Apple's churning of the gut

It's very similar to politics. Apple are the Republicans of tech in that every minor story is major news, all dirty laundry aired by journalists, bloggers, and tweets, and mockery where possible.

>I think the right answer is that Apple just fails to pass the gut test for most people.

This is no surprise. Apple holds no significant monopoly so AAPL is volatile. The stock is ripe for manipulation with a P/E that is far lower than many other tech companies while almost one-third of the company's value is in cash on hand.

The bigger issue for me is why this story has been so well covered by Daring Fireball, The Loop, MG Siegler and the rest of the Apple blogosphere? Do they really believe that they will affect general opinion of the stock or force an investigation?

What screams out to me is that this is about favoritismm but coming from intelligent people whom can deny it in a way that sounds reasonable to the average person.

In fact, Apple has better The Streets for most of the past six years.

Is this your gut saying it can't possibly be true that Apple attracts lots of negative press mainly because it has been King of the Hill for so long, when it comes to fat profit margins and popularity?

I couldn't disagree with you more. Sure enough other companies get unjustified bad press every now and then, but you have to be blind to deny the fact that each and every website, even if it's only remotely related to technology, appears to be populated with people who can't resist the urge to slam Apple for whatever is the popular Apple-fail-du-jour.

It's not unlike the 90', when Microsoft was in the position that Apple is now. No matter what they did, it was bad, evil, anti-competitive, it sucked, they stole the idea, whatever. I'm was guilty of irrational Microsoft hate myself back then. Today, people almost feel pity for poor Microsoft, finally trying to innovate in the smartphone and tablet space, but failing spectacularly to attract people to their platform.

There's really nothing surprising here. In dutch, we have this saying that goes along the lines of 'higher trees catch most of the wind'. I think it has something to do with human nature. People envy success, especially when they don't understand it. Combined with a tendency to herd around the popular opinion, it's not hard to see how successful companies attract most of the bad press. In the last few years I've seen some of the most nonsensical arguments against Apple products you couldn't even make up yourself, almost go viral on the internet.

At some point in time some other company will take Apple's place as the big evil technology corporation that can't do anything right. Facebook would be a pretty obvious candidate, the moment they start getting more successful at monetizing their service, I predict they will become the centre of attention for haters and trolls.

These stories quite clearly happens to everyone.

That said, there is something unique in the way that Apple stories are linked, repeated and shared, getting visibility of a level that Microsoft, Samsung, et al almost never do.

But that's ultimately just a function of tabloid-style sites trying to make tabloid style-stories out of everything, but only getting traction when they hit companies/services that people actually give a shit about: Apple, Google, etc.