Gruber is terrible. I'm completely unapologetic about my opinion about him. He's everything that's wrong in tech news today. He's been able to carve a niche for himself preaching to a choir of folks with large disposable incomes by providing unashamed regurgitation of Apple's marketing bullet points so that people can reinforce their beliefs by having another bullet point that they made the right technology purchase. If his recent posts continued his tradition of information free praise, I'd still be flagging them off the front-page. I can think of very few tech writers as well known as him who offer less useful information than he does on any topic.

You are right, Apple didn't get where they are by producing crap, but they also didn't get where they are without getting it wrong sometimes, and it's really hard to find cases where Gruber recognizes that without bookending and drowning issues in a thousand words of qualification. Sure, he gets to point to the sentence among dozens where he mentions something that might, just maybe, be wrong, but the context he places issues in minimize and excuse these issues away.

The question he needs to be answering is not if the Apple Watch is the best smartwatch on the market, I don't doubt that it is. But it's, "are smartwatches a good idea?". He's not capable of answering that question honestly because to Gruber, anything Apple does is a good idea, Apple is doing a smartwatch, therefore it must be a good idea. He waits till Apple tells him how to think, then he write a post recycling and expanding on their marketing direction -- and he does this completely unironically.

If you read his review with a critical eye it boils down to this:

- It's a terrible watch (there's about 1,000 words trying to weazel around what a shitty watch it is)

- The industrial design is nice

- He hasn't found much value in the expressed use-cases it shipped with

- If you don't wear watches, you'll probably be more interested in it than people who already wear watches

There, almost 6,000 words boiled down to the 4 main bullet points, and only the hardware received any real praise. I think it's interesting that these 4 bullet points are echoed in most of the early reviews I've seen. The problems he mentions, then tries to bury, are expanded on in more honest reviews.

They aren't really problems with Apple's version of the Smart Watch per se, but with the idea of Smart Watches as a class of product. It's really hard to come up with a Smart Watch that makes any kind of sense, and it's pretty clear that Apple hasn't been able to justify it (and if Apple can't crack that nut who can?)

Will Apple sell millions of them? Yeah probably. I wonder how many will be to people who made their purchase decision after reading daringfireball?

Totally baffled by your mindset. Why is Gruber terrible and everything wrong with tech news today? Compared to Engadget et al he seems reasonably fair and balanced. Please point me towards something he's written that's objectively biased or bad.

Everything he writes is objectively biased. Have you ever read anything he's ever written?

Tech news is already so full of bought promotions pretending to be articles, fan boyism and subjective "analysis" it really doesn't need more. It's already enough of a burden on the reader to try to figure out if a review of some new product is being truthful or was paid for by an ad on page 23, or if the editor has some platform to push or if the writer wants to keep using the sources he's developed with some cool company.

Technology media is honestly pretty terrible in general, and very few of the faults of the arena don't apply to Gruber. Except he's also a really great writer. He's smart. So it's not quite out in the open like it might be on a lesser site like a CNET review. But he has lots and lots of tools that he employs to push his agenda.

Here's some literary devices that Gruber employs in almost everything he writes:

- Minimizing or Maximizing Framing devices (when Apple is right, he makes them smarter than Gods, when they're dead wrong he makes it seem like a reasonable alternative that's still better than anybody else)

- False comparisons (Apple's apple's to everybody else's inferior oranges)

- Jumbling of facts (often used to lead into a Min/Max Framing segment)

- Information-like sentences (lots of facts and figures, but no actual information)

- Omissions (easy to excuse)

- Emotionally driven excuses (Apple did it this way to pull at your heart strings)

- Setting then ignoring a thesis ("Here's why Apple's is amazing", then uses the above devices to ignore that thesis when Apple doesn't live up to it)

He also likes to drop little bomb posts questioning the veracity and fairness of the rest of the media, which subtly informs the reader that he's not like those journalists.

Here's his recent tech-news post history (I won't comment on his non-tech posts):

- ‘FINALLY’ OF THE WEEK - where he criticizes the tech media for using the word finally in the following sentence "Cheap USB-C Cables for Your MacBook Are Finally Here"

- TRIPADVISOR, BOOKING.COM REVIEWS START APPEARING IN APPLE MAPS - where he points out that Apple is a better company than Google because its Business Development team secured data sharing partnerships for Apple Maps

- HIGHBALL 1.0 - where he pumps up a cocktail recipe app. He drops the not-so-subtle-jab at Google line "They might have actually found a good use for QR codes."

- MORE ON APPLE’S CONSTRUCTION HIRING - where he brings doubt into Apple's probably illegal hiring policy for construction on their new campus w/r to convicted felons. Of course the doubt he sews is framed that everybody else must be doing it so Apple discriminating against them is okay.

- ROLLING STONE UVA RAPE STORY RETRACTION: A CASE STUDY IN FAILED JOURNALISM - again a piece that subtly brings up the failings of everybody else who's not him in providing trusted and Fox News style fair & balanced coverage of things

- REPORT CLAIMS SAMSUNG PAID HUNDREDS OF ‘FANS’ TO ATTEND GALAXY S6 LAUNCH IN CHINA - an uncritical regurgitation of a quote from the WantChinaTimes, with an update of a quote from Samsung denying it. No insight or discussion from Gruber, no sources checked.

- ‘APPARENTLY NONE OF YOU GUYS REALIZE HOW BAD OF AN IDEA A TOUCHSCREEN IS ON A PHONE’ - where he quotes somebody else quoting somebody from 2007 comparing a Samsung flip phone to an iPhone

- FELONS BARRED FROM CONSTRUCTING APPLE’S CAMPUS - another post from him on this subject, this time excusing Apple because background checks on employees of the richest most profitable company in history must be "expensive"

- Reach for the Sky, Pando - where he criticizes the SF Chronicle for breaking the story on Apple's discriminatory hiring process. He also takes time to defend Steve Job's notoriously abrasive personality and the illegal hiring practices Apple has taken part in previously w/r to tech workers.

- JOANNA STERN’S GALAXY S6 REVIEW - where his only point is are that the S6 is an iPhone lookalike and Samsung's software sucks, and they aren't up to competing against Apple's products. Of course he completely omits that the article claims the S6, in balance, is a match to the iPhone 6. If your information source was Gruber's take on the review, you'd think the S6 was a cheap unusable knock-off. But the review doesn't claim that at all. He carefully omits in his quotes where the review praises the S6 for a better camera set, better battery life, faster recharging, bigger storage, cheaper price and a better screen.

and on and on and on going back years.

> - JOANNA STERN’S GALAXY S6 REVIEW > If your information source was Gruber's take on the review, you'd think the S6 was a cheap unusable knock-off

The software is the only point he cares to comment on. But his introduction to the quote is:

>> A rave review for everything but...

I had no trouble parsing this.

And for more context, this item preceded the link to Joanna Stern's review by a few posts:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/04/03/bohn-galaxy-s6

'He drops the not-so-subtle-jab at Google line "They might have actually found a good use for QR codes."' - Huh? What do QR codes have to do with Google? It did go through a brief period of being somewhat keen on them before quietly forgetting about them, but it's not like they invented it or anything.

So, from reading his review you came away with the impression that he thinks it's terrible. He mentioned lots of bad things about it. Yet you hate him for only praising it. That doesn't really follow. Perhaps you should rethink your position.

I hate him because he spends approximately 5,500 words of this 6,000 word review framing how awesome Apple and all their wonderful products are and how terrible the rest of the world is for not being Apple before giving a tiny set of heavily qualified problems.

With Gruber the answer to the question "did Gruber like this Apple product?" is one of two answers

1) Yes, with a 2-5 sentence blog post

2) Yes, with a multi-thousand line blog post he buries issues inside of

And to "did Gruber like this non-Apple product?" the answer is

1) No, it obviously sucks

2) No, because Apple does whatever it is better

These days he at least provides some useful information in his long form posts, so I don't autoflag them like I used to. But he's often virtually information free.

So someone who makes four main points in his review - two negative ones and one that's at least highly ambivalent - is preaching to the chore and just regurgitating Apple marketing bullet points. Got it.

No, somebody who buries those 2 negative points in 6,000 words of rhetorical framing devices is. Have you ever even seen the content of Daringfireball?

I totally agree to this. Gruber just praises everything that Apple does and knocks out other ideas. I see bias in his analysis of other ideas and products. Works for him because so many people want to hear exactly that.