Sure, HN is a curated site. Posts get removed from the front page all the time. This can be because of user flags, software action, and/or moderator action, in any permutation.
Edit: we don't moderate HN based on who is being criticized or praised, be it Apple or anyone else. If you're noticing stories criticizing Apple getting removed, you're probably a critic of Apple. If you were a fan of Apple, you'd notice stories praising Apple getting removed. I call this the notice-dislike bias (crappy name, but I don't know a better one): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This bias dominates people's perceptions of HN to such an extent that I don't think I've ever seen a single counterexample.
People have such feelings based on things that they've recently noticed, but it is almost always randomness, or perhaps seasonal fluctuations like the rise of a major ongoing story (the George Floyd-related topics like protests and policy brutality are the current one, covid before that and still ongoing, and so on). Those are random too in the sense that HN is bobbing in the waves of much larger trends. The way we operate the site itself hasn't changed.
Edit: we don't moderate HN based on who is being criticized or praised, be it Apple or anyone else. If you're noticing stories criticizing Apple getting removed, you're probably a critic of Apple. If you were a fan of Apple, you'd notice stories praising Apple getting removed. I call this the notice-dislike bias (crappy name, but I don't know a better one): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This bias dominates people's perceptions of HN to such an extent that I don't think I've ever seen a single counterexample.