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.
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.
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.
Maybe. More likely is there are AI bots used to proliferate messages much cheaper than "paid posters."
> Why would anyone defend a billion dollar corporation so vehemently and not earn a single dime?
Because some like the products made by said billion dollar corporation?
Because others like to be contrarian?
Because not everyone is motivated by being paid?
Maybe, just maybe, people are different and have differing motivations not easily reduced into being "am I getting paid for this or not."
Because I like some of their products very much. They don't need to pay me to defend hardware quality when everyone else sells cheap plastic stuff.
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.
Do you have a proof that Apple has bot farms to push its narrative?
You can’t claim A, and then when someone asks you for a proof reply with “prove that it’s not A”.
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.
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nyu-professor-says-apple-is-...
Why I can't answer for sure, but that these people exist when it comes to Apple I am sure. I have met many of them in person.
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.
It's not a “complicated psy-op”, promoting viral stories is the basics of marketing in the age of social media…
WOW, this is some remarkable (would rather use different word starting with R) desperate attempt to somehow turn the reality upside-down,of Apple being overpriced unrepairable unupgrade-able junk sold through pure marketing of exploiting insecurities of losers by selling them something that makes them feel "elite".
Unsolicitated "send via iPhone" SMS footer is perfect example.
> 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
”Oh wow our product is so amazing we can’t keep up with demand you better buy before we run out”
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.
> 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 [...]
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.
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.
Most companies have that division. It's called marketing.
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.
Practiced by Apple? Just because someone is doing it doesn’t mean that every company does it.
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.
[0]: Obligatory https://xkcd.com/386/
The smart companies out source their gorilla marketing to a third party, having realized their own inadequacies.
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.
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
Oh shit, I didn't know Marketing exists! Different thing from what OP described.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
“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.”
Thus this could be Apple marketing, or it could be someone independent.
But not for such niche products and such niche use cases.
To promote the latest airpods or iphone, yes.
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.
That… isn't how capitalism works…
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.
Why would they produce "low-end, low-margin Macs" then?
This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.
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.
This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.
You seem to have product marketing all figured out!
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 ..
Every large corporation has a psyops division. It's called a marketing department.
Of course not, they outsource that.
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).
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.
Your argument is basically: Why would they try and make more money when they can just sit back and get rich off iPhone's.
That's certainly not a tenable position.
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 can see them not releasing an M6 Ultra but no reason not to see Pro and Max versions of the M6.
I wouldn't have a problem with Apple fanboys if they just stated that they like Macs, but for some reason you have no problem with just straight up LYING. Or at least being so deluded that you state things that are so easy to prove false as fact.
I.e, 600 gb/sec is dogshit slow compared to vram speeds.
Being able to run frontier models at <10 tok/sec is just an excersize in showing that you can afford a Mac. Its useless for any real tasks. Gemma4 is on par with a lot of the older frontier models like Gemini Flash, and you can run that at 100+ tok/sec on a 2x3090 rig which costs way less than even top of the line Mac Studio.
* I say apparently because The Information wants you to sign up for access to the article, but I found this mentioned in multiple summaries of the article like this one [1].
[1]: https://tech-insider.org/openai-mac-buying-apple-supply-shor...
None shipped anything of value. Same with anyone claiming to be running dozens or hundreds of agents 24/4.
For mine I was on the fence - waited an hour or so and the delivery date went from early oct to 10-12 weeks so i decided to wait on the 512gb version
He started that whole trend!
Also the demand is really there. Or do you think Apple just removed certain options from sale for fun in stead of RAM being out of stock?
This is rather revisionist. A lot of the early OpenClaw publicity was about connecting it to iMessage (which was really only possible on Mac hardware at the time)
People don't fact check in the first place, they don't check that facts came from a trusted source, they don't check if information has changed the last time they got it from a trusted source, etc.
Is it just me or is it scary that it seems to me as if the average person just takes everyone's word for most things, as long as the person telling them is a "trusted source" based only on tribal lines?
I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple.
Why would they do a guerilla marketing campaign now if their Macs are generally sold out despite nearly doubling the Mac Mini price in the last few months?
The former honestly sounds like a nightmare because the Mac Mini can run some big models but not that big, and Claude Code will guaranteed stuff your context with 35k tokens, and all the Anthropic proprietary tool-deferral and tool-search stuff is meant to be handled inside the inference engine in a way that I don't think any open-source engine like vLLM can support right now (much as I wish it did). So you have a huge context on startup, broken functionality, and an underpowered LLM struggling through it all. Not to mention I have no idea how any of the sidecar LLM stuff is meant to work in that context (e.g. auto-mode classifier and even things like dynamic session naming). Am I missing something?
I don't want to assume it's the latter, I want to be charitable to other people. But.
Either they're running Claude Code with a local LLM (technically possible via dev tools albeit unsupported), or they genuinely have no idea why the Mac is good for AI and just bought it because they were told it was good for AI.
I’ve found a new use for it which I’m assuming others have as well.
You could make your case easily if you had some links to these.
(I understand though it's not likely something one remembers at the time to cache away. Still, without that I have little to go on.)
can you approximate plausibility by the wait time for a maxed-out config?
I follow a lot of people on Twitter who were one-upping each other about how much hardware they had bought (now gathering dust0 to run their Claw assistants. Those same people are now buying some toy robot duck?
The same thing happened with Mac Mini's and OpenClaw. 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 marketing bots (you could tell by looking at their post history, where they would drop "Mac Mini" into every conversation they could across all different subreddits and unrelated topics). Then it became fairly common.
So Apple's marketing department is seemingly using the same strategy again. Because still, it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim.