Nobody said Gruber wasn't biased, but he forms cogent arguments. The same can not be said for Apple's consistent detractors who seem to have a real chip on their shoulder and thus end up grasping at straws.
Granted there is a lot of valid Apple criticism that you won't get from Daring Fireball, but everyone has their viewpoint. Gruber is far from the worst stuff that shows up on HN.
No he doesn't. The majority of his posts are transparent fact twisting and fantastically uninteresting (as are the predictable comment threads surrounding most of his posts). On the rare occasion he's not outright fanboying for Apple, he can be a decent and breezy writer.
Unless he's actually providing some interesting commentary (and yes I do give his posts a read so I don't try and kill something that's genuinely useful) I'm resigned to just flagging his mindlessly biased nonsense.
In other words, I don't flag all of his stuff, but I did flag this.
But we can summarize the vast majority of Grubers posts thusly:
"Something about Apple = Great"
then generate a dozen or so threads of nothing but either fawning praise for Gruber or the same repeated complaints about his bias.
At this point Gruber posts and the follow up "conversation" (I'm using it charitably at this point) are something one could probably machine generate, then randomly insert the entire thing into HN's new queue and it would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
in other words, Gruber fails the Turing test and I for one (among apparently several HNers) are tired of having what are essentially Markov chains jamming up the front page.
The problem is everyone coming out and saying "let's ban Gruber" every time one of his stories are posting. This compels people like me to respond because I think he posts interesting stuff. If it weren't for the knee jerk reaction from the haters then we could have a decent discussion. I certainly wouldn't come in here unilaterally praising Gruber, I would respond to his points just like I do with any other post (except Dvorak, I always propose banning Dvorak because he is actively corrosive to intelligent discourse).
I ask this as an absolutely honest question, when Gruber writes (as he is prone to do) a piece that consists pretty much entirely of Apple praise, what exactly is it about that you find interesting?
I'm not trying to troll, it's clear that there is a minority here, including myself that can't find any possible information in them, but the HN majority clearly find his writing absolutely fascinating and full of all kinds of information nuggets that pass me and others right by.
I always propose banning Dvorak because he is actively corrosive to intelligent discourse
Why can't his articles just be well written opinion pieces? He's making observations and drawing conclusions from them about a company (and their products) that he clearly loves.
If one isn't interested one can just move on just as I move on when I see a post about Java or politics.
I am not sure if this is what you meant, but cogent means convincing.
1. Are you convinced that going forward, Apple's most "sustainable advantage" is economies of scale? Do you believe that consumers primarily buy Apple products based on price?
2. Do you believe that building up economies of scale would take Dell or Samsung a "decade"?
(These are the primary claims in the conclusion of Gruber's essay.)
1. The economies of scale may not translate to lower prices for the consumer. Consider their mobile offerings. Apple has a tiny portion of the handphone market share, but makes huge profits. They appear to get massive economies of scale.
If you sell a handphone cheaper than the iPhone, you make very little profit and if Apple ever feels threatened, they can just slash their own prices and still make more profit than you. Until then they charge what the market will bear and make huge profits that they reinvest into their business increasing their lead.
2. It's possible. In 2009 Apple purchased all of Samsung's NAND. At the time that was apparently over 40% of the world's NAND.
Granted there is a lot of valid Apple criticism that you won't get from Daring Fireball, but everyone has their viewpoint. Gruber is far from the worst stuff that shows up on HN.