That sad thing is... I don't think most people defending Apple in these topics actually own a significant amount of their stock directly. And they're actually undermining the strength of their own portfolios by undermining the strenght and resilience of USA economy due to erosion of free market competition and market stagnation via monopolies.
There is another type of stock: immaterial social capital. As long as Apple products are status-symbols, owners gain social relevance from their ostentatious use. This is why brands promote themselves way beyond what is necessary to just sell widgets: to build identities that people will invest in, binding themselves into enough social stock that they will feel compelled to campaign for a brand just to protect that investment.
I don't disagree, Apple's brand was built before the current shenanigans were even possible. "Think different", am I right? I'm just saying that the previous investment in brand-building can now be leveraged into defending the indefensible.
Kind of ironic that social capital on HN is earned by being being pro-regulation, anti-big-tech, isn’t it? Your point holds but there is more than a little irony in the post.
I think it just shows that large tech companies have lost all credibility even among early-adopting, tech-positive nerds.
New technology, unbridled, inevitably reaches a point where its negatives become clear to society at large. The printing press is regulated, cars are regulated, nuclear energy is regulated - because society recognized that we can't just let anyone build reactors in their sheds. Internet tech has probably reached that point.
Yup, again, yet another thread that devolves into android people doing the 'brainless apple sheeple' meme. It's fucking offensive and it's literally any thread that mentions apple. I wish Dang would crack down - this is not good discourse, it's not making HN a better place.
There is the same problem with NVIDIA, all NVIDIA threads eventually devolve into "people too dumb to buy AMD like me" as well, but, with apple there isn't even a slope, it's right into it from the outset.
We have just utterly normalized this sort of conduct from some of these fanboys to the point where it doesn't even register with most people. We just have taken it as the inherent nature of Android fans to be offensive like this.
Perhaps it is their nature. People with poor social skills self-selecting to the nerdy phone, etc. I have been leaning more and more to this theory after seeing it in thread after thread after thread - people simply cannot restrain themselves even here on HN. But oh gosh you can't say those things back! how uncivil! how dare I soil our sacred discourse of "brainless sheeple buying it for the blue bubbles" etc.
But there's no reason for the rest of us to tolerate it. It's shitty discourse. But it's so utterly normalized that everyone just shrugs and looks past it.
I don't own stock in any of the companies mentioned in the article, although I do own tech stocks.
And I'm not suggesting I have a relationship with any of them, parasocial or otherwise.
I wasn't trying to suggest we treat them like people or put them above us or give them a pass... I simply meant that getting rid of them completely could possibly eliminate the problem being discussed, but would also throw out a lot of value that they created and I didn't think that was the best solution.
