Really I think it got that rep mostly from people trying to run DOS games or shoddy ports from DOS to early Windows that still relied on a bunch of DOS stuff.
There might not be as many hateboys, but what I have found is that Apple fanboys are significantly more defensive, and often respond poorly to criticism, and are generally at best dismissive of it. This is probably a result of being so frequently accosted by said hateboys, but it makes nuanced discussion outside of the bounds of marketing copy difficult. Then again, rarely do fanboys make it easy...
320 kbps mp3 is already indistinguishable for most people with most workloads, let alone the much more performant 320 kbps Vorbis that Spotify uses.
A lot of people love to fret about this stuff and convince themselves they can tell for the exact same reasons uninformed people go out and buy $200 cables.
It's also the same as people who install Gentoo so they can tune their CFLAGS to be 0.0000001% faster under certain workloads at the cost of not running on any other machine and crashing inexplicably on occasion.
We all love optimizing things, regardless of the actual real-world benefits.
They pretty much only exist in business laptops because in that context it can be useful to issue someone a field laptop with a SIM in it, and it doesn't really mean much for cost on a large corporate data plan.