The Varieties of Religious Experience: How Apple Stays Divine - Science and Tech - The Atlantic

Think different – via Slate 

There are scholars who study Apple's consumers as religious devotees. Consumer behavior specialists Russell Belk of York University and Gulnur Tumbat of San Francisco State, even put together a framework for assessing Apple's mystical mythology. The company was built on four key myths, they argued.
Here are the four narratives, as summarized by media csholar Texas A&M's Heidi Campbell, who distilled their work for her May paper "How the iPhone became divine":

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

The Varieties of Religious Experience: How Apple Stays Divine - Science and Tech - The Atlantic