Happy claim chowder for DaringFireball's Gruber | Hacker News Reader

Happy claim chowder for DaringFireball's Gruber

theorangeview.net

26 pointsapress22 comments

Since he's first in line to ladle it out, I'm happy to watch Gruber eat a little claim chowder of his own, but I don't think he was being "defensive," I simply think he was mistaken.

Also, the whole "claim chowder" thing as he dishes it out usually refers to sharp criticism. As in, if someone else writes that the iPad is terrible because you'll never be able to sync it over wireless.

That's when you eat the chowder, because you were busy telling other people what they cannot do. In this case, Gruber seems to have simply misprognosticated how quickly wireless would become good enough to let go of the PC for a lot of iPad and iPhone users. I don't see that is being in the same realm as criticizing Apple or a competitor.

The canonical example of Gruber dishing out the claim chowder is probably this line:

  Guess What? They Just Walked In.
  --------------------------------

  Speaking of Palm CEO Ed Colligan, now’s a good time
  to recall his comments from last November, regarding
  the prospects of Apple’s then-only-rumored entry into
  the mobile phone market:

  > Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — 
  > including the wildly popular Apple Computer — 
  > could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone
  > sector.

  > “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here
  > figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said.
  > “PC guys are not going to just figure this out.
  > They’re not going to just walk in.”

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/08/24/colligan

Gruber's remarks about the need for a PC are not even remotely of the same tone as Ed Colligan's contempt for Apple's ability to build a phone.

> Since he's first in line to ladle it out, I'm happy to watch Gruber eat a little claim chowder of his own

FTR, he's called claim chowder on himself before: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/19/kindle-claim-cho...

I don't know about that.

Firstly, Gruber recently pulled up "claim chowder" for someone in 2001 who thought that Apple had a tough time to rebuild their company and would fail. Is that such a crazy idea back in 2001? It's only with the bias of what happened since that might make you believe it was crazy. It wasn't crazy though, it was wrong, but not crazy.

edit: I can't find the Gates one changed my example.

I like the real claim chowder by Gruber, not so much the fake stuff.

And he did say, in April 2011, that wifi was too slow for syncing. That's not very long ago, nothing has changed for wifi since then. So he is guilty of it right?

Secondly, it's not just wifi, we're talking about ISPs and broadband syncing to Apple's servers. So that's even more elaborate than Gruber thought was impossible.

Edit: example from 2001 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/20/alsin-claim-chow...

In 2001, this analyst declared "The game is effectively over", strongly advising his readers not to buy AAPL. Here is what happened to people who ignored that advice:

http://j.mp/iVrc6o

Presumably because Circuit City was one of Jim Collin's "Good to Great" companies, this same analyst was telling people to buy Circuit City. I'd show you that graph but for some reason I can't find it. Here's an approximation:

http://j.mp/mj77CD

Message board geeks get a pass for doubting Apple in 2001, sure. But stock market analysts who give ludicrously bad advice deserve all the chowder Gruber can dump on them.

Bad example.

That's still based on what happened. Apple was declining for a long time. He was surely wrong, and if you sold your stock then you lost because of him. Stock market speculation is already BS because so much is random.

I think "claim chowder" is crap if you don't call it fake in the moment. Going back with the bias of what happened and see who was wrong isn't particularly titillating. Gruber has done a lot of good CC, but this isn't one of them.

"Claim chowder" refers to refutations of strident and (usually) objectively measurable assertions. "Apples's going to sell a couple thousand of these at best." Often, things you can make stock purchasing decisions based on.

The Gruber statement this one cherry picks begins with "I think", and is about the noodley notion of "the post-PC era". In the end, what this blog post does is illustrate how Gruber is controlling the conversation, as rival pundits try to use his framing devices, badly.

The Gruber quote starts with the words "I don't think...", which fully qualifies if for me. I know exactly what I'm getting, an "opinion".

Claim Chowder tends to be a lot more arrogant than that, and is usually qualified with lines like "trust me" or "I know a thing or two about this or that so I'm right and Apple is dead wrong".

As far as I can tell, yesterday’s announcement supports what the OP is quoting from Gartenberg – his point was that “post PC” doesn’t mean no more PCs. The announcement yesterday simply meant that Apple now considers the PC a device on equal footing with the phone and tablet rather than the “hub” of your media collection. That doesn’t mean no PCs, it just means the end of “PC era” where they were the central computing device. Being demoted to a peer isn’t the same as being deprecated as obsolete.

Arguable. For one, iCloud will allow you to keep "the last 1000 pictures", but the mac or pc will be where all of them are supposed to be. I am not a big photographer, but I have at least four times those.

So you will still need a PC, and sadly, a backup system.

> For one, iCloud will allow you to keep "the last 1000 pictures", but the mac or pc will be where all of them are supposed to be. I am not a big photographer, but I have at least four times those.

It's a bit more complex:

* Photostream will keep 1000 pictures on your device

* And the last 30 days worth of pictures in your iCloud Photostream

* But that's for uncategorized pictures (your photo stream, evolving is kind-of the point of it being a stream), those in albums are there forever, separately, in your iCloud account

We're "post pc" when it comes to multimedia, but not for anything that requires a keyboard, e.g. word processing etc.... That's a big deal, no doubt, but until we move past our reliance on the keyboard for some essential applications, we're not post-pc.

Granted, we're probably headed in that direction.

Apple's bt keyboard works great with the iPad - I use it with mine. So while I agree that there are still apps that are impractical on a tablet (Photoshop with 12MP RAW images, anyone?), needing a keyboard is not a differentiating point.

It's not practical to write an essay on an iPad. Edit: without an external keyboard.

Sure, all you need is a case the makes it easy to carry both the keyboard and the device together. Perhaps with a hinge on one side so the keyboard protects the screen when you're not using it?

At least I have the option to not carry the keyboard (and usually, I don't.)

Arguable. You can move any photo from the 1,000 picture photostream into an album on your iPad or iPhone. Then the albums are all backed up to the iCloud's separate backup service.

Is that forever or as long as you have the photo on your device? I guess my question more broadly is what is Apple's "post-PC" scheme for the long term archiving of photos and other data?

PC is still the mass storage device where you can keep your lifetime of pictures. But some people don't think of pictures in terms of archiving. They think in terms of taking pictures, sharing them, and moving on. I'm not a "Post PC" person because I want to store my TBs of photos and maintain the external HD and DVD backups of same. Today's teenager is probably happy to let Facebook "store" their photos for them.

Hm. Interesting point. So, I guess what you're saying is that the question itself is not from a "Post-PC" perspective?

It's interesting, but seems like conflating a desire for archive with a desire for PC-level control. They seem like parallel but distinct issues to me.

Even FB stores those photos in perpetuity, doesn't it? I really don't know, I'm not on FB.

Is the idea of permanence or permanent record fading with the PC?

yes, but the pictures I have on my laptop tend to be a superset of those I have on my iphone, and AFAIU those will not be backed up in iCloud, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Just because there is wireless syncing and no need to activate with iTunes doesn't indicate that Jobs meant post-pc to mean "no pc needed". I still think post-pc means after the pc, as both Gartenberg and Gruber suggest.

There are plenty of things to criticize John Gruber for, but this is hardly one of them.

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