Not weird at all. It's a documented phenomenon in marketing research: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3150288?uid=3739744...

Since its effect is directly proportional to the cost of the purchase in question, it would make sense that relatively expensive objects, such as smartphones and computers, would trigger a correspondingly stronger negative reaction to criticism of said product.

I'm not doubting that there is post-purchase rationalization. It's just weird to read it from my comment. You think the functioning of OS X's home directory encryption makes me feel threatened because I'm a Mac person?

tpacek is a person who says things about Apple. Not all people who say things about Apple are tpacek.

Saying "people defend the products they buy, sometimes wrongly" is not in any way controversial, and wasn't (in my opinion) about your comments.

Huh? It was a direct response to my comment.

No, it wasn't. It was directly in response to another comment someone else made, not you. They asked a general question, and this person answered that general question. Your comment might have sparked that general question, but it was not the focus of it.

Seriously, not everything need revolve around your one comment. FFS.

What are you Mr Miyagi ?

That is NOT correct.

Dissonance model has been shown to not be proportional to price. Which is intuitive as you see fervent defending of brands for products such as beer, wine, websites etc which are relatively low cost or have no cost to the user.

It's a well known behavior, once people have made a commitment they move from analyzing objectively to defending their choice. Not saying it is in play here, but it isn't really unheard of.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias

Dan Gilbert's TED Talk does a great job demonstrating this (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...).

Not really, it's very common, people defend things they have an interest in.