indefensible: john gruber

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/11/cameron

asshole

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/11/green-day-rip-this-joint

yuppie

(PEDANTIC NOTE: House style here at Daring Fireball is to capitalize the second words in “iPod Mini” and “iPod Photo”, on the basis that they’re proper names, despite the fact that Apple’s marketing style is to use lowercase.)

you write a blog

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/08/campus

lol

Really beginning to think that Gruber needs his own thread, but I don't want to be the one to start it.

The latest Talk Show podcast, 35-ish minutes in. They're discussing the new iPad cover and he's practically on some kind of nerd interpretation of the old "Magnets? How the fuck do they work?" routine.

So I dare to visit his website today because of his verbal spastic attack, and one of the links is to a news story about the actress from The Wire with his heartfelt and not at all patronisingly semi-racist comment of "That’s a shame, but I’m glad to see her alive."

― James Mitchell, Thursday, March 10, 2011 8:36 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/08/campus

he is a champ at this glib commencement speech bullshit

arsehole

The rate card for his weekly sponsorship is now $5,500 -- $286,000 a year if it sells out at full price.

http://www.businessinsider.com/daring-fireball-2011-3#ixzz1OltvorIZ

not bad considering he just lazily throws up links most of the time.

Don't think of iCloud as the new MobileMe; think of iCloud as the new iTunes.

It also means iPhone users with iPhone-using friends and family no longer need SMS. I’ll cancel my SMS plan as soon as this ships.

I don’t think over-the-air backups or media syncing are coming soon. Wireless networking just isn’t fast enough. I’m not talking about Wi-Fi syncing over a local network to iTunes running on your Mac or PC — that may well be coming soon, but it wouldn’t solve the “how can these devices be ‘post-PC’ if they require a PC?” problem. We’re not talking about why the iPad needs a USB cable; we’re talking about why it needs a PC, period.

haha, i'd forgotten that. glad that there is a place to document gruber's predictions with the same mixture of obsessiveness and gloating that he reserves for everyone else.

"we’re talking about why it needs a PC, period"

http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/shuffling

The music on FM radio pretty much totally sucks

where did you read that? in a rolling stone you bought at an airport?

I’m biased, insofar as I consider Apple’s strategy more appealing than Google’s. But that’s because my interest lies in having the best possible user experience — the best-looking UIs, the lowest-latency responses, the smoothest animation, the most elegant designs. I share that interest with Apple. Google’s interest is in reaching the largest possible audience. That’s why I chose, at the outset of this paragraph, to say that I find Apple’s strategy “more appealing than”, rather than, say, “superior to”, Google’s. Apple’s strategy is correct for optimizing the quality of the user experience. Google’s strategy is correct for maximizing the number of users for its apps.

haha liking this thread no matter how redundant it is - keep em coming

Will be interesting to see how this pans out. Not sure what it means if it’s true that their initial target is Mobile Safari specifically, not mobile WebKit in general. My guess is that it’s simply a result of Mobile Safari being so far ahead of the Android WebKit engine.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/17/apple-buy-phone-industry

yes, but it would be illegal under US, UK and EU law, so what's your point?

Has he always been so mean-spirited? I don't remember him being so spiteful just a few years ago.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/06/17/come-on-gruber-youre-better-than-this

url a bit generous but otherwise, oh snap

Gruber seems to be right about things a lot of the time, though that's easy when the people he disagrees with are prone to willfully ignoring the fact that Apple is making hundreds of millions of dollars doing what it's doing and is preposterously unlikely to make any sudden changes in strategy. Also less of a raging, belligerent asshole than you might expect.

Also wrt the "buy whole cell phone industry" post that is sort of following up on an earlier link about how Apple could easily have enough cash in a few years to take itself private. That is, in an industry where firms are frequently assessed by their market cap or their VC funding or what have you, Apple actually has HUMONGOUS FAT STACKS OF CASH.

agreed that this guy is a bit of a dick, he has unsavory triumphalist tendencies, and thinks various middlebrow stuff is the height of human achievement - however as to his core competency, i do believe hes one of the best writers on design out there today

Chock full of SEO crap: My comment on Marco Arment's comment on John Gruber's comment on David Pogue's comment on Google's Chromebook.

Has anyone read the marco aren't Phish post?

Damn autocorrect: Arment

however as to his core competency, i do believe hes one of the best writers on design out there today

he doesn't really do this any more though?

Got sick of his blog a while ago - but I have to admit his comment on the Chromebook is kinda on point, why does it deserve a "good try!" sentiment?

Gruber's predictions that don't come true are still reasonable and make sense when you evaluate the facts available at the time. He can't rely on his mysterious inside sources all the time, you see.

You don't have to believe me, just ask Gruber. He's always Gruber. I mean, right.

he doesn't really do this any more though?

― caek, Sunday, June 19, 2011 6:18 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah its not most of his posts, but when he does write a long piece i feel like he really gets where design is at re todays technologies

also hes a v good clear writer

chrisdejabet Chris De Jabet by daringfireball
Just got complimented on my @daringfireball shirt at the Apple Store. Because I'm handsome.
18 hours ago

*stabs twitter in the face*

thought it was really out of line when this guy shot mr takagi

i really like gruber

which mac writers do you guys really like? i could use some more feeds in my google reader

Jean-Louis Gassee

totally forgot abt him, thanking u

feel like this post embodies many of his less good qualities

http://grab.by/cBWF

how long till some shill links him this thread and ilx gets ~fireballed~

one can dream

You are trying to view American McCarver on a shitty browser. Won't work.

Note that the UI screenshots are even set in Helvetica, not Arial. Some of the best evidence of good taste at Google I can ever recall.

duly noted.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/28/google-plus-videos

guh arial and helvetica are like exactly the same shit stfu already

A friend shared this blog post on Google Reader: http://stu.mp/2011/06/dear-yahoo-hire-me-as-your-next-ceo.html

I’d buy the NYT (for a mere $1.5bn!) and recruit John Gruber to be Editor in Chief of the “Yahoo! News” division.

I cried a little.

Oh god, until I read that blog post in full I thought that was a joke, like forcing him to cover stories about Microsoft.

Cringely's been half-nuts for years. Now I think he's full-nuts.

well, he's got a point

I guess it's not as bad as how he keeps referring to Paul Thurrott as a 'dick' purely because he writes about Microsoft.

cringelys nutsness is the best part of his shtick, guy is not afraid to think big

I don't think Cringely's being nuts there! Even if Jobs is showing pictures of full server rooms, it's not like he's shown pictures of the entire interior of the facility, and it's completely possible that it's not that densely populated.

yeah but thats not some weird conspiracy designed to intimidate rivals, its just building out future capacity

p sure this dood killed caylee http://horace.dediu.usesthis.com

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/11/cameron

asshole

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/07/08/murdoch

"congratulations to the tories"

wish someone would put this asshole in a room w/paul thurrott and then they can mutually annihilate each other

You are trying to view American McCarver on a shitty browser. Won't work.

maybe i've just been developing for legacy browsers too long at this point, but this kills me. laziest shit ever - you run a SPORTS BLOG ffs

Ordered

gruber owning a $100 box cutter is pvmic

he’s busy bitching on bluesky about Aftermath, an independent video games/internet culture site, having a pop-over on their articles

note this is coming from a man who has made negligible changes to his own blog’s design in the course of 20 years, and despite all his Apple boosterism he has no phone-friendly version of his site

relatable tbh

aftermath is cool imo. love chris person’s articles

otm

can't fault him for his contribution to Markdown but I have to say his Apple reporting has consistently slid. Still has pretty good takes on a lot of stuff Apple related.

you can do totally fault him for his contribution to Markdown. The explosion of incompatible variants and total lack of a standard is due to his deliberate neglect

his contribution to markdown was writing one perl script that used conventions already fairly prevalent on prior platforms and translating them to the html representation for italics, etc

really only gained traction, iirc, because MoveableType was the ad hoc standard blogging software and it made it in there. but as stet mention, he almost immediately said "yes, this standard is done" and didn't take any submissions, bugfixes, changes, etc. so it is in fact NOT a standard, just a bunch of formatting shorthand bits that are once again inconsistent

imo it's not any more useful or revolutionary than, say, bbcode, but nobody is writing "I created bbcode" at the top of their resume that I know of

right he did the easy bit and not the hard bit, and actively obstructed other people trying to do the hard bit

I mean, good for him on getting his foot in the door during the right time period when blogs were becoming popular, Apple was ascendant, and before Google Reader got nuked. He seems to be pretty well set up as a pundit, but if he had to create a website that hosts writing on the topics he already writes about from scratch in 2024, he'd absolutely crash and burn immediately

Mark Down would be a good stage name though...

nobody is writing "I created bbcode" at the top of their resume that I know of

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Tuesday, December 17, 2024 12:36 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

probably they are theyre just not well known apple bloggers

they probably have more notable accomplishments too, lol

has anyone figured out if the swiss graphic design fetishist/kubrick lover/dieter rams loving/apple afficionado types have screenshotted any movies not by stanley kubrick yet? heard through the grapevine they might have discovered christopher nolan at one point

hmm the pure aesthetics guys probably go for villeneuve more than nolan

more recently? good call

Gruber has a layer of conceit that is annoying.

"yours truly" is an ugly humblebrag

I basically agree with the new gruber piece but he is such a bad writer that it took me a long time to realise I agreed

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/13/rotten/

well they also promised carplay 2.0 about.. 2.5 years ago now and it still hasn’t turned up in a single car. they listed about a dozen car companies on their website but none of them have implemented it.

one of my friends said "I sometimes think about how smug Gruber must feel [about the success of Markdown] and it annoys me"

apple intelligence: apple’s kodak moment?

i’m still thinking of the self own of tim cook skimping on ram for so many generations of iphones that only iphone 15 pro and up can run it

more ram = lower battery life! ok, maybe not that much lower

I feel like Apple got stuck in-between having to kowtow to AI marketing and their impulse to only ship when they can do so safely at scale.

I’m sure there are pockets of the internet still doing this, but for years, people would complain about how Apple wasn’t adding every boutique feature that small competitors would have and that they were overly cautious or behind the curve, which, sure, if you define the curve that way, they’ll be behind by definition

they kind of dropped the ball by not doubling down on Shortcuts and other automation hooks in the last few years, because that’s exactly what they’ll need to glue everything together with a smarter natural language query thing

Apple is shipping, by far, the best microarchitectures for these applications. Unfortunately, these applications still don't exist in any useful way. Look at Logic's absurd song segmentation feature.

yeah the saving grace here is that nobody else has figured out how to make gen ai do these things reliably either

I haven’t messed with Microsoft’s new cloud business crap but the value proposition of search across all your files, correspondence, and recent actions seems like it could be useful, and they have the sandboxed app-specific security model where you can put tight boundaries around what you’re searching, unlike that abortive screen-scraping, capture-everything and sort it out later thing they tried in Windows 11. So far, coworkers report less than great results

Apple’s got the frameworks about right, they just need to get apps to surface that and tie it all together. I don’t think flinging all your shit at chatgpt and telling it to sort it out is going to be it, and it seems like they get it

I don’t think the AI marketing and boosting at Apple events is for customers — I think it’s for stockholders. I work in tech, but not devices or direct to consumer software, but we still had a bunch of stuff that got prioritized toward the end of last year to generate demos for “investor day”. It’s not all hype, but the moment you indicate to shareholders that there might be some magic thing you’re not at least evaluating… it’s a tail wagging the dog thing, where share price might not go up if you don’t at least pay lip service, and may go down if you don’t

damn, it really is everywhere

https://bsky.app/profile/theathletic.bsky.social/post/3lkc7e2n3tk27

Gruber thinks max is cynical

i mean max is cynical but not everyone is cut out for fawning over apps

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/max_read_literary_history_fake_apple_texts

maybe this is what he didnt like

Like a lot of troubled young men, I used to pay close attention to Apple’s developer conferences and special announcements, eagerly anticipating each new generation of iPhone and operating system.

interesting that gruber completely misses the whole idea of maxs piece and is just like of course these marketing materials are like this and in fact theyre very good thank you

Being a Professional Apple Blogger in the post-Jobs age seems like an unrewarding career, could he not pivot to vlogging where he makes Apple benchmark videos about how quickly you can export a 4k video about Apple benchmarks?

like most bloggers i think hes mostly a podcaster now, tho tbf he does still make a lot of blog posts, maybe hes actually the last blogger, salute

what kind of sick freaks listen to an Apple podcast

idk if its just apple or more tech in general either way roughly the same kind of sick freaks prob

ive perused the summaries and it is very apple heavy https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/

there is a podcast i listen to about apple called accidental tech podcast, but i only really listen to it because very smart nerd john siracusa is one of the hosts

I generally think apple makes decent shit but being an Apple fanboy in 2025 feels like being super into Microsoft in 2005 - 2010

Gruber having his fainting couch ready at the idea of Apple having an ad where someone is texting in all lowercase, or god forbid, with bad punctuation, kills me

one last one: it's funny that Gruber is like "this is so CYNICAL" when it's an analysis of what kind of sentiments, and the form those sentiments take, in marketing for a particular company. if analyzing why every ad has friends talking about "fun trips" and asking for pictures is cynical, why has Gruber spent decades at this point pontificating about aesthetics and then pretending to know things about supply chains? he's a web app creator who pivoted to punditry with no background in any of that. max at least is speaking from within his wheelhouse

max is treating the texts as if theyre real, gruber responds like uh ever heard of marketing, the funny part is that he thinks theyre good when theyre obviously stilted and odd, even sticking to their chosen form they could easily be done a lot better

what if Gruber just talks like that irl

tbf, all the android phone commercials that have pictures/texts that attempt to approximate how people actually communicate also seem pretty artificial and fake, but from the opposite direction. the pictures are still the best you'll get out of the phone camera, people are doing things that are supposed to be wholesome fun, but occasionally someone is texting "lol whatever"

what we really need is someone stumbling around, hungover at someone's house they crashed at attempting to use "find my" to locate their watch from their phone or vice versa, happy that their phone is semi-waterproof after they find it in a puddle of beer

But the Gawker attitude was that no subject was worthy of anything but withering scorn. I never could abide that, and there’s something like it undergirding this otherwise splendid piece from Read. It’s like an otherwise delightful cocktail with one distinctive unpleasant ingredient, which ingredient was added, deliberately, to imbue the libation with an aftertaste of spite.

I say! steady on old chap!

What if it was, in fact, the deliberate omission of an ingredient: Apple liqueur, a libation that sweetens your perceptions?