Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies, Fabrications, and Exaggerations Point-by-Point, Despite the Fact That No Matter How Egregious the Inaccuracies / Fabrications / Exaggerations, Such Pieces Inevitably Lead to Accusations That I’m Some Sort of Knee-Jerk Shill Who Rails Against Anything ‘Anti-Apple’ Simply for the Sake of Defending Apple, and if I Love Apple So Much Why Don’t I Just Marry Them?
6.1 Key Insight: Lazy tech journalism about Apple follows a predictable formula: attribute everything to Jobs, cite impressive-sounding but irrelevant competitors, ignore facts that contradict the narrative, and dress it all up in epic language to manufacture a crisis that doesn't exist.
Gruber systematically dismantles a Fast Company cover story by Adam Penenberg that portrays Apple as a company on the brink of decline in 2008. He goes through the article's claims point by point, showing that its assertions about competitive threats from Nokia, Toshiba, SanDisk, and others are either factually wrong, misleading, or internally contradictory. Gruber highlights how the piece repeatedly attributes all Apple decisions to Steve Jobs personally, ignores Apple's existing openness (iTunes Plus, Windows compatibility, Boot Camp), and draws absurd conclusions — like arguing Apple is threatened by customers wanting devices that work together, which is exactly Apple's strategy. The piece's invocation of Einstein to predict Apple's doom via 'closed systems' receives particular ridicule.
9 A good rule of thumb, by the way, is that the more a writer attributes the actions of Apple, an enormous corporation with thousands of talented employees, to Steve Jobs, who is jus…
8 Well, if Einstein predicted Apple's business is doomed, it must be so, because we can all agree Einstein was one smart dude.
7 There's a lot of stupid packed into the above 13-word sentence.
AppleMedia & Journalism