Product "Reviews" Gone at Apple Website...

........and I say good riddance to them!

The Verge.com was one of the first to report it:

"Apple has removed customer reviews from its online store, as first reported by AppleInsider, and we’ve confirmed this to be the case. AppleInsider got a tip from a reader that the reviews had been removed from the US, UK, and Australian Apple Stores (which we have also confirmed).

If you want to see the changes for yourself, you can look at the Wayback Machine archives for the original Apple Pencil for November 16th and November 17th, as found by AppleInsider. On the November 17th capture, you can see that the “Ratings & Reviews” section is gone.

Apple’s choice means that customers can’t provide useful feedback on the products available on Apple’s store — especially if a product might be bad. There were at least 735 one-star reviews for the Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter, for example, but now you can’t tell if it’s good or not just by looking at that page."

Why do I oppose them?
I don't trust them.
I suspect the majority of the reviews are phony, written by people fired from the company, or who work for a competitor, or who work for the company itself! 

It may also be an offshoot of my dislike for the after-story comments on news sites. They bring the worst of talk radio to what is left of actual journalism. 

I'm also not an Apple fan, but that's another story! 

(UPDATE: The N.Y. Times includes a column on 11-28-19 on this very subject:

"Reviews can be easy to manipulate, and the operators of sites with the most reviews are not always motivated to crack down on fake ones planted to promote products. That leaves many consumers wondering what to believe."