>HN tends to bias towards pro Apple.

I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple.

Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.

My Sennheiser HD8s and their propietary cable begs to differ. And also keep in mind you are favoring Bose, the multi-million dollar company that didn't bat an eye when they decided to introduce spyware on their app.

Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.

I think it depends on how you define Hacker. This site is very business leaning to begin with in a lot of ways which doesn’t always draw the “hacker” crowd. I will forever think of hackers ideally not being so concerned with operating businesses but being obsessed with technology sometimes at the expense of business concerns.

Hacker crowds like to see underdogs win. Apple was the ultimate underdog for most of its existence, and was "doomed" every year up until around 2013.

There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).

> HN tends to bias towards pro Apple

Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.

But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.

No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").

Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.

I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.

This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful.

(This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)

This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news. It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked down on because you're posting on a site run by venture capitalists.

It seems quite the opposite: HN biases towards anti-Apple, often for bizarre reasons that require lots of mental gymnastics to justify.

You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.