indefensible: john gruber

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

actually i think i hate sub-gruber wannabe sycophant ux doods even worse than gruber proper - so much hot air about making software "empathetic," so much whining about not getting paid to be a thought leader, so much referring to "marco" by the mononym...

http://i.imgur.com/e7obs.png

Read a blog post about grids. Saw a movie about Helvetica. Short. Terse. Sentences.

TS: john gruber vs lieutenant gruber from 'allo 'allo

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.

RAGE!

oops already posted X:

it cannot be mocked too often. the star was a nice touch.

I listened to some of his most recent podcasts during the week and was astounded by his and Dan Benjamin's claim that it gets 800,000 downloads an episode.

Err, what? Maybe it was some kind of belated rip on The Daily's iPad app but I think they were being serious. There's no way it's true, though.

i think it's more like 400,000, but i could be wrong

800,000 was either the WWDC or post-WWDC download count iirc, but again, i could be wrong

It's like his amazing high trafficked and revolutionary new sports website, which is actually a fucking tumble blog about baseball where you click on the notes to find less than half a dozen people 'liked' each post and fuck-all anybody reblogged anything, because why the fuck would you.

I'd rather read David Beckham's views on fonts an touch interfaces.

are you kidding i'd TOTALLY read david beckham's views on fonts and touch interfaces

Dean Martin’s recipe for hamburgers. Sounds perfect. ★

nice commentary.

Sounds like... salted meat and a glass of bourbon

http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2008-March/001163.html

-J.G.

I give it a C-. Not up to the high standards of open source assholery established by the likes of Linus Torvalds. Canonical example http://lwn.net/Articles/249460/

Yes, in August, Apple is going to start selling Lion on USB sticks. But I think most of us really will be able to get by without them. That’s why the USB stick installers are going to cost $69, a $40 markup over the App Store download. Apple wants us to go download-only.

Rather than try to one-up their selections I’m going to one-down them. Herewith, then, are the Top Ten Worst Westerns. Observations inside.

You can tell he’s right on most of these, from the posters alone.

god what a bore.

dude is like a demigod of suburban consumerism, yelling so loudly about inane bullshit from atop a mountain of 'slightly used' apple products. good links sometimes tho.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/07/20/scrollvetica

Scrollvetica.

SCROLLVETICA

not to mention scroll reverser has been around since day 1 of the lion betas

does it set yr scrollbars in helvetica

Marco Arment is way worse; he's like distilled Gruber shit.

lol i like both of them

It's a beautiful, simple and clean way of moving your fat fingers along the edge of the touchpad.

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?