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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredibly fanboy-y article even by Gruber standards. I'm not sure he's physically capable of criticizing Apple, even if he wanted to.

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> This is an incredibly fanboy-y article even by Gruber standards.

Agreed... this was the most Gruber-y he's ever Grubered: "Is the higher price of the iPhone X over the iPhones 8 justified? [...] But you also get something you can’t compare in a checkmark comparison — a sort of joie de vivre."

> I'm not sure he's physically capable of criticizing Apple, even if he wanted to.

That's definitely not true. While he generally likes their products, he's definitely critical of them when he thinks they mess up. If all you read of his are these posts shared on HN, you'll probably only read his glowing reviews. And if you don't like his writing, then sure, there's no point in seeking him out. But don't assume that because you don't read his criticisms, that he doesn't—can't!—write them, because he most assuredly does.

There was some stretch of time where I'd visit his blog once every week or so and catch up. He has a tendency to take Apple flaws and spin them as good things. Even when he does criticize Apple it's only half heartedly.

I'm not sure who wins the spin competition between him and Paul Thurrott

Definitely Gruber. I've seen Thurrot recommend products from more than one company. Gruber, never. If Apple has a product in the space, only the Apple product is worth buying, no matter how objectively bad it is.

> I've seen Thurrot recommend products from more than one company. Gruber, never.

That's also definitely not true. He's been a big supporter of Amazon's Echo line, he's mentioned a number of Android phones he likes—hell, on his front page right now he links glowingly to an article about how much better Google Maps is than Apple Maps.

> He's been a big supporter of Amazon's Echo line

Apple doesn't have a competing product. Please read the rest of the GP post.

> he's mentioned a number of Android phones he likes

Yet he prefers the Apple phones to all of them. Again, read the remainder of the GP post.

> on his front page right now he links glowingly to an article about how much better Google Maps is than Apple Maps.

Yet he himself still prefers Apple Maps. Again, read the remainder of the GP post.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/30/apple-maps-goog...

Extracting the part of the GP post that matters: "If Apple has a product in the space, only the Apple product is worth buying, no matter how objectively bad it is."

You seem to have missed the part of your own post—the one you're commenting on a reply to—where you stated "I've seen Thurrot recommend products from more than one company. Gruber, never."

You seem to be more interested in pedantry than in understanding the point of the post, which you've conceded.

To be extra pedantic, none of your examples show Gruber recommending a non-Apple product at all. At most, Gruber concludes that they have some useful features. When he writes about the Echo, he writes about how Apple will do it better.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/26/wynn-echo

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/11/06/amazon-echo

And peak MacGruber: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/27/amazon-echo-loo...

> You seem to be more interested in pedantry than in understanding the point of the post, which you've conceded.

Yes, I am interested in responding to what you actually said. Sorry if you can't handle that. I'm going to ignore you from now on.

> Yes, I am interested in responding to what you actually said.

Then it's a wonder how you failed so spectacularly at it. What I actually said consists of multiple sentences that must be taken together, and even the portion you extracted contains the word "recommend," which is a word you don't seem to understand.

thurrott in my opinion because he wasn't afraid to bash on Microsoft SUPER hard after Windows 8 dropped.

My take on Gruber is to not take him seriously. Don't take his recommendations, he'll flip on a dime. For example, when the Pebble was announced he was first in line on the Kickstarter. It shipped, he liked it. As soon as the Apple Watch came out, the Pebble was suddenly a piece of shit.

I'm also convinced that he recommends things that he's either never used, or took money to recommend. An outstanding example is a weather app he gushed about that I'm convinced he never used because it was horrible (as in, the forecasts weren't even close), and the visual design was something he'd typically tear into.

For me, Gruber is in the "Dvorak/Cringley" bucket: entertaining, sometimes on point, but for $DEITY's sake don't take it for gospel. But despite all that, I read every post.

It shipped, he liked it. As soon as the Apple Watch came out, the Pebble was suddenly a piece of shit.

Isn't that how it works? My 15" GTX 1070 laptop used to be the bees knees. So amazing and compact for a laptop that could support VR. Now, in comparison to some stunning Max-Q designs, it's now pretty meh.

I don't have anything against him, I think in the iPhone X case he might deservedly be lauding Apple, their phone genuinely seems good. But more to your point, concerning watches I remember that for months on his podcast he was dismissive of the then rumored/speculated Apple Watch form factor altogether, he thought that if anything it would be more like a fitness tracker, and obviously once it became reality he unconditionaly praised the watch and now every new year with equal praise he is saying that the new model should have been the first one... Time passing, more than being biased I think his real issue is that he has become incredibly lazy with his work.

I think I missed the mark in several ways with my review of the original Apple Watch, but I complained strenuously about the fact that the display doesn't always show the time -- something I'm used to because I've worn a traditional watch since I was in middle school. I think I complained about not being able to read the display in sunlight too. The gist of my review -- and I still think this today -- is that Apple Watch is good at doing several new things (notifications and fitness tracking) but isn't as good as a traditional watch at traditional watch things (showing the time and date continuously).

That heartbeat part of your review, though... cute&sweet&naive, as a teenage girl. Still makes my day every time I read your watch reviews and remember it :D

Specifically I remembered this early conversation: http://podsearch.david-smith.org/episodes/1031#1538

I don't see any real contradiction here. The original pebble was very cool for the time, and the price was reasonable. But the design was a bit cheap/silly and it had serious limitations. The apple watch was one of the first actual full featured ones that continued to be built upon, and is still very usable today having improved with software the entire time. Pebble's were dying within the first year and people got increasingly unhappy. They always had weird bluetooth issues and other thorn-in-side small glitches

I owned both, and i think those are completely congruent takes in their time periods.

I don't recall ever overly praising the Pebble. Here's everything I've ever written about Pebble:

https://daringfireball.net/search/pebble

I really only wore mine for about a week, finding it more annoying than useful. As I stated here: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/pebble-time

I like Apple Watch, but only as one of several watches I own. The others are mechanical, not digital.

I don't know which weather app you're talking about, but I've never recommended anything I haven't used, and the only posts I get paid for are the once-a-week sponsorships, which are always clearly noted as being sponsored.

I will say first that as it concerns the Pebble: I react my statement. (Can’t edit now, sorry.) Ugh, I made a decent effort to find what I was talking about, but you sure wrote a lot of mentions about Pebble. :-) All I have to go on is an increasingly faulty middle-aged memory, despite your giving me a handy list of posts, so I’ll leave it be.

As for the weather app, it might very well have been sponsored. But here’s the thing: despite my critical comments above, I still take you as a person of integrity even for sponsorships. Now maybe that’s just naive of me (I grew up on Paul Harvey, I should know better), but even if you’re paid I just assume you tried the product and said, “yeah, I can sincerely praise that.” Naive or not, I just know that when I downloaded it, my first thought was “no way Gruber’s seen this running, it’s horrible and I’m not nearly the font and design nut he is. That, and the forecast looks like it’s for Florida, not Seattle.” Again, maybe that’s on me: it was an ad, clearly labeled as an ad, caveat emptor. Made a good faith effort to find my purchases in the App Store to back this up, but Apple apparently isn’t going to make that easy on me.

Finally, had I even suspected you might see this I probably would have not used a Dvorak comparison. I meant it to mean “can go on a rant, but a rant that’ll be worth consideration; whether you agree or not”, but that was Dvorak 30 years ago. I truly do enjoy reading what you write, and do read every post, and that comparison was unfair.

While it does read as a fanboy article, Gruber has criticized Apple at least a few times in the past. Here's one example, in particular.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/04/08/snell-3d-touch

When I first read Gruber he spent quite a bit of his time attacking Apple for abandoning lots of the good stuff from OS9 in favor of the promise offered by the (relatively) clean but at-the-time untested underpinnings of OSX.

Until he says Apple screwed up so bad that he recommends another company's product, he can only be called a shill.

Which products do you think I should recommend a competing product over Apple's? On phones, tablets, and computers, I personally much prefer Apple's OSes, and I usually prefer their hardware as well. But even when I don't prefer Apple's hardware, the OS wins out.

I don't recommend Apple's wi-fi base stations: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753

And why haven't you written anything about which WiFi base station you recommend? Because it isn't an Apple device? Everybody has a WiFi base station, while relatively few people have a smart watch or a programmable TV set top box, so noteworthiness is definitely not the reason.

On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up issues with competitor products out of whole cloth. Your writing on Apple's long-delayed deployment of third party multitasking and its eventual copying of Android's Activity model, having worse battery life than the competition this the entire time, was especially cringeworthy.

He has talked pretty frequently about how he has and likes Eero’s products on his podcast.

They also happen to be a sponsor of the podcast, so I could understand why he hasn't written a glowing review on DF.

He likes Eero like the radio DJ likes Comcast and Sleep Train. There is no attempt to justify his recommendation, certainly not the massive effort and contortions he puts into recommending every Apple product.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/10/eero-wifi-syste...

https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2017/12/eero

Photos seems like a good example of a product that is in such a mess that you should be discussing what a general user should use instead at this point. You even confess in the recent post about Marzipan about what a debacle drag and drop not working for a year in Photos is. But you've never written a piece about "why is Photos in such a mess"? Because it is. Basics of the platform still don't work, more than a year later (export original files and watch it hang, with no progress indicator! Drag and drop between applications is a joke!). Why not turn some light on that, why not discuss alternatives than general users should be looking at instead?

The way I read that is that you're a shill as soon as you say something (even slightly) positive about Apple..

I guess for an Android fan it's not a tough call to be cleared of the 'shill' label, because there's plenty of fucking up going on in that world that even the diehard fans have to admit to it.. If only Apple would do us Apple fans the favor of royally fucking up from time to time so that we can stop being accused of being shills.. But alas they never do.. What a pity..

Perhaps the best way to extract information from Gruber is to analyze which Apple products he does not write about.

Waaaay over the top with glowing, hyperbolic language about how the X truly, truly this time “reinvents” the iPhone in a way unlike any device has ever been reinvented.

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