Granted there is a lot of valid Apple criticism that you won't get from Daring Fireball, but everyone has their viewpoint. Gruber is far from the worst stuff that shows up on HN.
No he doesn't. The majority of his posts are transparent fact twisting and fantastically uninteresting (as are the predictable comment threads surrounding most of his posts). On the rare occasion he's not outright fanboying for Apple, he can be a decent and breezy writer.
Unless he's actually providing some interesting commentary (and yes I do give his posts a read so I don't try and kill something that's genuinely useful) I'm resigned to just flagging his mindlessly biased nonsense.
In other words, I don't flag all of his stuff, but I did flag this.
But we can summarize the vast majority of Grubers posts thusly:
"Something about Apple = Great"
then generate a dozen or so threads of nothing but either fawning praise for Gruber or the same repeated complaints about his bias.
At this point Gruber posts and the follow up "conversation" (I'm using it charitably at this point) are something one could probably machine generate, then randomly insert the entire thing into HN's new queue and it would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
in other words, Gruber fails the Turing test and I for one (among apparently several HNers) are tired of having what are essentially Markov chains jamming up the front page.
I'm not trying to troll, it's clear that there is a minority here, including myself that can't find any possible information in them, but the HN majority clearly find his writing absolutely fascinating and full of all kinds of information nuggets that pass me and others right by.
I always propose banning Dvorak because he is actively corrosive to intelligent discourse
No argument from me at all.
If one isn't interested one can just move on just as I move on when I see a post about Java or politics.
1. Are you convinced that going forward, Apple's most "sustainable advantage" is economies of scale? Do you believe that consumers primarily buy Apple products based on price?
2. Do you believe that building up economies of scale would take Dell or Samsung a "decade"?
(These are the primary claims in the conclusion of Gruber's essay.)
If you sell a handphone cheaper than the iPhone, you make very little profit and if Apple ever feels threatened, they can just slash their own prices and still make more profit than you. Until then they charge what the market will bear and make huge profits that they reinvest into their business increasing their lead.
2. It's possible. In 2009 Apple purchased all of Samsung's NAND. At the time that was apparently over 40% of the world's NAND.