But Gruber also spends an extraordinary amount of time these days using framing devices to either draw false comparisons that put Apple on top, or minimize the cases where Apple clearly screwed up. You could easily cut this review down by 2/3rds just by getting rid of the superfluous framing he uses throughout and not lose any information at all. The amount of hemming and hawing in this makes me think that he's not really buying it this time. It's not a crap device, but it's not clear what it's good for and it's not strictly better than just a normal watch. He didn't really effuse about Apple's stated use-cases for the device. His hope throughout is that maybe it'll appeal to non-watch wearers?

You'll also notice that he carefully doesn't compare it to all the other smart watches in the growing segment. He pretends like it only is comparable to regular watches, like the Apple watch was introduced into a market vacuum, cut from whole cloth (Apple's magical genius cloth), and completely uninformed by the three decades of smartwatch development.

Obviously Gruber is a big fan of Apple, but your criticism of him is a bit harsh. I assume he didn't spend a lot of time comparing it to Android wear because he hasn't spent a ton of time using Android wear.

I'm a little afraid of the first gen bugs, and some of the reviews I read today weren't completely sold, but pretty much every single one that I read said it was far and away the best smartwatch they've used, even if they still weren't completely sold and gave it meh reviews overall.

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?

Tech news is already so full of bought promotions pretending to be articles, fan boyism and subjective "analysis" it really doesn't need more. It's already enough of a burden on the reader to try to figure out if a review of some new product is being truthful or was paid for by an ad on page 23, or if the editor has some platform to push or if the writer wants to keep using the sources he's developed with some cool company.

Technology media is honestly pretty terrible in general, and very few of the faults of the arena don't apply to Gruber. Except he's also a really great writer. He's smart. So it's not quite out in the open like it might be on a lesser site like a CNET review. But he has lots and lots of tools that he employs to push his agenda.

Here's some literary devices that Gruber employs in almost everything he writes:

- Minimizing or Maximizing Framing devices (when Apple is right, he makes them smarter than Gods, when they're dead wrong he makes it seem like a reasonable alternative that's still better than anybody else)

- False comparisons (Apple's apple's to everybody else's inferior oranges)

- Jumbling of facts (often used to lead into a Min/Max Framing segment)

- Information-like sentences (lots of facts and figures, but no actual information)

- Omissions (easy to excuse)

- Emotionally driven excuses (Apple did it this way to pull at your heart strings)

- Setting then ignoring a thesis ("Here's why Apple's is amazing", then uses the above devices to ignore that thesis when Apple doesn't live up to it)

He also likes to drop little bomb posts questioning the veracity and fairness of the rest of the media, which subtly informs the reader that he's not like those journalists.

Here's his recent tech-news post history (I won't comment on his non-tech posts):

- ‘FINALLY’ OF THE WEEK - where he criticizes the tech media for using the word finally in the following sentence "Cheap USB-C Cables for Your MacBook Are Finally Here"

- TRIPADVISOR, BOOKING.COM REVIEWS START APPEARING IN APPLE MAPS - where he points out that Apple is a better company than Google because its Business Development team secured data sharing partnerships for Apple Maps

- HIGHBALL 1.0 - where he pumps up a cocktail recipe app. He drops the not-so-subtle-jab at Google line "They might have actually found a good use for QR codes."

- MORE ON APPLE’S CONSTRUCTION HIRING - where he brings doubt into Apple's probably illegal hiring policy for construction on their new campus w/r to convicted felons. Of course the doubt he sews is framed that everybody else must be doing it so Apple discriminating against them is okay.

- ROLLING STONE UVA RAPE STORY RETRACTION: A CASE STUDY IN FAILED JOURNALISM - again a piece that subtly brings up the failings of everybody else who's not him in providing trusted and Fox News style fair & balanced coverage of things

- REPORT CLAIMS SAMSUNG PAID HUNDREDS OF ‘FANS’ TO ATTEND GALAXY S6 LAUNCH IN CHINA - an uncritical regurgitation of a quote from the WantChinaTimes, with an update of a quote from Samsung denying it. No insight or discussion from Gruber, no sources checked.

- ‘APPARENTLY NONE OF YOU GUYS REALIZE HOW BAD OF AN IDEA A TOUCHSCREEN IS ON A PHONE’ - where he quotes somebody else quoting somebody from 2007 comparing a Samsung flip phone to an iPhone

- FELONS BARRED FROM CONSTRUCTING APPLE’S CAMPUS - another post from him on this subject, this time excusing Apple because background checks on employees of the richest most profitable company in history must be "expensive"

- Reach for the Sky, Pando - where he criticizes the SF Chronicle for breaking the story on Apple's discriminatory hiring process. He also takes time to defend Steve Job's notoriously abrasive personality and the illegal hiring practices Apple has taken part in previously w/r to tech workers.

- JOANNA STERN’S GALAXY S6 REVIEW - where his only point is are that the S6 is an iPhone lookalike and Samsung's software sucks, and they aren't up to competing against Apple's products. Of course he completely omits that the article claims the S6, in balance, is a match to the iPhone 6. If your information source was Gruber's take on the review, you'd think the S6 was a cheap unusable knock-off. But the review doesn't claim that at all. He carefully omits in his quotes where the review praises the S6 for a better camera set, better battery life, faster recharging, bigger storage, cheaper price and a better screen.

and on and on and on going back years.

The software is the only point he cares to comment on. But his introduction to the quote is:

>> A rave review for everything but...

I had no trouble parsing this.

And for more context, this item preceded the link to Joanna Stern's review by a few posts:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/04/03/bohn-galaxy-s6

With Gruber the answer to the question "did Gruber like this Apple product?" is one of two answers

1) Yes, with a 2-5 sentence blog post

2) Yes, with a multi-thousand line blog post he buries issues inside of

And to "did Gruber like this non-Apple product?" the answer is

1) No, it obviously sucks

2) No, because Apple does whatever it is better

These days he at least provides some useful information in his long form posts, so I don't autoflag them like I used to. But he's often virtually information free.

Do you have evidence of Apple secretly paying Gruber for apparent opinions? Because that's what that word means; it's a form of marketing fraud.

> You'll also notice that he carefully doesn't compare it to all the other smart watches in the growing segment.

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, so a comparison arguably isn't particularly worthwhile.

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.

[citation neeeded]

This is great point, which I never considered. He consistently creates false arguments where Apple is favored.

Here's the thing - John Gruber is a partisan (to quote Siracusa), but so is his audience - so it's entirely reasonable that he would offer a partisan's analysis of the Apple Watch.

Even so - I thought he was more critical of the watch than most other Apple products - and perhaps it's because he does wear a watch, and was trying to decide whether he was interested in wearing an Apple watch instead.

His conclusion seemed to be that it wasn't clear he would.

Put another way, of the four reviews that I've read so far (NYT, Recode, The Verge) - Gruber's was the first one that made me think that buying a version 1 Apple Watch wasn't such a great idea - simply because it was a partisans review that was clearly calling out disclaimers.

You should try listening to his podcast(s). Just like pre-Functional-High-Ground-Marco, I find Gruber to be a lot more realistic and balanced when he is talking, not writing.

[1] http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-g...

I wouldn't be surprised if we'll continue to see more honesty from Arment - I think he's realized that it only did Siracusa good. Gruber, who I love his reading, is in a tough position - he has to tow the company line in order to get the invites and gear from Apple, which are somewhat important to DF.

Strava is a killer app for those who already have an iPhone: Watch Sport costs about what I would pay to upgrade to the latest Garmin Edge, plus it tracks non-exercise activity (which is something I like but am not willing to pay for by itself). On top of all that, Apple Watch comes with maps (and turn-by-turn directions) for free (something you pay for out the nose with Garmin).

Then there's the mobile payments piece. Taking out your phone is fairly low-friction, but double-tapping a button on your watch and holding it up to a terminal is even less so, plus the idea that I could go out with just my phone and watch is pretty appealing.

Fair point on the payments, though. I think only the Sony watch has NFC, and I haven't heard when/if that will be actually supported by the OS for payments.

To be clear, I am not a believer in this product, and I really like Apple stuff. But if you're not seeing ideas and improvements, I think a closer look is warranted.

Those are all unique to Apple's Watch as is pretty much every aspect of the look & feel. You can argue different watches having the same features but Apple's implementation will always be quite unique.

Not saying the device isn't worthy of most of its criticisms, but let's not pretend this is and iOS-ified version of Android Wear.

The pebble watch had a whole store that would work either with android or iOS (some limitations here).