alt Hacker NewsCompanies 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
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.