Comment by bane

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?

> Because that's what that word means;

No it doesn't.

Shill means "an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others"

Being unable to accept or say negative things about your accomplice and only provide those things about your accomplice's competitors are all the marks of a shill. Gruber exists only to entice and encourage others to want, desire and do all things Apple. His post history is demonstration of this.

It doesn't mean he's paid directly by Apple, but benefits from Apple's success. He's not a "tech blogger" he's an "Apple blogger". If he was being paid directly he'd be an astroturfer. I'm using "shill" very precisely here.

> The market right now can be divided into two sections; things like the Pebble, and watches-with-apps (Apple Watch, Android Wear). For the latter category, which way you go entirely depends on what sort of phone you have,

But he does compare it. This article is not an analysis-in-a-isolation. He explicitly compares the Apple Watch to regular timepieces, and in such a way that it generally compares favorably to those devices -- then he spends a few paragraphs excusing why it's not that great of a watch.

He doesn't compare it against other smart watches or other fitness tracking devices at all, but both are market segments the Apple Watch explicitly markets towards, which he spends almost 1/6th of this essay talking about. It's not that I think the Apple Watch would fare poorly against those other devices, but that it brings up uncomfortable questions about the entire segment that Gruber isn't prepared to talk about because Apple hasn't told him how to talk about it (either directly or through their marketing and advertising channels).

> so a comparison arguably isn't particularly worthwhile.

Why wouldn't a comparison be worthwhile? They all have significant product overlap, the Venn diagram of all smart watches is almost a circle, while the Venn diagram with traditional watches is not. Yet he chose to spend 1,000 words on the regular timepiece comparison, and zero words on the market segment. I'm positing that this wasn't an accident. It's an easy comparison to make against the rest of the offerings in the segment.

- The battery life is better than just about any Android Watch on the market

- It's not as good as a Pebble

- But the screen and functionality is better than a Pebble, and most of the Android watches on the market

- The styling of the Apple watch appears to be better than other competing watches on the market

- But this comes at a cost, it's among the most expensive devices in the segment

- You also have to be in the Apple ecosystem to use it

There, that's easy. My mini-comparison review even makes the Apple Watch look like a good choice. It's because that's what a critical analysis looks like. You don't set the outcome of your review then fudge in 6,000 words to support it.

By not doing that there's only a few possibilities:

- In all the years that smart watches have been out, he's never bothered to even check one out, showing an extreme lack of interest in the segment, he's only now interested at all because Apple has put one out. This is useless.

- Now that he has an Apple watch, he could go to the his local electronics store and just use the novel technique of looking at a few competitors and give some impressions. He didn't and this is also useless.

- He did do the above, and doesn't want to write about it, because several years into the market now, the competitor's offerings are more mature and compare better to the Apple Watch. By not writing about this issue, he's shilling and is useless.

- He already decided to write a positive review about the Watch. This is preordained, since he always says positive things about Apple products. He acts like the rest of the market doesn't exist or is irrelevant, but $20 Casio watches are. This is useless.

The only useful thing he could have done, at minimum is say "I'll be doing a comparison test against the rest of the market in an upcoming article", at a maximum is use some of his 6,000 words to compare against the entire rest of the market.

But he doesn't and all we know is that Gruber wants you to think he thinks the Apple Watch is good.

https://daringfireball.net/