Apple Limits Lengthy iPhone X Testing for Most Reviewers | Hacker News Reader

Apple Limits Lengthy iPhone X Testing for Most Reviewers

wsj.com

46 pointsskue61 comments

John Gruber from daring fireball doesn't sound too happy about getting review unit after all those youtube "stars".

> Thank god Apple seeded Mike Allen with an iPhone X review unit. Such great insight from his fucking nephew, the emoji expert.

John Gruber thinks a great deal of himself! I've never been quite sure why.

Agreed.

Because most of us tend to think a great deal about ourselves. The difference being: he has a lucrative, popular blog and we don't.

I mind me of the fit he pitched over Atwood et al. attempting to bring some sanity to the farrago of Markdown variants a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264733

I'm glad his blog gets him paid! Everyone should have a way to make a good living. But I'm not sure why his blog getting him paid requires that I or anyone else take him as seriously as he so often seems to do.

I don’t dislike Gruber, but has he earned the entitlement he seems to be suggesting? Gruber is very “inside baseball” — average consumers don’t really care about his opinion. Sure he’s “tech famous” but I don’t think anyone that isn’t already using an Apple product really cares what he thinks — and even most Apple users probably aren’t making a decision from a Gruber review.

A negative review from him would probably be pretty damning and deter lots of techies who are stilly trying to buy the phone.

No one ever looks good complaining they didn't get invited to the dance, but I think he's earned it to the extent such a thing can be earned.

That particular criticism (aside from being pretty mean to a 19 year old) struck me as especially silly - one of the key iPhone X features is a silly animated emoji face. Of course it makes more sense to get a young person to review it instead of John effing Gruber. If anything he ought to be angry at the feature, not that he isn't first choice to review it.

> ... one of the key iPhone X features is a silly animated emoji face.

I think we should all take a step back and let that sink in a bit.

I think that's post 3/3 in a series of "Thank god Apple gave X a review copy before me" — it's incredibly bitter and a bit unseemly, to be honest.

To be fair to Gruber, I think his criticism of the PR for the X is that it displays a lack of taste. If Google picked slack-jawed YouTubers to be the first wave of press for the Pixel 2 I bet he’d have a similar, if more derisive, reaction.

> “Thank god Apple gave X a review copy before me”

Ah yes. Excellent usage of quotation marks for your interpretation of Gruber’s thoughts. Nothing at all dishonest about that.

Just to give a bit more context. Three recent posts use almost exactly this wording [0-2], but none of them include "before me".

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/10/30/allen-iphone-x

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/10/30/fashion-iphone-...

[2]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/10/30/iphone-x-highsn...

I don't get the impression that he was denied a review unit, just that his embargo clears later. The Youtubers don't seem even to have been given a unit at all — just access to them in Apple facilities.

He got a review unit 24 hours ago, per his most recent post.

Right, so the youtubers were just sort of teaser reviews. I do think it's disdainful, and slightly obnoxious/elitist, but I don't read it as personal bitterness.

Eh, that's just Gruber's style, always a bit of an asshole. Sometimes it's amusing and sometimes it really grates, but you've got to admit it seems to be working for him.

Anyway, underneath the presentation, he has a good point that it's pretty weak that Apple chose complete puff-piece reviewers to get initial seed units.

Probably drives a Mercedes, but not so bad as a BMW.

I think his beef is more with the vapid content of the review rather than the fact that Mike Allen got a review unit.

This new phone comes out and it’s got some new stuff that we’re really not sure about - no buttons, Face ID, the notch - and the reviewer relays a story about his nephew and an emoji. It’s hardly insightful journalism, is it?

The review does mention other stuff like Face ID as well, though: https://www.axios.com/axios-am-2503582568.html?rebelltitem=2...

It just leads with an aniemoji anecdote. For a lot of users it's probably every bit as important as discussion of the notch.

Because it's not journalism. It's entertainment.

My first thought is there are three possible explanations for this.

1. Apple is not concerned about increasing demand with reviews because there is already a backlog of orders that exceeds supply. This is similar to Tesla's anti-selling of the Model 3 in favor of a product that already has wide supply.

2. Apple was really making last minute hardware and software changes that prevented them from producing a large number of review units ahead of time.

3. Apple knows there are flaws in the phone and wants to limit the amount of time a reviewer might have in order to discover those flaws before the first publish date.

Considering Apple's history, that they still provided week long review windows for a handful of sources, and none of those sources are particularly technical device reviewers, I would lean towards option 3.

Is there any other possible explanation for this change?

I would say there may be many more possible explanations than you listed here. We cannot know, only speculate.

The idea that anything reviewers write will have any measurable impact on iPhone sales is laughable. Can reviews or other media coverage kill a startup? Sure. It happened to Juicero.

An Apple product is like a Star Wars movie, it doesn't matter what anyone writes, people are going to see it. Nobody really intermediates between Apple's relationship with customers, and that's been proven over and over again (most recently with The Verge's months long campaign painting the removal of the headphone jack as "user hostile").

Will bad reviews kill an Apple/Star Wars release, obviously not. That however doesn't mean that reviews don't have any effect. Otherwise why would these companies go through the process of giving out review devices or holding critic screenings? Or why would all these reviews get so much traffic if their content had no effect on the reader's ultimate buying decision?

It's obvious why they're doing it, they're a business. Why wouldn't they try to maximize buzz for their product? It may help on the margins but it's not at all like some startup. Apple is a 41 year old company and an established brand. They're a known quantity to customers and there is already a relationship there. Their experience with past Apple products will have more impact on their decision than any review will.

Companies, and maybe more so executives, live and die on the margins. Would bad reviews for the iPhone X sink Apple as a going concern? Certainly not. Might they result in missing guidance for the quarter? Possibly, and that would cause the stock to fall and a lot of people to be upset -- even though Apple would still be a hugely valuable, profitable, going concern.

I was thinking about the reception of the latest Apple Watch ("Series 3").

The Watch had some issues with Wifi common-use scenarios that Apple testers failed to anticipate (obviously they wouldn't want these devices connecting to random coffeeshop hubs, etc.); this resulted in many of the reviewers having ongoing connection problems, which led to a lot of "this will be really cool when they work out the kinks" reviews.

Compare to the early work on iPhone X: a bunch of "normals" just gushing about how cool it is. The initial messaging is undeniably better.

Personally, I chalk it up to an experiment that they can afford, largely due to your #1 observation.

I wrote about the Watch here, if you're interested. https://hackernoon.com/im-returning-my-apple-watch-3-cellula...

I see I’m getting downvoted and don’t really understand why, the parent comment asks about experience with the watch and I was sharing mine with the cellular version. I could copy & paste the article here, but what’s the point of the www then.

The GP comment is'n /about/ the apply watch. Plugging your review on a comment that's only tangentially related to the apple watch might come off as crass self-advertising to some.

> 2. Apple was really making last minute hardware and software changes that prevented them from producing a large number of review units ahead of time.

Apple was not making “last minute” changes to this hardware. This hardware was locked in at least six months ago.

This is certainly true, but I suppose it's possible that they were making last minute changes to the hardware 6 months ago (or whenever was the deadline to get it locked), and as a result don't have very many review units until this week.

That said, I don't think that the numbers here are all that plausible. Maybe if they only gave out 50 or 100 review phones, we might say they were supply-constrained, but surely they can't be so supply-constrained that they could only give out a dozen.

This was basically my thinking behind saying it was an unlikely scenario. "Last minute" doesn't mean they were literally deciding the hardware days before shipping the units out. It meant they were making changes right up to their deadline limiting supply and/or quality of review units.

This applies the same to software although the "last minute" there is obviously later than it would be for hardware. It is possible the software was not tuned as finely as Apple likes as early as Apple wanted hence why the review units went to reviewers who likely wouldn't be as technical as some of the more traditional tech press.

This hardware has been in manufacture at the rate of, let’s say, a million a day, for months. (A decent enough Fermi estimate for the purposes of this discussion.)

They can ‘spare’ 10,000 review units. This was a conscious decision not driven by hardware demand.

That's a huge overestimate. Manufacture of the iPhone X might reach 200k per day, more likely 100k, quite possibly as low as 20k per day if some of the more pessimistic reports about undersupply are true, and have not been at that level for months in advance. Certainly nothing like 1M per day.

This is the first time Apple has sent youtube personalities iPhone review units. In the Steve Jobs era, they would carefully select certain tech columnists. That coupled with limiting time for reviewers seems to be a desperate attempt at convincing people to buy the phone. The verge says FaceID is inconsistent in daylight and outside when beeing used.

It's exactly this. YouTubers are being given phones to drum up some uneducated noise to dilute any criticism from technical reviews. YouTubers only care about view counts and their popularity, and most will just shout about how shiny it is without putting in any effort to find anything to criticize. Apple needs some hype to convince consumers that the iPhone X's notch design, and Face ID not working in sunlight or sitting on a flat surface, aren't deal breakers.

That notch is the most gimmicky thing to ever make it past the concept phase for a modern phone. The tech reviews I've seen so far are showing off just how broken existing apps are because of the notch interfering. Of course all the "big player" apps will be fixed within 1-2 months, but there are thousands of apps that will never be updated to support the X's notch.

Apple needs to figure out how to embed these components beneath the screen. Yes it will be an incredible technical challenge; but that's what we're really waiting for: 100% screen space. Until that is possible, they shouldn't have pushed such an unfinished concept as being "innovative".

iPhone X reviews are expected to receive the largest audience, so Apple's strategy of starving time probably makes the reviewers be more favorable.

I've also known a reviewer who got into Apple's "Shadow Ban" list for a negative review. In his case, Apple product reviews always garnered the largest audience, thereby impacting his bottom line.

"Shadow Ban" seems like you're saying tech reviewers are entitled to being able to review Apple devices before they're released. But that's not true. Apple always seeds a limited number of devices (rather than giving one to anyone who claims to be a journalist), and it's their prerogative to give the devices to the reviewers of their choice.

Right, but if you don't go deep like Rene Ritchie does, you may not get invited again.

While that's true, for the user, a review by a reviewer who is afraid to state his opinion or mention any negative in order to be invited again, is quite useless.

It's hardly black and white. Some would argue that a review by a reviewer who got to use a hot new phone for free cannot be fair in the first place. It's one of the reasons Consumer Reports buys all of the things they test for full price at retail.

> one of the reasons Consumer Reports buys all of the things they test for full price at retail.

Does the reviewer personally pay for the device?

The key part is not if they have to pay or not, but if the conditions of getting the phone or not can possibly be affected by the previous reviews.

A reviewer who gets to use a phone for free provided by Apple understands that Apple might not "gift" the next phone if they don't like the review.

A reviewer who gets to use a phone for free provided by their employer doesn't care about what Apple thinks, since Consumer Reports can and will buy the next phone for testing anyway under the same conditions as always.

Right, but people can and do use a company's legal actions to make moral judgements on them. If a web hosting company chose to give hosting space to a hate-group, people would be upset too.

It's disappointing that Apple feels like they can bully people into only giving them favorable reviews.

I've seen reviewers say negative things about Apple products within the context of a review and still get future devices.

I don't know what reviewer the parent was talking about, but if Apple thought their review was unfair, I see no problem with Apple deciding not to give that reviewer any more devices.

>but if Apple thought their review was unfair, I see no problem with Apple deciding not to give that reviewer any more devices.

Sure, and other people can call it bullying. I guess we all agree then !!

"Bullying" would be "you can't say anything negative". As I already said, I've seen reviewers say negative things and still get devices. There's a difference between saying negative things in a review, and writing an unfair review.

You can still be a bully even if you do it 5% of the time. Its not all black, doesn't mean its white, and the reality is always grey. I'll concede that maybe at times, the reviewers are unfair, and at times Apple is unfair. We can judge it ourselves on a case by case basis. You can just as easily rush to point out "the person is within their rights to say this" just as "apple is within their rights to withold devices". I don't particularly feel the need to defend Apple (or any other giant corporation). They have people they pay for that.

Is there ANY evidence Apple is bullying anyone? Being selective and choosing new channels isn’t bullying — it’s smart marketing. Why would any company seed a review device to a hostile outlet? That’s just stupid. All the people that want to write negative reviews shall have their opportunity.

People are “mad” because they were looking forward to cashing in on web traffic. Apple doesn’t owe anyone a preview unit.

>Why would any company seed a review device to a hostile outlet? That’s just stupid. All the people that want to write negative reviews shall have their opportunity.

I don't know whether choosing to highlight the flaws in a product is honest or hostile. In any case, Apple is within their rights, and so are others to express their opinion. Relax! Nobody is taking your toys away!

Did they limit the reviewers time with the iPhone X? Or did they limit their time before the embargo lifted? Genuinely curious, some reviewers are saying they will update their “impressions” with full reviews.

Per the article, they usually give out review units at embargo time - 1 week, and instead they gave out review units at embargo time - 1 day (except to TechCrunch, Buzzfeed, and Mashable, plus some Youtubers, Axios, and Glamour).

They gave them 24 hours until the embargo was lifted. I'm not sure why some blogs are upset about it though, because they could have waited however long they wanted before they published something. They clearly wanted in on the initial review traffic.

That is the whole point. Most of these review sites are trying to run a business, so they need traffic. Launch day reviews are a huge source of traffic, so they need to 1) post as soon as the embargo is lifted, and 2) stay on apples good side so that they get early review units.

The effect is that we aren't getting entirely honest reviews of apple products on launch day, and we probably aren't getting honest reviews afterwards from any site that depends on the traffic from early review units.

Launch day is Friday. Most outlets will have had the phone for the whole week by then.

I really don’t see how this results is consumers having less information. There is a 5-6 wait on any new iPhone X’s. If any issues arise, consumers will be able to cancel their orders free of charge.

Another way to grab some attention.

Whatever. It's been less than two months since the last Apple phone release. Are they trying to compete with the Sony Xperia line for number of slightly different models?

Modded down to -4. Apple's PR operation is on the job.

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