I don’t know if he was captured and made to produce pro-Apple content. He does that on his own. But reading that did make me question why he wrote it. Why does he care?

I don't think "made to" but as someone who followed his blog for many years, there was a before he did a special episode of his podcast with an apple VP and after. And clearly after he had a different perspective. It's IMO just not hard to imagine why. Every giant company has a procedure on how to manage journalists and every ex-journalist turned mouthpiece thinks they're too savvy for that.