was still product, but product design (metal frame) over product engineering (properly isolated antennas).
    - wnevets 12y ago
      That was a terrible product design in addition to being a terrible product engineering IMHO. Holding that phone for any meaningful period of time was not enjoyable. As a side note the 6 feels great.
  - Raptor22 12y ago
    One phone. There are companies out there who, generation after generation, make the same mistakes with their products. At least Apple learned from that one.
digi_owl 12y ago
Most companies these days are about marking their brand and associated products as a certain lifestyle. But Apple may have taken that to a new high. also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism_marketing#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism_marketing#History Likening it to religion is likely not as far off as it first seems.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  As long as your religion is the best hardware currently available.
  - tkubacki 12y ago
    But Apple does not seem to have "best hardware currently available" anymore and still fanboism level seems to be bigger than any non-Apple brand level
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      By the specs that is true. I guess I should have said best performing hardware. Having twice the specs means nothing if it performs worse.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Meh. Apple more or less markets "business" hardware to consumres. Not really that different from not buying the "consumer" models from most other brands.
  - collyw 12y ago
    I was under the impression that Apple uses the same components as most generic PC's since they switched to Intel.
moogleii 12y ago
I have a hypothesis. And I think it applies to your comparison with religion as well. It has nothing to do with the typical "sheeple" argument. Or at least, that's only half of it. It's a matter of "forces", equal and opposite. While Apple does seem to attract a lot of folks coming out of the woodwork to defend it, I would say it also attracts a disproportionate amount of hate as well. You'll see this happen pretty much anywhere. Politics? Far right wing nutjobs come out of the woodwork, angering far left nutjobs who come out of the woodwork to counteract the former. Ditto with military forces. Rebels/terrorists come out of the woodwork, suddenly extreme force (e.g. aerial bombardment, rendition, etc) is A-OK to cancel them out. Religious fanatics come out of the woodwork, and then the atheist fanatics come out of the woodwork. The middle pretty much ignores the fringes until the battle actually affects them. Then everyone's coming out of the woodwork.
entelechy0 12y ago
Who is standing up for Apple in this instance? Or others, for that matter?
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  Have you read any of the comments on Hacker News? Apple apologists abound here.
NIL8 12y ago
This is also true when it comes to political views.
boh 12y ago
People identify themselves with the brand. When the brand is discredited, people feel they're being discredited, hence the resistance. This is where marketing tries to be.

snarfy 12y ago

I read a study (sorry no link) that says when people with irrational beliefs are presented with evidence to the contrary, it strengthens their beliefs.

jpttsn 12y ago

Something makes people stand up against what they think are unfair accusations. Otherwise trial by jury etc. wouldn't work.

shurcooL 12y ago

It depends on the difference between perceived rating by others vs your own. If you come in and see 10 people attacking Apple, you might start defending it. "It's not _that_ bad!" If you see 10 people saying Apple is completely innocent, you will try to convince people Apple is somewhat at fault.

Spearchucker 12y ago

It's about consistency. Consistency is our nearly obsessive desire to be (and appear to be) consistent with what we have already done (buying an iPhone, for example). Once we've made that choice, we encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. If you're interested in this sort of behaviour, you might try Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, the Phychology of Persuasion (http://www.amazon.com/dp/006124189X/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/006124189X/). [Edit] I'm an idiot. I forgot that I wrote a post about this a while ago - here's a summary of Cialdini's (and related) stuff: https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=439dc4d5-33db-45a3-9c32-176ad141b86f https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=439dc4d5-33db-45a.... It's about influence, and to that end discusses some of our behavioural traits.

netcan 12y ago
I agree, but I think it runs in other directions as well. People rush to attack companies and find unlikely conspiratorial and malicious motivations for companies' actions too. I think the reality is that we're not all that logical. We're logical too, but logic is only part of how we form opinions. A lot of it is some sort of habit. If you see bourgeoisie conspiracy and class conflict as a driving force in the world, your version of events is likely to be whatever supports that. If you see corporate conspiracy everywhere… If you see governments accumulating power everywhere.. If you see a Google conspiracy everywhere.. But I tend to side with you. There's something offensive about the loyalty consumers have to big brands. The relationship just isn't mutual, which gives it an unsavory slavish flavor.
- jackweirdy 12y ago
  I think people just like looking right. Part of that is jumping on others' choices when something bad happens, and defending themselves when others do the same.
  - netcan 12y ago
    It's amazing how many desires of its own our mind has. The desire to be good members of a group. The desire to be consistent, even if it leads us to be consistently wrong. The desire for big explanatory abstractions at the expense of interpreting reality to fit into them. I don't know about you guys, but I'm struggling with this damned primate brain.
- colomon 12y ago
  For my taste, brand loyalty is drastically less harmful and unsavory than the equally troublesome loyalty to political parties. (At least in the US, can't say about elsewhere.)
  - Yetanfou 12y ago
    Brand loyalty does more personal harm as it turns individuals into milch cows. As to whether loyalty to a political party or orientation is harmful depends on whether that loyalty is balanced - will the party stand up for issues you care about? The bigger the party, the smaller the chance they will. It does not get much bigger than the D/R split in the US while still maintaining the semblance of choice.

stinos 12y ago

the same behaviour often seen in discussions involving religion yup. Here's one of the best explanations I've read to date about why those discussions usually are useless and result in yay/nay but nothing more: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html In short: when beliefs take over, reasoning steps aside.

Xcelerate 12y ago
I love that article. In fact, it may be my favorite article ever written (although "What you can't say" is a close second). What I've come to realize though is that to a certain extent, it seems futile to try and overcome tying things to our identity. I've often been accused of being overly analytical in everything I do (including things like relationships, which apparently you're not supposed to evaluate using statistics). The problem is that my attempt to catch my own biases kind of drives me crazy in a way. I already have OCD, and all of my layers of meta-analysis toward my own arguments and viewpoints just ends up exhausting me. Add that to the fact that when I get in an "unwinnable" debate (you know the people; the ones who never give an inch) I just end up getting cranky and unhappy. So while I do think this primitive, illogical, emotionally biased soup of a thinking machine we call a "brain" is far from optimal, I'm not sure if it's much better healthwise to attempt to force it into the other extreme.
- stinos 12y ago
  force it into the other extreme No. Extremes are always bad - except in one case: me making this claim is also sort of an extreme. But the only good one, lol :] For the rest: I think I know what you mean. I used to be self-analytical like that as well. Getting older though I found in the end it just made me unhappy because all this analysis (for me) led to mainly focussing on the bad points and ignoring all the good points. So now I'm easier on myself and instead of constantly trying to fix my whole self in one go I'm trying to do it rather gradually: firstly always try to do good and good only and secondly when I figure I'm not doing good (well, just admitting that and trying to fix it is already a good start and steps beyond what some ever achieve), or being way too biased, or wanting to kick people becasue they are being complete asholes, etc, etc, a short reflection going for example like 'ok, I'm too biased here, that's not so good, but it's also nothing to be ashamed of, just try better next time' or 'ok, the guys opinion clearly differs from yours and is possibly also completely wrong, but that does not mean he's a complete asshole. Better try to educate him instead of trying to kick his ass'. No idea if that makes sense to anyone but after some years of doing this I think I've actually become a better person. And definitely less unhappy. Nonetheless, sometimes I'll still be a complete ass myself mainly in online discussions. Working on it though :]

roel_v 12y ago

It's called 'cognitive dissonance': when two 'cognitions' (ideas, or feelings, or facts) contradict (are in 'dissonance'), we feel uneasy, so we resolve the situation by suppressing one cognition. To do so, we usually need to resort to convincing ourselves of what are really logical fallacies or sophisms. E.g. cognition 1: I only buy from companies that are good; cognition two: company I bought from did something bad. Fact is I have something from the company, so the only resolution is: accusation against company is false. An easy way to convince yourself of something that is not rationally true is by evangelism: telling others that yes, this is the best way or greatest thing. The more you repeat it, the more you will believe it yourself. This phenomenon is especially strong with something that people derive identity from, like religion or (especially for juveniles who have not yet developed a complete identity) psychological feelings of affiliation with subcultures revolving around a certain music genre or goods that project a certain lifestyle to others (designers goods like expensive hand bags, shoes or iPhones).

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

bane 12y ago

People become really invested in brands and start to associate it with their identity. Apple has an amazingly powerful brand that people who identify with tend to do so very strongly and for reasons they're not quite aware of (think of all those "think different" type ads designed to make each owner of an Apple product feel like a special snowflake). Attacking the brand feels like attacking them and they get defensive about it.

archagon 12y ago

You like Apple (or Google). You think they're one of the few companies in the tech sphere who know what they're doing. You feel they respect their customers. You like their leaders. You want the future of tech to be in their hands. And yet, every time you look online, you see people talking about how horrible they are. People laugh at you for using Apple (or Google) products. A number of non-controversies about the company's products come up every year, just to give angry people another link to click on. And when the real controversies come up, all they do is reinforce people's established opinions. "How just like Apple (or Google). Fuck that company." You don't want this stuff to become part of your identity, but in the end, your hand is kind of forced.

happyscrappy 12y ago
Most people I know like Apple and Google. The carriers are the ones that have screwed up Android.

amelius 12y ago

> An honest question to those of you who feel the urge to defend your favourite company from all accusations, what makes you do so? Whatever psychological mechanism it is, I'm sure these companies are abusing it (or would if they could).

skc 12y ago

The Apple brand is really strong. I was reminded of this recently when I started seeing a lot of tweets along the lines of "Now that I've been using the iPhone 6 for a while, the iPhone 5 looks like a postage stamp. I can't go back to such a small screen" Only a little while back these same people would ridicule large phones. I think most companies would kill (figuratively) for that sort of audience.

adamlett 12y ago
Hundreds of millions of people have bought iPhones. How sure are you that the people who defended the smaller screen are the same as the ones who defend the bigger screen? My personal experience is that people who were sceptical of a large screen iPhone before Apple made one, mostly still are.

ntakasaki 12y ago

> It bears a remarkable parallel to the same behaviour often seen in discussions involving religion Apparently, the same parts of the brain are triggered. http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/19/apple.religion/ http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/19/apple.reli... "The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says."

huxley 12y ago
Note: a company put a single Apple blogger under an MRI not as part of a study or "a report", it was one scan that was paid for by a documentary series called Secrets of the Superbrands hosted and written by comedian Alex Riley ("Britain's Really Disgusting Food" and "Movies' Greatest Cars") http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2203728/?ref_=tt_ov_st http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2203728/?ref_=tt_ov_st
unitygain 12y ago
The next level of this may be that those parts of a brain that fire when considering a deity's will are more highly correlated with the parts that fire when thinking one's own desires, than when thinking of the will of others. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full Perhaps we're really describing the same mental faculty - conflation with brands, and religions, and political parties, are all just manipulations of the brain's habituated desire circuits, and to the person experiencing the "loyalty" just feel like being "true to oneself." This may be a tautology.

tomelders 12y ago

I'm sure a lot of people are fans of particular companies, but I think it's unfair to label anyone who expresses doubt in a class action law suit or newspaper headline as a defender of a company. In a world of spurious law suits and sensationalist headlines, it's a savvy person who doubts stories like this. And in reality, this really does sound like a bug right now. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't see any point in deleting a users music this way. Apple doesn't have a problem implementing unpopular policies that irk it's customers. So why be cloak and dagger about this?

Raptor22 12y ago

I'm only speaking for myself here, but I consider Apple to be fundamentally different from most other companies. Most companies seem to have their priorities in this order: Money, money, money, money, product. Whereas Apple seems to be: Product, money, money, money, money. The fact that they make such good products, and they are so far ahead of everyone else in terms of the focus on the product, that's why I'd treat them differently. I mean, if they do something illegal, they should get punished for it. But if another company does it, it's not the same - the other company was never thinking about the product or the customer, they were only thinking about profit. Whereas Apple truly seems to care, at least in some instances, about their products and their customers. Think about what I just wrote, and tell me what does that say about the current state of the corporate world?

wnevets 12y ago
>Most companies seem to have their priorities in this order: Money, money, money, money, product. Whereas Apple seems to be: Product, money, money, money, money. Everytime someone mentions this I cant help but recall the iphone that couldn't make phone calls unless you held it correctly.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  That was still product, but product design (metal frame) over product engineering (properly isolated antennas).
  - wnevets 12y ago
    That was a terrible product design in addition to being a terrible product engineering IMHO. Holding that phone for any meaningful period of time was not enjoyable. As a side note the 6 feels great.
- Raptor22 12y ago
  One phone. There are companies out there who, generation after generation, make the same mistakes with their products. At least Apple learned from that one.

digi_owl 12y ago

Most companies these days are about marking their brand and associated products as a certain lifestyle. But Apple may have taken that to a new high. also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism_marketing#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism_marketing#History Likening it to religion is likely not as far off as it first seems.

happyscrappy 12y ago
As long as your religion is the best hardware currently available.
- tkubacki 12y ago
  But Apple does not seem to have "best hardware currently available" anymore and still fanboism level seems to be bigger than any non-Apple brand level
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    By the specs that is true. I guess I should have said best performing hardware. Having twice the specs means nothing if it performs worse.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Meh. Apple more or less markets "business" hardware to consumres. Not really that different from not buying the "consumer" models from most other brands.
- collyw 12y ago
  I was under the impression that Apple uses the same components as most generic PC's since they switched to Intel.

moogleii 12y ago

I have a hypothesis. And I think it applies to your comparison with religion as well. It has nothing to do with the typical "sheeple" argument. Or at least, that's only half of it. It's a matter of "forces", equal and opposite. While Apple does seem to attract a lot of folks coming out of the woodwork to defend it, I would say it also attracts a disproportionate amount of hate as well. You'll see this happen pretty much anywhere. Politics? Far right wing nutjobs come out of the woodwork, angering far left nutjobs who come out of the woodwork to counteract the former. Ditto with military forces. Rebels/terrorists come out of the woodwork, suddenly extreme force (e.g. aerial bombardment, rendition, etc) is A-OK to cancel them out. Religious fanatics come out of the woodwork, and then the atheist fanatics come out of the woodwork. The middle pretty much ignores the fringes until the battle actually affects them. Then everyone's coming out of the woodwork.

entelechy0 12y ago

Who is standing up for Apple in this instance? Or others, for that matter?

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
Have you read any of the comments on Hacker News? Apple apologists abound here.

NIL8 12y ago

This is also true when it comes to political views.

boh 12y ago

People identify themselves with the brand. When the brand is discredited, people feel they're being discredited, hence the resistance. This is where marketing tries to be.