https://apple.com does redirect to https://www.apple.com, but it does so with an Apple-issued certificate. Are you running Chrome on OS X?

If you use curl/wget/similar on a machine that doesn’t have Apple’s certificates installed the 301 fails (bad cert).

"curl: (60) Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with known CA certificates”

Oddly, when I first tried to load https://apple.com inside Vienna (OS X RSS reader) it refused to load (bad cert), now it loads fine. Hmmm.