I have a question: Why are these considered different sites by your algos? If we were talking ".com" vs ".net", OK, I get it. But this is about "www.domain.com" vs "domain.com" and their http and https variants. I'm sure there's something I don't understand.
Would "http:www.apple.com", "https:www.apple.com", "http:apple.com" and "https:apple.com" be treated by Google as four completely different and separate sites also to be ranked in isolation of each other? Why?
That's true, but the www/no-www/http/https cases are very likely to refer to exactly the same site. Besides, Google's algos, through crawling, should know that it is the same site. It seems unfair to punish the site for this.
Would "http:www.apple.com", "https:www.apple.com", "http:apple.com" and "https:apple.com" be treated by Google as four completely different and separate sites also to be ranked in isolation of each other? Why?