Anytime anybody in the universe says something negative about Microsoft, Brad Thorne* loses it. He fires up Twitter: “You’re fucking pathetic!... You have your head so far up your ass!... I can’t wait until you eat your smug words!”

Thorne, a fortyish IT manager with a preppy wardrobe and shy grin, is actually a nice guy in person. He plays golf and enjoys spending time with his wife and step kids. He works as an IT director at a nonprofit charity organization in the South that’s run by nuns. He is not religious — unless you count his relationship with Microsoft, of course.

“I’m a missionary,” says Thorne. “For me, it’s about being super passionate and super knowledgeable about their products, and not leaving that passion at the door when you leave work. You preach it all the time.”

Thorne is not religious — unless you count his relationship with Microsoft

Thorne has been a preacher, so to speak, for decades. He feels a deep, personal connection to Bill Gates, who, like Thorne, is a “true believer in the power of technology and how it can change everything,” and has an “unabashed way of approaching his foes or detractors.”

But only in recent years has Thorne’s proselytizing for Microsoft assumed a Cotton Mather-esque shrillness. Blame it on the smartphone. The rise of the iPhone helped Apple unseat Microsoft as the reigning tech superpower, and it put Thorne on the offensive.

So when he goes on Twitter he calls longtime Apple-friendly Wall Street Journal columnist and Recode co-founder Walt Mossberg a “douchebag.” He tweets at another reviewer who gave the Lumia 1020 Windows Phone a bad review, and tells her she’s a pathetic loser. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

He seems to love — as in, romantically love — his phone

Anybody following tech media in the past few years would instantly recognize the Thorne type. He’s a fanboy. That is, the kind of crazily obsessed tech enthusiast who appears to have become unhinged somewhere between peeling off his smartphone’s screen protector and making his 457th comment on Android Central. He seems to love — as in, romantically love — his phone. He explodes with rage when somebody says anything less than glowingly positive about it.

Fanboy-ism is not just a phone thing, of course. There are Star Wars fanboys, and video game console fanboys, and comic book fanboys. Before the word even entered the pop lexicon there were fanboys: Grateful Dead tape-traders, ham radio enthusiasts, orchid nuts, and a million other things. But smartphone fanboys are different: They are noisier. They are more aggressive. And they seem, at times, truly out of their minds, or at the least to have seriously lost perspective.

Lol brainless samsungfags, if﻿ you hate iPhone so much, why do you care to watch it? Lol the android community is so damn annoying. Shut up about the shit4 or note 3, stop hatin on Apple! Anonymous Fanboy (from YouTube)

Although phone fanboys are a niche subculture, the objects of their affection are not. The companies behind the products they covet are massively influential: Apple recently climbed to the sixth spot on the Fortune 500 list. More than half of all Americans have smartphones, and for many of those people, the device has become like an extra appendage. We risk our lives texting while driving. We take selfies at funerals. Almost a quarter of younger people even use their phones while having sex. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that some of us develop an abnormal fixation with our phones that goes beyond being extremely grateful for the Google Maps application.

Although fanboys can easily be lumped together as “angry nerds,” look closer and you’ll find that each one is like a snowflake. The reasons they’ve traveled to the fringe are personal, but also familiar. A phone might not seem to be something worth fighting over, but what it stands for most definitely is.