iSheep was originally a SanDisk marketing description of users of iPodmusic player instead of SanDisk's own Sansa player. The marketing term is borrowed by some in technology sites and Internet forums as an insult to a person or a group of people who is a fan of Apple Inc. products, especially those who tend to purchase products from the brand not regarding its actual value or functionality, but the brand name, logo and the status symbol associated with it. The term is often used to bash Apple fanboys who over-advocate or promote the 'Apple cult' in online discussions, those usually involve fanboy wars over popular smartphone brands or manufacturers.
History
Origins
The term was introduced in May 2006 when SanDisk launched the "iDon’t" campaign to advertise the SanDisk Sansa. iDon't calls on "free thinkers" to "break-free from restrictive formats and a single source for music," with slogans such as "You do not need to follow." The Campaign's site offered T-shirts, posters, and stickers featuring a monkey and asking, "Are you an iChimp?" Another image showed a sheep and says, "iSheep say Baah." while another showed a donkey trying to bite a carrot dangling in front of its face with the slogan "iFollow." The iSheep campaign was abandoned in July 2006, to give way to the "Lil'Monsta" mascot campaign.
Behavioural patterns
A common behaviour of “iSheep” is labelling new features and capabilities of products of competitors as superfluous or feature creep and flooding online forums with their criticism, while labelling similar features on Apple devices as innovative, which is a form of double standard. One example is the Galaxy S4's “dual camera” mode, which allowed capturing photos and videos from both cameras simultaneously, which was labelled “feature creep” by forum users. More examples are fast charging, wireless charging, multi-camera systems, AR camera, water resistance, 1080p front-camera video recording and 2160p video recording, all of which were features Android-based mobile phones had years ahead of iPhones, which were labelled as unneeded and/or superfluous by critics on forums and social media by the same people that would consider it as innovative when Apple introduced the feature on their mobile phones years later. In addition, Air View on the Galaxy S4 was often mentioned in essay articles that labelled it as feature creep.. Unlike “Air View”, the similar 3D touch feature on iPhones since 6s is not known to be repeatedly labelled as “feature creep” by critics. Another observation is that the same Apple iPhone users who historically stated the slim build of Apple iPhones as a reason for purchase, purchase the iPhone 11 despite of its 8.3mm thickness, which means that the thickness suddenly does not matter when Apple made a mobile phone thicker than usual. This behaviour is caused by a mixture of cognitive biases, including the sunk cost fallacy, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. Apple is notorious for historically favour design over functionality and robustness. One example is the iPhone 6s, released on September 9th 2015 was equipped with a battery that could only hold up to 1715 mAh, which is considered rather menial compared to other mobile phones such as the Galaxy Note 4 with 3220 mAh or the Galaxy Note 2 with 3100 mAh.
