This isn't "reviewing", it's spin. There's not much to talk about with this review, and Gruber's talent is for making the boring stuff sound great. So he talks about the color gamut of the display. He fills space with nice-sounding pablum like (yes, this is a direct quote): "Apple boasts during last week’s event that they now measure the precision of the iPhone 5 assembly in microns. A micron is one-millionth of a meter." And he does this repeatedly through a long, winding, elegant post.

That doesn't tell you if it's a better phone than the 4S (or the GSIII, or whatever). All it does is give you a good reason to want it more than the 4S.

Gruber is a great writer but a terrible reviewer. His recent writing completely lacks any balance. It's obvious that he loves Apple and doesn't give a fair review. I don't have any issue with people liking Apple products but I don't understand why Hacker News upvotes his one-sided blog posts so highly.

Well, to be fair, Gruber is writing a love story here, not really an unbiased review. So, no, he doesn't blow away the other reviews, (As an unbiased review, Mossberg's is pretty good) but, for us lovers of all things Apple, his is the review we look for to give us that dopamine rush of reinforced sense of self worth from using Apple products.

I've been hitting refresh every five minutes on daringfireball since 7:00.

Note - I think his is the most well written of all the writeups so far. He put a lot of effort into this essay. I wish he did more like these, though I realize it must take a lot out of him.

He also demonstrates a bit of useful insight/balance here, that you wouldn't expect from what should be a purely apple-biased review, e.g. from the section on displays "Apple has a lead here, which is interesting, because they buy these displays from companies like LG."

> Gruber is an amazing writer. Blows away the other reviews.

I think you miswrote "shill".