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Comment by btmorex | Hacker News Reader

>The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams.

Do other people actually like reading stuff like this? I mean, regardless of what you think of the iphone 4, that level of praise almost makes me feel bad for him. It's like romantic love for an object.

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> It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams.

In the design documentary, Objectified, by Gary Hustwit, Dieter Rams is asked if there is any company that really gets design today. He answers after a moment's pause: "Apple".

I believe Apple is integrating design down to lower levels than anyone has done before. Some companies talk about corporate DNA but Apple is going to Jurassic Park levels.

It feels natural. Even though the object has been artificially and painstakingly engineered with love.

Excerpt from "Objectified": Dieter Rams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBF1rOxWsxg

Excerpt from "Objectified": Jonathan Ive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU

http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/

What's wrong with that? People love cars, architecture, sculpture, jewelry, watches, clothes, and all sorts of other objects. There's also nothing wrong with a purely utilitarian view of the world either. I don't see any good reason to judge either way.

Thats like asking do great mathematicians enjoy the description of a great proof.

"The overall quality seems impossibly good. The proof is beautiful to behold and there is a timeless nature to it. It’s like a love letter to Pierre-Simon Laplace."

Sure its a little corny, but F#ck, for the majority of even moderately wealthy designers the iPhone 4 is probably the most well designed item they have ever touched. Yes, the average person could care less of the design quality, but for those who do care its a big deal.

I like reading it very much.

I like reading it because it's interesting. I can read a hundred reviews where the author says 'The build quality is good and the phone feels solid in your hand.' Those reviews are typically as exciting, fresh, and captivating to read as a first-generation Blackberry is to behold.

It might be a little over the top sometimes, but that's part of what I like about him.

So do I, it's hard to find good, impassioned writing on the web.

It doesn't make me feel bad for him, but it doesn't make him sound like an objective source of information. Which is 100% okay.

Writers don't have to be objective, so long as they point out their biases clearly. Gruber does. More and more I don't want to read blatantly pro-Apple stuff, but that doesn't mean Gruber's wrong to write it.

It's not so much "love" as it is obsession; and obsessive people tend to be at least colorful, if not interesting, just given how much time they're willing to devote to a subject seemingly so minute. This article is the 1st I've read since the initial batch of reviews that I didn't stop reading after the 1st paragraph.

Except that Gruber is anything but colorful -- his whole aesthetic is dour gray

People go to his site for the words, not for the site. A flashy design would be distracting, and for someone who (IMHO) writes as well as he does, anything that takes away from that is impractical.

It's the same reason he'll link to images or videos or sound clips, but he never posts them directly on his site.

But his writing is the same way -- he's gotten to the point where he spends more time sneeringly mocking Apple's detractors than fellating Apple.

He wrote a bunch a while back about how Apple needs an equivalent rival like Nikon/Canon. It would sure make his writing a lot more interesting -- they've now got a Dreamworks to their Pixar in Android, but that's just giving Gruber more insubstantiative shit to sling.

I skimmed through the article looking for anything negative. Acknowledging its flaws is more productive than studying its perfection.

There is plenty of discussion of the signal issue, the proximity sensor issue, and the potential fragility. It doesn't gloss over them or overplay them.

Is that sufficient? This seems at least as balanced and credible as the Ars Technical review.

Not only did he find and acknowledge a flaw, but he filed an issue on it.

It seems likely to me that these won’t be obvious until people have had more time to use the device. Which flaws should he have acknowledged?

I think this article is a great demonstration of Poe's Law.

The more money you spend on something, the more you need to hear that you did the right thing. At school in a psychology course I learned that there is advertising created for people who already bought the stuff (like an expensive car), to prevent them from worrying.

Still, the level of reassurance Apple fans need is a bit disturbing. If it is so great, why not just shut up about it and enjoy it?

I don't feel bad for him because I am sure he is getting paid.

Paid? By Apple?

Or just his feed sponsorships and Deck ads?

By Apple of course.

That’s a rather serious accusation. Do you have any evidence which would point you that way?

A less serious accusation is that Gruber now knows that his core readership consists of, essentially, the Apple faithful. He knows to pander to that crowd and that is how he gets paid. It's iPhone fans who feel that every Gruber observation about the iPhone is so critically important that it needs to be voted up on HN.

His readership, from the frequency with which his posts make it to the front page here, seems to include the hacker news community. Do you consider yourself, or the rest of us, “essentially the Apple faithful”?

As far as I can tell the subject of his blog could be summarized as something like “high signal-to-noise and semi-technical discussion of Apple, the web, and graphic design, with occasional sports and politics related tidbits.

“The Apple faithful” as a group is quite different from “technical and semi-technical readers interested in Apple and the web”.

>Do you consider yourself, or the rest of us, “essentially the Apple faithful”?

HN does have a strong Apple lean, although it has subsided quite dramatically over the past year (for reasons that PG has documented).

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I != the other person. It was a simple, obvious observation. In the same way that a writer for the right wing press isn't going to suddenly question conservative values.

The grammar nerd in me is desperately wishing that you had written this as "The other person != me".

My bad. My memory is really failing me.

I feel that way a lot when reading Gruber. He has the same kind of unwavering fawning praise for Apple that Rush Limbaugh has for the Republican party.

Rush Limbaugh constantly criticizes the Republican party from the batshit crazy right.

Gruber’s frequent criticisms of Apple are ones I think most people on this board would agree with (probably including you).

Your comparison is so absurd as to be trivially dismissible, and implies that either you’re irrationally angry/resentful about something, or trolling.

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