Same here. I jumped to Apple in the early 2000s when I realised here was a very nice machine that let me run the rather splendid iLife suite, MS Office and let me tinker to my heart's content with a BSD Unix. Best of both worlds.

I live fairly happily with hardware tinkering restrictions in my iMacs, but the inability to upgrade RAM in the new smaller iMac may be the last straw. It's really irritating.

I think that's a very specific definition which supports the argument but I don't really see any justification for that over, say, those who climbed on around the launch of the iPod or the iPhone. The views and expectations of those people would paint a very different picture.

There are plenty of Apple fan boys (I'm using the term in a non-prejorative way indicentally, I've got three Apple devices on my desk right now) who don't go back nearly that far.

Possibly we're just confirming that the term "fan boy" is entirely useless in any sort of real discussion?

I don't think it's useless. The fan boy phenomenon (of any type) is one of the more difficult and frustrating things in tech to deal with. Somebody who likes some company a lot, and buys their gadgets and thinks the stuff the company makes is swell, but is able to afford the fact that their company does do things wrongly sometimes is not a fan boy -- they're a fan and I don't think anybody has a problem with fans.

People who act as consistent apologists, who's identity is made up of their allegiance to this company and who react with shock and indignation that anybody could even propose that the company they've devoted a significant part of their psyche and lives to, could in any way be flawed...are fan boys. And they bring discourse to a halt by increasing the noise in a conversation to the point entire forums become useless, and actual fans get caught up in the crossfire...it's really frustrating and annoying.

And if you read all that and thought I was talking about Apple then you've missed the point. This exists as a kind of mixed-identification phenomenon exists across a broad spectrum of milieus. Car brands, politics, religion, etc. And it's to the benefit of these brands that they identify and recruit the people who are susceptible to fan boyism and use them as a deep pool of loyal customers and a passive defense to their organization's operations. Why try and spend time fighting off stories of negative aspects of your company when you have a million fan boys who'll do it for you?

And it's the constant noise they introduce, either in the form of an echo chamber of reinforcing good feeling but content free interactions or in the form of constant nonsensical diatribes and willfully ignorant defenses of their brand identity, that's why it's important for any on-line community to try and either turn fan boys into rational thinkers -- to separate the person's identity from the brand -- or drive them from the community.

HN is a place that needs signal, not noise. And fan boys bring only the loudest sort of static possible.

I don't think we disagree that many of the people who are termed fan boys add little but noise, but my problem is in accurately identifying them and in particular in then ascribing a single common world view and set of motivations to them as was being done in the thread above.

Plus being an apologist doesn't mean that you can't make a good point. Gruber could often be accurately described as an Apple apologist but I'd strongly take issue with the idea that he couldn't add to a debate on Apple. Similarly RMS when it comes to open source/freedom and others across the spectrum.

As with anything, argue with the point being made, not with the person, at least until you're absolutely sure you know them and where they're coming from far better than you're likely to through occasional interact on an internet message board.

And that's before we even get into the pejorative nature of the phrase "fan boy" and how you might as well just call someone a dick for the reaction you're likely to provoke.

Yes it's an interesting phenomenon but in terms of dealing with people who I may think are fan boys, I see no reason why there should be any reason why I should treat fan boys differently than I'd try to treat anyone else - that is take what they say at face value and engage them on that basis, or ignore them completely.

I think that's mostly fair. But we may part ways on the value of filtering through fanboy noise...Gruber for example is brilliant when he talks about Apple, but he's a terrible predictable bore hen he gets into comparisons with anything outside of Apple -- 9 out of 10 times.

When I see a Daring Fireball post, if it's about Apple I'll read it and I find many things he says interesting and insightful (even if I may disagree with them), if it's Gruber on any other topic there's no point in even trying to scrub through his posts to find the valuable points to consider.

So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, you are right, evaluate the points and not the person (don't go ad hominem), but sometimes the level of effort required to find the valuable points isn't worth it.