One of the most common criticisms of Daring Fireball's John Gruber is that he too stridently and uncritically defends Apple. I believe Gruber's perspective is better understood not as fanatic, but as someone who gives Apple — a company he obviously loves — the benefit of the doubt based on a history of good faith and positive experiences. Whether that's a useful perspective to you or not is something for you to decide. (For me it is. Now if I could get over his Yankees obsession.)
But Gruber's coverage of Apple's latest mistake, the banning of two completely useful, non-SDK-violating applications for the iPhone — Podcaster and MailWrangler, both axed due to purported duplication of features of Apple's own iPhone software — has been fair and critical of Apple's decisions. I've been turned off by what I felt was Gruber's borderline sycophantism in the past, but his reporting and writing the last couple of weeks have laid any doubts I might have had to rest that he's willing to call out Apple on their mistakes.
For example, as he writes about Podcaster and Apple's App Store policies:
The App Store concept has trade-offs. There are pros and cons to this model versus the wide-open nature of Mac OS X. There are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides. But blatantly anti-competitive exclusion of apps that compete with Apple’s own? There is no trade-off here. No one benefits from such a policy, not even Apple. If this is truly Apple’s policy, it’s a disaster for the platform. And if it’s not Apple’s policy, then Podcaster’s exclusion is proof that the approval process is completely broken.Either way, something is seriously wrong.
Outstanding.
