"today I’m just as thrilled to be putting an entirely new Ultra Wide lens in my pocket. It gives us another format to tell the story, another perspective to visualize, and a better rounded tool for doing our best creative work."
He along with everyone else was critical of the first Apple Watch.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/05/03/patel-apple-wat...
Seeing that he still not only gets review units every year, he gets the prime live interview every year after WWDC with top Apple executives, I don’t think he has been blacklisted.
Not to mention that Marco Arment is often critical of Apple and got a review unit of the Mac Mini last year.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/10/25/night-sight
Gruber has stated repeatedly how much of an embarrassment that the MacBook keyboards have become but he famously still uses an old ADB Apple keyboard so he doesn’t have as much first hand experience as Marco who buys computers more frequently.
They have both complained about Macs falling behind compared to what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line.
Marco routinely criticizes the Apple Watch and compares it to the non smart watches he prefers. Gruber also prefers regular watches.
And of course he gets ‘paid’. If not directly by Apple in dollars, but by Apple in exposure of his name and thus his business. He does this (great) PR piece pre-launch for Apple, we all learn his name, some will want him to be their photographer of choice and thus the cycle closes.
Taints the whole point of doing reviews.
It certainly does, which is why you can never trust an early review of an Apple product. https://www.cultofmac.com/255618/how-apples-blacklist-manipu...
I can believe that Apple might do this (especially since he also cites openly breaking rules by doing things like live-streaming when it’s been explicitly forbidden) but this article doesn’t convince me it’s happening or educate me on how much of a problem it really is.
Also because the article you linked is about blacklisting.
Now that we have that out of the way, do you agree that early reviews of Apple products can only be done by reviewers that Apple considers favorable?
Is this an advertisement? Ads are paid announcements. There was nothing noting it was paid for in any capacity.
There's a difference between an ad and a bias. I find it useful to notice biases because we all have them. Ads are quite different.
Second, this wouldn't be the first time someone did a paid promotion without noting it was paid. I don't know anything about this guy, so I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. (See game streamers and their odd tendency to open tons of 'loot boxes' on stream & get significantly better results than expected.)
Finally a lot of the copy reads like it's straight from a press release, with capitalized words and everything.
Whether it's enough to constitute an ad in a regulatory sense, I don't know. But you can be advertised to without the source being a literal ad according to a legal definition.
>I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules.
Who exactly said that?
If it looks like an ad, if it reads unnaturally, like something no real person would say to convey a honest opinion, then it's most likely an ad.
Given the date of the post, time to write it up, and time to take the pictures this phone is in the hands of something before the official release date.
I read this like I read something from John Gruber about something Apple.
Further he never thanked Apple. He thanked a maker of a camera app for iOS. At most it seems to be an ad for a camera app, and they likely provided the device to him.
And he's just beating the strawman with his review.
- Did we need a "review" to learn that the new iPhone can shoot better pictures than previous iPhones?
- Where are all the full-resolution pictures–especially from the night shots? Everything looks nice and sharp if you scale it to 750x560. Even for the single lens camera of my 3 years-old android.
- Would it break Apple's heart to include a comparison of their "pro camera" with a real professional camera? Even a low-end one.
And let's not stick with the payment thing. We have no way to verify whether or not he received or will receive compensation from Apple. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
Why would they? That's not who they're competing against.
But Apple clearly wants the average person to believe that it can. Why else stick a "pro" description to your phone's camera? Of course they can't spell it clearly, because they will become a laughing stock. But they do imply it at every opportunity: "Pro camera system. We’ve three‑upped ourselves.", review by professional photographer etc.
It would be fair game if they had a professional instagrammer review the new iPhone. Because that's the only kind of "professional" camerawork you can do with any phone.
Discussing whether he is just subjectively biased towards Apple or outright paid is already kind of moot point
While the article may well serve as a function of marketing because some pro photographer got a loner from Apple and wrote up a gushing review. I don't believe the word "advertisement" holds water.
I think this comment said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016402
It's unprofessional at best and dishonest at worst to pretend that this isn't just corporate PR.
And ironically, the image quality really isn't all that amazing. It's +/- other phone cams - better in some conditions, not as good in others. And in absolute terms, these photos are nowhere close to the sharpness, dynamic range, and saturation of professional equipment. Night mode is good, but the daylight shots are okay but not awesome.
You could argue it's unfair to expect anything better from a (relatively) cheap phone cam - but it's a (relatively) cheap phone cam with a "pro" tag being marketed as a "pro" product.
In photographic terms, it simply isn't - except maybe for the fairly forgiving social media photo niche.
A distinction without substance.
Are you suggesting that Apple gave or lent the author products with a contractual obligation that the author write a positive review? I think that is extremely unlikely, and I believe anyone familiar with how Apple works with reviewers/influencers/content producers would agree. I would need to see compelling evidence to change my mind.
The root of what you are asserting is that is ANY review is corp PR. Which is partially true - a review (good or bad), and esp high profile reviews, can shift conversations around its subject.
For smaller entities, any publicity is good publicity, not as true for larger entities.
So if Apple gave a review copy of a phone to a photographer, that based on his past writings, Apple was fairly sure would write something "positive" - they made a good bet and the review copy of the phone paid dividends.
That being said, the article isn't corp PR - it reads like a "fanboy" review and that's exactly how I took it. Not an advert.
Personally for camera tech I like sites like dpreview.com (no review site is perfect).
I did like some of the example photos in this article tho - don't know if I could ever reach that quality but I'm not a pro photographer.
You can say the language is "marketingy," sure, but it is extremely unlikely that the author is involved in or paid by Apple's marketing or advertising team.