Apple is different because it’s a super-vertical. “I love/hate Apple” goes from the physical layer up to the entire platform and ecosystem. Apple is a shared experience.

Nobody gives a hoot about Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc because they are just commodity providers. People do very much care about Microsoft, but they do so on different horizontal layers — finance guys love Excel, IT guys love AD, developers love Visual Studio. But... there is no shared experience.

I think bias is the wrong characterization. End of the day, Apple is very good at communicating their position on things, and they do it across their portfolio. My nine year old son is somehow excited about the M1 chip. Some of the stuff that sounds like bias is really a reflection of people actually knowing what the company is doing.

Other than niche companies like Ferrari, I can’t think of anyone better at marketing and communications than Apple.

There are developers with biases for/against most major tech companies, Apple is no different. Developers tend to be extremely opinionated about stuff they use (e.g. vi vs. emacs) and aren't afraid to voice that opinion. HN is a good place to do that because usually there is good signal to noise ratio in the discussions.

Apple is a company that uses emotion when describing their products. I think this tends to bring out stronger opinions than a tech company like Google. People's perception of companies isn't going to be rational.

What is your end goal with proving/disproving a bias regarding Apple on HN?

I think what is more interesting is exploring the root cause for some of these biases - sometimes there is history of a person strongly disliking Microsoft so their perception of Apple is based in that. Sometimes someone really dislikes closed source/eco-system and prefers open-ness and tinker-ability.

I think there is a bias, I don't know if it is FOR or AGAINST or evenly balanced between the two camps.

The scary thought is could the whole for or against argument be created or atleast promoted by Apple itself in order to be the topic of conversation? I seem to recall a successful add campaign by Apple that did just that a long time ago. "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC"

I feel like there's always been a vocal anti apple crowd, sometimes justified, sometimes not. Nothing specific to hacker news.

Apple has always attracted spirited conversation. I remember Apple computers being referred to as “toys” back in the 80’s because of the GUI and mouse. The discussions of Apple on HN have long and old roots. It’d be interesting to have a look at the old flame wars on usenet.

> The search caused me to ask: can we prove, or disprove, that HN has a specific Apple bias? Whether it's positive or negative, whether it's stronger than bias around other tech companies?

How are you going to tell apart bias in favour of Apple and just being in favour of Apple?

Maybe it's easier to prove in some of the positive cases if you notice that people are making demonstrably incorrect favorable statements. But I doubt that you can reliably prove that bias doesn't exist.

while most big tech "fanboy" clubs don't exist anymore (e.g. google), apple's seems to be still going on

They also still uphold their founder's cult of personality

I think HN just has more Apple customers who are ok with everything apple does. Except maybe the keyboards on MacBooks.

A lot of negative comments come from people who don't or won't buy Apple products. Which is fine, because there are a lot of positive comments from people that only own Apple devices. There's bullshit everywhere and it helps to know what it smells like.

Hacker News posters have been a long-time fan of Macs, especially since OS-X (which predates hacker news). Paul Graham's article [5], "Return of the Mac" (2005) has been an influence, or at least explained the popularity amongst hackers.

[5]http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html