People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies. They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.
People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.
Having worked at multiple large companies more often than not the truth is there are 5 levels of approval for every tweet that goes out and writing a single blog post can take months.
The smart companies out source their gorilla marketing to a third party, having realized their own inadequacies.
I remember talking to a person who worked in marketing Kingsford, which at the time had like over 90% of the marketshare for USA charcoal. They had a marketing budget that was willing to spend money on any ol' stupid idea because they had already won & just wanted to stay on top by getting their name out there.
I worked in community marketing for few rather large software companies. The struggle is real. Almost every CMO I worked for seemed to make it their mission to squeeze any life out of social conversation with actual users and replace it with bland, boring "on message" communication about synergies for leveraging pivots enabling disruption at enterprise scale.
For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".
Different ballpark. Original comment is about shadier methods of marketing not official stuff landing on the primary domain of Apple. I have 1st knowledge of a travel tech company laying off their entire marketing team during COVID that then got hired by a brand new company to find different and riskier approaches on how to keep the funnel alive despite the travel restrictions without direct risk of exposure for the brand.
Yeah and why they outsource that? First is effectiveness of reach as you mention. Second is the ability to have a clean official record.
Wake me up when an extremely capitalistic company, in the past caught with dirty hands on numerous topics, will reject increasing massively a legal revenue stream with no strings attached. Right, exactly how to become a trillion dollar company and keep it.
I grok that specifically for apple their echo chambers do majority of certain work themselves, but claiming with 100% confidence thats all is a bit of a stretch. If I was a personal close friend with their head of marketing, I would maybe believe that. In any other case, hard logic prevails over anonymous online claims.
That only applies to tweets that are published on behalf of the company, not tweets from sockpuppet accounts that have no direct connection to the company and are made to look like a regular consumer.
Tbf comment you replied to never said they were direct hires. Outsourced workers sitting around is possible. You seem to have customized their more general statement
Can confirm though, being acquainted with PR people in the field for >20 years; everything on TV is scripted these days.
Chatted with some of my PR friends coworkers over the years at Christmas parties and the like. They claimed stunts during MTV specials, other "candid" moments from the last 20-25 well known to pop culture were actually organized by a PR company they worked at (never that they worked on that project; such work was reserved for whatever PR rockstar PR firm hired)
But all this too could be PR sales pitch to impress; society is full of hearsay to titillate
Or they hire an agency and the agency does all the gray-hat stuff, and apart from the marketing person who hired the agency most of the company probably has no idea what the agency is up to.
It is multiple layers of approval, but there is no reason to think they wouldn't approve this. At least not from the limited information I have. The approval is about covering themselves, so if they won't get sued (either because it is legal or they can cover their tracks) they will approve it. There is more than lawsuits they track, but the exact set of things is different for each company and I have no idea what Apple works on.
Thus this could be Apple marketing, or it could be someone independent.
“I have worked over 100 of these kinds of campaigns and never had it come back on the client. I’ve been doing viral marketing and reputation management since 2005. =In the past year I’ve worked for a major entertainment network to magnify a rumor within sports entertainment, as well as damage control on a rumor that came out of an actor being hired on a film before the production company was ready to announce that casting.”
If apple indeed use shit posting, there has to be several layers of subcontractors in between for plausible deniability. Apple's own comms guidelines strictly prohibits pay-per-review, manipulative, "shit posting" style practices.
Companies 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
I'm sure there are people dedicated to marketing the Mac Mini, but seeing as Apple has had trouble keeping it in stock from demand, I doubt they spend too much on it. And considering Apple is supply constrained, there is no benefit to trying to increase demand above supply levels.
I think the Mac Mini is legit popular and is actually being used for local AI use cases, especially Open Claw.
Beyond that, Apple is at capacity for SoCs and ram, and the Mac Mini is going to have a ceiling of how much of Apple's allotment they are willing to give it.
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.
To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly.
And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product is and how much people are dying to have it.
The most serious point in favor of this being organic nonsense is just the sheer lack of any actual evidence that it isn't, but the case is being wildly overstated, in part because we're using the non-standard term "psyop" to describe what I'd consider to be mundane marketing practices.
At this point I feel like there is no reasonable way to draw a conclusion. However, viral marketing like this is common and in fact, incredibly easy. This is done through PR services (and even shadier sources) all the time... I'm a bit surprised people on HN are unfamiliar with how utterly common the practice is, it wasn't new when I first came into contact with the industry over a decade ago. The hallmark of this is very similar articles appearing suddenly through the Internet and in the news. It's often not just random plagiarism. This is why the news is constantly running stories about how suits are back in vogue and other vain crap like that.
do people on here not know that things like forbes 30 under 30 are a pay to play game? do they not know that 90% of car influencer reviews are carefully curated by mrketing agencies? and yes apple is notoriously controlling about it too which is the reason to why it is unlikely to be apple driving this.
Complicated psyop? It's called "Personas" and a few of my coworkers wrote a few of them just this morning.
You simply promote or finance marketing materials (blog posts, podcasts, youtube videos) with a clear idea of the kind of people you want to reach, and if your "Persona" (that is, ideal customer or evangelist) model is accurate enough, they will talk endlessly about your product for free without having to directly connect with them.
That's very different from faking a bunch of excited chatter and making up happy customers, which is what the original comment was about:
> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple [...]
There's nothing masterful or careful about it. If it were, no one would notice it. This is as obvious and sloppy as it gets. No different to startup founders paying social media marketing companies $10-20k to promote their slop products all over X and Reddit with their army of AI generated blogs and news sites and social media accounts. This happens on the daily, and it is not a secret - every founder knows it, and most founders use it at some point. So to think this doesn't happen at larger scales with bigger companies is pure naivety.
It has nothing to do with "big-evil-corpo", it happens at all levels. For some reason you're trying to claim that "big-evil-corpo" are the rare exception, which is ridiculous.
Tbh, I won't be surprised that 1 is true; it does not look that far fetched. Organizing scarcity is already a well-established strategy in the marketing playbook; there are examples of other big organization playing a way longer game to conquer a market (see for instance how Japan became a coffee nation https://www.thetakeout.com/how-nestle-brought-coffee-to-japa...)
Because caring about factual accuracy isn’t “defending a corporation.” A claim doesn’t become true (or false!) just because it concerns a "billion dollar corporation".
Besides, Apple isn't a "billion dollar corporation", it's a multi-trillion dollar corporation.
> People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal?
> Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.
> If one side lies to make all of their arguments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up. Unless they want to be left behind, the other side has to make all of their arguments 5% stronger too. Then there’s a new baseline - why not 10%? Why not 20%? This mechanism might sound theoretical when I describe it this way, but go to any space where corrections are discouraged, and you will see exactly this.
I have no proof, only personal experience interacting with commenters on HN. No other tech company gets as much positive support when exerting its soft power under the guise of (bullshit) technicalities, e.g. all the issues with EU digital markets, API restrictions, 30% tax. Specifically, people were defending Apple vehemently when they feature gated remote phone control for EU citing concerns about EUs privacy laws (???).
I never stated that I know for a fact that Apple deploys bots, but I would not be surprised. I don’t even need to know if anyone is paid or not - if I cannot distinguish paid posts from fanatic apologism, then I need not care. The resulting posts are worrying all the same.
Similarly, I do not know if Apple was caught off guard by the demand - I wouldn’t trust this article. But Apple does plan production well ahead of time and forecast demand rather precisely. They could’ve been wrong. Them being unable to produce enough 1/2tb mac studios seems like a loss to me.
Why would anyone attack a billion dollar corporation so vehemently and not earn a single dime? Billion dollar companies also hire hundreds of thousands of employees, paying them a lot. They create products that millions enjoy.
I am surprised this take is controversial. It really seems almost certain whenever enough money is involved in controlling narratives and selling things, regardless of the details.
Certainly employees at these companies are earning more than a single dime, so even if innocent there's still an obvious conflict of interest. That doesn't mean the posters are wrong or their opinions invalid, on the contrary their direct experience is valuable to hear.
But they are certainly paid, and this is fair to remember when reading opinions.
edit: oh, I see, they're focusing on taking the last little bit super literally. great.
Some of us are motivated by interest in facts. I get that others are financially motivated, or focused on sports-style love/hate for organizations.
I can’t imagine coloring my perceptions or actions to ensure they only attack big companies.
But then I also can’t imagine accusing anyone who disagrees with of doing so in bad faith, or of being a paid shill. To me that looks like poisoning your own mind out of the mistaken belief it will somehow effect change.
BTW it’s not even a defense of Apple, it’s an explanation of how the press works. I worked in the tech press decades ago, and it’s only gotten worse since. It is not organized enough for the conspiracy theory in question to be plausible.
No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.
This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about. If you see red yarn between everything, you're impervious to reality.
Honestly, I'm an Apple user since 1988 and shareholder. I use my full-ass name on hn. I wish they'd give me money to promote the brand, but in reality they have something even more valuable than paid shitposting: authentic word of mouth and devoted users. That comes out of the product, not the marketing department, and it takes years.
Flawless logic! I can’t believe I got busted again… The other lizard people are going to be so disappointed. I’m already on probation for leaking the fact that the Earth is flat and bungling the JFK thing. Now they’ll probably pull me off the microwave mind reading project too.
I was buying my own Mac specifically for LLMs around this same time, didn't care about OpenClaw, but people I knew IRL were immediately asking me about buying a Mac for OpenClaw, and whether they should get a Mac Mini or what, and these were not programmers or tech nerds. There was genuine hype. Macs are lower cost alternatives to Nvidia GPUs.
I think it might have been a mix of the two to be fair, but probably a lower portion of devs. For example, I have a Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro but in about two more years once I've put aside money for a newer laptop I'll wait for the next "updated" models and buy another Mac just for the inference, the speed improvements and the unified RAM.
Apple has a history of feeding rumors sites fake information to weed out leaks. They take it very seriously.
Wouldn’t put it past them to pay strategic influencers to feed social media fake information to generate hype. As a way to make the leak ecosystem work in benefit of the marketing department (or psyops division if you want to call it that).
> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.
No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.
and there's a goddam ad at the start of every apple TV show, and macOS forces ads on you via the SETTINGS app! (both such ads are for other apple products ... still, it's an ad)
True, but so what? Is the idea that they sponsored the creation of OpenClaw and Claude Cowork, CIA-style? Or is the idea that this (presumably lower-level, given that they're working on the mini) marketing employee had a large discretionary budget and was able to identify the trend and immediately capitalize on it with no corporate bottlenecks, mobilizing a series of commenters to underscore the narrative that you need a Mac mini to get into AI?
The narrative — ie being associated and seen as an AI-winner — is worth billions of market capitalisation at Apple scale.
I don’t think there’s a direct guerilla marketing division, but I would absolutely bet money that Apple’s marketing/comms team is encouraging creators, influencers, etc to promote Mac Mini and Mac Studio for AI.
And when those teams brief and speak to people, even on confidential terms, they almost expect some things to get leaked; or will keep sharing it with more people until a third party leaks what they want leaked.
So they may seed things like “super confidential, we were internally really surprised by the demand for AI”. Intentionally.
It's just hilarious the degree to which people see a thing happen sometimes and begin to believe, despite not just evidence but plenty of counterfactuals, that it's happening every time.
Might not be in the particular case, but what are your thoughts on the following (just to name a few recent examples): Cambridge Analytica, Net Neutrality, DMCA?
> People really have a twisted idea about how corporate America works. Apple does not have a psyops division cooking up ever more elaborate ways to seed demand for low-end, low-margin Macs via bot armies.
This is absolutely how how corporate America works. I don't know about Apple specifically, but most in companies with a marketing departement, you can bet eating your hat that they do.
I have a friend at Apple, working in retail front lines. He was tasked by his stores' management to put his personal Mac Mini to use with OpenClaw in order to familiarize himself with what can be done with it, and then use that experience to inform his direct recommendations to customers. He even had an internal checklist to fill out once he'd done his own installation.
I think you're radically misunderestimating the power of the retail front lines. Folks leave the Guru Bar with what they see as 'bleeding edge ways to use Apple tech', and Apple know it ..
Obviously they do not, the same way Amazon isn't treating their drivers poorly, it is just third party contractors "surprisingly" not doing their job well.
Also many startups and companies are now building racks of Minis and Studios to automate build pipelines, testing, do local inference, run agents etc. I've personally seen this in at least 3 companies out of the half a dozen I've interacted with. The demand is certainly there.
You're suggesting there is no chance that Apple is engaging in guerilla marketing, which you discredit by referring to as a "psyop" when it is in fact a well-documented and pretty mundane practice, because they sell a lot of iPhones?
I mean, it's pretty much just blind conjecture that they may be marketing in stealth in the first place, so really who knows on that front. But you gotta be smoking something to think Apple doesn't want their low margin products to sell like hot cakes. I mean sure, they'd love even more for their high margin products to sell like hot cakes (like the Mac Minis that are useful for AI like in this story), but the low margin ones literally make up for it in volume so you'd sure hope they sell well.
They are a trillion dollar company, that wasn't by accident. They are marketing and sales monsters. Arguably of the big companies, they are the ones that have mastered consumer perception the best of any company on Earth. They would like all of their products to like crazy always.
You're right, Apple has a long history with guerrilla marketing, especially gray-area tactics like bots and paid commenters. Even though there is no evidence of this, it "feels" true, so it must be true, right? Why wouldn't they do it, after all? They don't really care that much about protecting the brand, and these types of tactics have zero chance of blowing up in their face.
Even though they can and do pay for the highest-profile placements, they also do shady guerrilla marketing "just in case," because they have a whole lab that just analyzes channel efficiency, and they've discovered that anonymous comments on Reddit in random channels have 8.7x the effectiveness of YouTube ads, especially among the coveted Pale Incel demo.
This is how they got to be a trillion dollar company after all! It was marketing, not product.
As you say, Apple would not be a trillion dollar company without a great product, but you can build something great and also aggressively market it. Nobody is saying they got where they are just with marketing.
Why do you care so much that this is a totally realistic argument? You don't personally have to like it, it's not about how it makes you feel as a fan of Apple.
It absolutely isn't. It is only ludicrous if you hold Apple to some weird standard of ethics that they absolutely do not deserve. If you think this practice isn't common, that's purely a matter of ignorance on your part.
Occam's Razor would be that the tens of thousands of marketers that Apple hires (contractors or otherwise) utilize the most obvious and effective strategy for making sales: Spamming the internet and manipulating perceptions. Their marketing personnel don't sit there thinking "well I'm only hired to market the low-margin Macs, so I guess I'll do nothing today."
Your argument is basically: Why would they try and make more money when they can just sit back and get rich off iPhone's.
People really were talking about and buying Minis due to OpenClaw, because they wanted something that was on all the time and had access to all their stuff in macOS. Occam’s Razor.