Spoiler alert: For the seventh year in a row, Apple topped consumers’ lists as the most relevant brand to their everyday lives. Seems like the Cupertino tech giant can’t lose in this particular race.

You have to wonder who placed 293rd. That’s how many companies the annual survey evaluated, in 27 categories.

Let’s face it, RIM has been suffering from a serious personality conflict. The company is trying to cling to its enterprise business while also making its brand more attractive as a consumer alternative to iOS and Android.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the company’s PlayBook tablet. RIM initially pitched the PlayBook as being all about consuming content like movies and other media. At the same time, RIM was also trying to sell it as a business device when paired with a BlackBerry even though it lacked core enterprise apps (including email) that could run on the device when it wasn’t tethered to a BlackBerry – a fact that led to RIM hyping the PlayBook’s email app (introduced this week in PlayBook OS 2) as an exciting new feature.

RIM may be caught in this consumer/business identity struggle, but Netflix made it clear today that it doesn’t see RIM as a consumer company – or at least not as a viable one.

Apple has started to delete threads full of comments about the Consumer Reports article bashing the iPhone 4 antenna from its support forums.

Apple’s Discussion Forum censors went into overdrive today in what appears to be an attempt by Apple to squash all references to the Consumer Reports statement that it “can’t recommend” the iPhone 4 until the antenna issues are fixed, issues that their labs and I’ve independently confirmed on my own iPhone 4.

This isn’t the first time that Apple has had sour grapes about topics posted to their support forums. They have been known to regularly delete discussions about hardware or software flaws that Apple wasn’t ready to talk about. I’ve heard and read about Apple’s dreadful censoring habit for years when there were issues about iMacs, Powerbooks, and Mac OS X Leopard. It wasn’t until today that I saw a real example of Apple’s censorship happening to something that interested me.

I checked the forum postings that were in earlier reports and I wasn’t able to access them and received this error: “Error: you do not have permission to view the requested forum or category.” I searched the forums and found two live threads (at press time) here and here. Ironically, the first thread has disappeared only to be replaced by the error message and so far the second thread is still live, but I’m sure that won’t last very long.

Unfortunately for Apple, but luckily for us is that the Internet has a lot of wide open spaces that can be used to discuss the antenna issue that Apple does not want to admit to — so go ahead voice your comments good or bad here on Cult of Mac.