Indeed, they have different hosts. akamai appears to host all of www.apple.com while the non-www server is hosted directly at 17.142.160.59 (primary), 17.178.96.59 (forwards for a lot of Apple domain names) or 17.172.224.47 (also forwards for a lot of domain names...). Oddly enough, only 17.178.96.59 has a proper certificate, but it's signed with Apple IST CA 2 - G1 from GeoTrust rather than VeriSign used everywhere else. They appear to have a misconfiguration for the other two servers configured in DNS to serve apple.com. Apple IST probably stands for Information Services and Technology group at Apple.
the redirect happens _after_ the certificate warning. to get to the redirect, you have to accept the self signed certificate first.
so it might still scare people away, and rightfully so: normal folks cannot distinguish a self signed certificate from a malicious used one f.e. used in phishing attempts.