Once upon a time, when MacRumors was young, this was a little oasis of savvy and grown-up Mac users who gathered to shoot the breeze when rumors were often few and far between. Many of us, professionals for the large part, had stuck with Apple through the lean years because these were the tools we used to pay the bills and put food on the table.
Then, as time went on and the iPod came about, a few more people became interested in Apple and the site grew... but Windows evangelists who came here were shunned, seen as trolls and often banned. I've occasionally pulled the plug on people like this myself, because they added little to the site. Things started to shift a little when the Intel Macs came along and Bootcamp came about, so the 'Windows on the Mac' forums were set up.
When the iPhone was released, membership grew by leaps and bounds, but paradoxically, those who came onboard with Apple at this stage, seemed to have less allegiance to Apple because by this stage, Apple was seen by many as a consumer electronics firm. And people wanted to talk about other handsets, unlike the large majority of Mac users who knew what platform was best for them... and this created a whole new level of debate because, quite rightly, a large section of Apple fans weren't interested in talking about other handsets.
Not long after the iPhone forums were created, I stickied a poll in there, asking if people wanted to keep the iPhone forum restricted to Apple handsets only. After a few weeks, it was split 50/50, something you would have never seen in regards to Windows back in the Mac-only days of MacRumors.
And to be honest, the moderator workload in maintaining an iPhone only forum would have been near impossible, with close monitoring of each thread needed to ensure that no-one uttered the word 'Razr' or 'Android', lest a thread become derailed. So, seeing that it was near impossible to keep the hordes out, my assumption is that an accomodation was reached, which was to set up the other handsets/platforms forum, in which threads could be dumped into, much as a console games sub-forum was implemented years ago after the original gaming on the Mac forum became unmanageable, due to childish console wars.
And so, due to the near-impossibility of keeping a lid on an army of fractious nerds, in almost all cases, instead of making moderator work by tossing people off the forums, an accomodation has been reached where people can talk about this stuff if they want. So there we have it.
However, what this has meant is a dilution of brand to some degree, where the front page now has news items about
Microsoft products. For some, we can get this news anywhere... so whether by design, or by increments due to practical reasons, those of us who drop by for the Apple stuff have to share this space with those whose allegiances and buying decisions range a little more widely. I see and expect no reason for this change, because after all, traffic, clicks and eyeballs is all that matters. So my advice is, in seven words: suck it up and get over it.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Disclaimer: Mac user for 20 years, departmental purchaser, owned iPods and even one of the few that still owns an iPod Hifi... but own an ICS Android phone, for which I would never come here to talk or seek advice on because there are countless Android forums out there. It just seems bad manners to come here to trash-talk Apple when it comes to something as minor as a phone. Bit old-skool that way. 
