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Comment by davely | Hacker News Reader

I find that Gruber occasionally has some interesting insight but it’s often hard to take him seriously these days — he’s effectively an unofficial PR outlet for Apple.

(Fun fact: he co-created Markdown with Aaron Swartz)

Edit: Swartz not Schwartz

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It's a sad evolution. Gruber's blog is entitled Daring Fireball and in his early blogging days in the '00s he was in fact pretty daring and posted a lot of criticisms of Apple. Over time he had so thoroughly assimilated himself into the Apple way of thinking that he seldom notices whatever Apple is doing wrong.

He now gets exclusive 1 on 1 interviews with Apple execs and the blog is a full time job.

You got to shill to pay the bills.

> posted a lot of criticisms of Apple

His criticisms were all about how the NeXT folks were ruining Apple with their mach-o binaries, file paths & extensions, etc. You'd have thought that Avie Tevanian ran over his dog or something.

Really? I've always considered Gruber to be an Apple fanboy. He might write criticisms, but they read to me like a Deadhead penning an essay on why Aoxomoxoa isn't as good as Terrapin Station or something.

Ultimately, Gruber knows his audience is Apple enthusiasts and his material comes from being given access by Apple.

Swartz. Aaron Schwartz was in Mighty Ducks and Heavyweights.

Thank you. That’s an embarrassing mistake.

He's pretty critical of them in some areas. Mostly in developer-relations these days -- he doesn't like the anti-steering App Store rules, and Apple's general "we provided the successful platform; your apps contribute nothing to that" attitude.

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