why my pihole is blocking apple.com but not www.apple.com. what is the big difference?
I'm guessing you have added it to the blacklist yourself?
The difference is the www!
Slightly more detailed answer:
the www portion, in this case, is viewed as a subdomain, and acts the same way as if it was, say, devices.apple.com
Let's say there existed: example.com, and it served it's ads from ads.example.com, you want to access example.com but you don't want to see the ads. In this case you would blacklist ads.example.com, and then you would still be able to access *.example.com or just example.com
thanks for the explanation