Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing.
The more this perception is challenged, the more fiercely it gets defended. An attack on $BRAND_OF_CHOICE is viewed as an attack on their choice to invest in it, and thus an personal attack on themselves. So they seek to reaffirm their choices via whatever and whoever will say what they want to hear.
MG Siegler on the other hand has been perfectly described by Lyons. All he does is generate venom, and copious amounts of it, followed by a couple of "Fuck You's"" and so-on. I think he's the National Enquirer of tech. reporting. And hence, ankle biting Chihuahua is more than correct.
If Dan's reading this, good-luck mate. I am glad you called out Siegler's bluff. What he was trying to do with the Path issue was simply 'diversion'. Rake up an issue that can get people talking - loud enough - that it drowns out the issue at hand (callous and selfish handling of privacy in the Silicon Valley).
http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/balls
Gruber and Siegler are symbiotes and it is entirely appropriate to drag Siegler in.
a. Lyons' article makes no mention of him. b. Gruber and Siegler might write about Apple, but Gruber can actually write, and Siegler can't. Ankle biting chihuahua is just right.
Anyway, you make a good point, and I hope I clarified why I thought Gruber shouldn't be in this list.
You say "iPhone's are stupid!" and all they hear is "I think YOU are stupid!".
A lot of people define themselves by distilling the version of themselves they want to portray to the world as a collective of company logos and brands.
I don't think it is healthy, but it sure makes sense why people do it.
Harley Davidson is another example where this occurs.
Consider all the tribes that don't even have a coherent "brand" behind them: C people and Ruby people; truck people and sports car people; dog people and cat people; PC gamers and console gamers; new york- and chicago-style pizza people; goths and hipsters and rockabillies; nerds and jocks; white-collar and blue-collar people; etc.
You a farmer in Illinois? Then the noun could be "John Deer" or "Monsanto" and you'll get appropriate responses.
If you are a chef in New York you could say "Dilantium Knives" are/aren't stupid and get an appropriate response and so on.
We are a lot like race car drivers anymore; draping the brands of the companies we are proud to identify ourselves by.
"Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing."
Or maybe it's just a good blog?
Despite happily not owning a Mac for almost a decade I've continued to read Gruber all this time because his signal to noise ratio is off the charts compared to any other tech blogger. His voice is unique and entertaining. The entire layout is clean and sparse. It's one of the few tech RSS feeds you know isn't going to be knee deep in repackaged press releases and bullshit false equivalence analysis.
If all you had to do to make a half million dollars a year was turn out snarky one liners there'd be a lot more millionaires in the world.
Post purchase dissonance reduction is a well known cognitive bias[1]. And what can be better for dissonance reduction than someone telling you that you have good taste, and anyone who buys the competition is a philistine?
I should point out that this does not impute anything to the quality of the products themselves. I just posit that blogs such as Gruber's play a active part in the ecosystem due to our cognitive biases. They are not merely a passive observer.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-purchase_rationalization
These gadgets are EXPENSIVE. If you're clearing $15.00 an hour and you buy a smartphone, that's 15-40 hours of your life that you've dedicated to that little machine. You can see why there would be fervor over those devices, especially for those enthusiasts that have to work so hard to afford them in the first place.
It's the other way around: Apple isn't successful because of Gruber and Siegler, Gruber and Siegler are successful because they tied their fortunes to Apple.
The only other TechCrunch writer that I regularly read is Devin Coldewey and that's because he has interesting articles and actually seems knowledgeable about technology. In other words I have learned things from his blog posts.
Then please, stop reading his blog posts, it's the only way he'll learn.