Off-topic and a stupid question: why does anything related to Apple attract so much attention on HN? As a newcomer, I assumed HN focused mostly on reverse engineering,retro computing, and deep technical topics.

Tech stopped being full of tech nerds when 10 weeks in a JavaScript boot camp and a few thousand lines of code in your personal GitHub would land you a $140k remote job.

Maybe now we will start seeing a reversion to the people in it for the passion.

I would not say your list is anything like complete, although those topics are often discussed here. Apple is a huge player in the general computing ecosystem, and probably a majority of front- and back-end developers these days work on macbooks, so it isn't surprising that the things they do resonate in this community.

Apple offers the most convenient computing experience available to mankind as of right now. That's why I care, at least. I love their products and services, but not so much when it fails (as in the authors case). That shit is scary.

HN hasn't focused on those topics in a long time, they rarely are on the front page. Skip the top 20 articles and you'll start to see some interesting content instead of all the VC & AI drivel.

Hackaday is a content aggregator site that usually has more content on these topics - https://hackaday.com

Or there are still some good old blogs out there with RSS feeds http://www.righto.com/ http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/ https://blog.ret2.io/

>I assumed

You assumed wrong. Honestly that was never case, but maybe it was better 15 years ago