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Comment by danudey

3 years ago

As an Apple fanboy, I can easily say that Linus does not hate Apple.

Linus DOES hate a lot of what Apple does; cases where they make things more unrepairable for no real reason, or various socio-political causes (like opposing Right to Repair or unions or whatever).

Regardless of that though, I would trust a Linus review of a new iPhone or iPad a lot more than I would trust a lot of other sites, because I know he's not going in with Apple fanboyism (the way I would, for example), and he gives reasons for all his opinions.

Fundamentally, he always comes across as principled. If he has an opinion he'll tell you, and he'll give you a reason. He'll admit that he was wrong when he (believes he) was wrong. He'll contextualize his thoughts so you can decide if this or that opinion is really relevant to your situation.

As far as I've seen, his AMD/Intel/nvidia opinion changes follow along with the facts. He's pretty PO'ed at Intel for basically just sitting around with their fingers up their asses for however many years, and only actually trying to make good products at good prices (and largely failing) when AMD suddenly stepped everything up.

nvidia makes great video cards, the best on the market, but he's not going to avoid calling them out for shady or anti-consumer business practices. AMD makes great CPUs and good video cards, but if they have a disingenuous benchmark or claim he's going to say something about it.

I dunno, no one is entirely unbiased, but from what I've seen over the years, I can trust Linus more than most other people.

As an Apple apologist, I also concur with most of the above.

Though I do find it amusing that Linus has often commented negatively on companies that don't want their employes to unionise, when Linus does much the same thing. In the case of LMG, Linus employs emotional threats, publicly warning his employees that forming a union would represent a declaration of "personal failure". Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% with Linus here. Unionising is what you do in response to exploitation, not as a default state of affairs. I just wish he could see the parallel when commenting on other companies which aren't currently unionised.

[Edit: just noticed that this exact point was already discussed to death elsewhere in this sub-thread.]

  • Unionisation as a default state of affairs is what prevents exploitation. Join a union.

    • Not to mention that if you wait to unionize until you are being exploited, you will have far less power to resist coercion. Striking when you have some money under the mattress is a lot easier than doing so after you've eaten the last of the shoe leather.

    • Which is great in theory, until you realise that unions can and do exploit workers too. Collectives of people (whether corporations, unions, or entire countries) tend towards corruption as they scale. History has shown that large unions are similarly prone to exploitation and corruption.

      7 replies →

  • You also unionise to prevent exploitation, it's not just a reactionary option. Yes, it can get unnecessarily adversarial. We'd be better off if unions were the default but were only adversarial where necessary. I believe countries like Germany do a bit better at this?

  • > Unionising is what you do in response to exploitation, not as a default state of affairs.

    You're not from France I can tell ;)

    But yeah if people in such a small company start organising it means stuff is wrong

As someone who loathes Apple, I disagree. But I do agree that there's basically no place to get a trustworthy resource on Apple. Because, for the same reason I don't trust Linus, money is involved.

  • It is unreasonable to expect any one source to be consistently reliable. The "trustworthy resource" is multiple sources with diverse views. Combine your LMG diet with some Rene Ritchie, Hoeg Law, etc.

  • I think the truth is you cant trust any one reviewer, you should always look at multiple reviewers.

    • Thats was true some time ago, but isn't anymore - for every authentic review you will find hundreds of fake SEO article/comments. This means that by simply increasing n you're basically guaranteed to be less informed.

      Welcome to the age of misinformation.