
Happy claim chowder for DaringFireball's Gruber - apress
http://theorangeview.net/2011/06/happy-claim-chowder-for-gruber/
======
raganwald
Since he's first in line to ladle it out, I'm happy to watch Gruber eat a
little claim chowder of his own, but I don't think he was being "defensive," I
simply think he was mistaken.

Also, the whole "claim chowder" thing as he dishes it out usually refers to
sharp criticism. As in, if someone else writes that the iPad is terrible
because you'll never be able to sync it over wireless.

That's when you eat the chowder, because you were busy telling other people
what they cannot do. In this case, Gruber seems to have simply
misprognosticated how quickly wireless would become good enough to let go of
the PC for a lot of iPad and iPhone users. I don't see that is being in the
same realm as criticizing Apple or a competitor.

The canonical example of Gruber dishing out the claim chowder is probably this
line:

    
    
      Guess What? They Just Walked In.
      --------------------------------
    
      Speaking of Palm CEO Ed Colligan, now’s a good time
      to recall his comments from last November, regarding
      the prospects of Apple’s then-only-rumored entry into
      the mobile phone market:
    
      > Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — 
      > including the wildly popular Apple Computer — 
      > could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone
      > sector.
    
      > “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here
      > figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said.
      > “PC guys are not going to just figure this out.
      > They’re not going to just walk in.”
    

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/08/24/colligan>

Gruber's remarks about the need for a PC are not even remotely of the same
tone as Ed Colligan's contempt for Apple's ability to build a phone.

~~~
napierzaza
I don't know about that.

Firstly, Gruber recently pulled up "claim chowder" for someone in 2001 who
thought that Apple had a tough time to rebuild their company and would fail.
Is that such a crazy idea back in 2001? It's only with the bias of what
happened since that might make you believe it was crazy. It wasn't crazy
though, it was wrong, but not crazy.

edit: I can't find the Gates one changed my example.

I like the real claim chowder by Gruber, not so much the fake stuff.

And he did say, in April 2011, that wifi was too slow for syncing. That's not
very long ago, nothing has changed for wifi since then. So he is guilty of it
right?

Secondly, it's not just wifi, we're talking about ISPs and broadband syncing
to Apple's servers. So that's even more elaborate than Gruber thought was
impossible.

Edit: example from 2001 [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/20/alsin-
claim-chow...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/20/alsin-claim-
chowder)

~~~
tptacek
In 2001, this analyst declared "The game is effectively over", strongly
advising his readers not to buy AAPL. Here is what happened to people who
ignored that advice:

<http://j.mp/iVrc6o>

Presumably because Circuit City was one of Jim Collin's "Good to Great"
companies, this same analyst was telling people to buy Circuit City. I'd show
you that graph but for some reason I can't find it. Here's an approximation:

<http://j.mp/mj77CD>

Message board geeks get a pass for doubting Apple in 2001, sure. But stock
market analysts who give _ludicrously bad advice_ deserve all the chowder
Gruber can dump on them.

Bad example.

~~~
napierzaza
That's still based on what happened. Apple was declining for a long time. He
was surely wrong, and if you sold your stock then you lost because of him.
Stock market speculation is already BS because so much is random.

I think "claim chowder" is crap if you don't call it fake in the moment. Going
back with the bias of what happened and see who was wrong isn't particularly
titillating. Gruber has done a lot of good CC, but this isn't one of them.

------
tptacek
"Claim chowder" refers to refutations of strident and (usually) objectively
measurable assertions. "Apples's going to sell a couple thousand of these at
best." Often, things you can make stock purchasing decisions based on.

The Gruber statement this one cherry picks begins with "I think", and is about
the noodley notion of "the post-PC era". In the end, what this blog post does
is illustrate how Gruber is controlling the conversation, as rival pundits try
to use his framing devices, badly.

------
tomelders
The Gruber quote starts with the words "I don't think...", which fully
qualifies if for me. I know exactly what I'm getting, an "opinion".

Claim Chowder tends to be a lot more arrogant than that, and is usually
qualified with lines like "trust me" or "I know a thing or two about this or
that so I'm right and Apple is dead wrong".

------
tomkarlo
As far as I can tell, yesterday’s announcement supports what the OP is quoting
from Gartenberg – his point was that “post PC” doesn’t mean no more PCs. The
announcement yesterday simply meant that Apple now considers the PC a device
on equal footing with the phone and tablet rather than the “hub” of your media
collection. That doesn’t mean no PCs, it just means the end of “PC era” where
they were the central computing device. Being demoted to a peer isn’t the same
as being deprecated as obsolete.

------
riffraff
Arguable. For one, iCloud will allow you to keep "the last 1000 pictures", but
the mac or pc will be where all of them are supposed to be. I am not a big
photographer, but I have at least four times those.

So you will still need a PC, and sadly, a backup system.

~~~
apress
Arguable. You can move any photo from the 1,000 picture photostream into an
album on your iPad or iPhone. Then the albums are all backed up to the
iCloud's separate backup service.

~~~
joebadmo
Is that forever or as long as you have the photo on your device? I guess my
question more broadly is what is Apple's "post-PC" scheme for the long term
archiving of photos and other data?

~~~
alanfalcon
PC is still the mass storage device where you can keep your lifetime of
pictures. But some people don't think of pictures in terms of archiving. They
think in terms of taking pictures, sharing them, and moving on. I'm not a
"Post PC" person because I _want_ to store my TBs of photos and maintain the
external HD and DVD backups of same. Today's teenager is probably happy to let
Facebook "store" their photos for them.

~~~
joebadmo
Hm. Interesting point. So, I guess what you're saying is that the question
itself is not from a "Post-PC" perspective?

It's interesting, but seems like conflating a desire for archive with a desire
for PC-level control. They seem like parallel but distinct issues to me.

Even FB stores those photos in perpetuity, doesn't it? I really don't know,
I'm not on FB.

Is the idea of permanence or permanent record fading with the PC?

------
YooLi
Just because there is wireless syncing and no need to activate with iTunes
doesn't indicate that Jobs meant post-pc to mean "no pc needed". I still think
post-pc means after the pc, as both Gartenberg and Gruber suggest.

------
kmfrk
There are plenty of things to criticize John Gruber for, but this is hardly
one of them.

