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How could anyone read this without knowing it's an advertisement: "today I’m just as thrilled to be putting an entirely new Ultra Wide lens in my pocket. It gi

How could anyone read this without knowing it's an advertisement: "today I’m just as thrilled to be putting an entirely new Ultra Wide lens in my pocket. It gives us another format to tell the story, another perspective to visualize, and a better rounded tool for doing our best creative work."

helpPeople 7y ago
Stockholm Syndrome? But yes, it's good that you were able to see it. I find marketing unethical, most people don't even realize that they are being advertised to.
- jacobush 7y ago
  If it's VERY CLEARLY shown, it's not too bad. But think for a moment if advertising only had access to one font, 1000 characters length of text, including spaces, and at most 15% of the ad real estate for images. Plus a warning sign, reminding everyone that repeated exposure to propaganda can change one's mind, even though one is aware. :-)
- briandear 7y ago
  > I find marketing unethical That’s a strange view. Taken to an extreme, that would be a restaurant without an exterior sign, menus, or even a waiter explaining the food. You would literally know nothing about any product or service without marketing. Marketing is the act of “bringing a product to market.” Marketing isn’t advertising. A farmer displaying tomatoes on a table at a farmers market is marketing. A farmer buying billboard space with a photo of his tomatoes is advertising. There isn’t anything unethical about either practice. Communicating about the availability of a product shouldn’t be considered unethical. Lying about that product on the other hand..
  - helpPeople 7y ago
    >Lying about that product on the other hand.. What if things are not prove able? Like "most secure", but their metric is fastest patching. It's not actually secure, but they have logic. Technically true, but intentionally misleading. I don't suggest getting caught up in the Innocence of having a brick and mortar sign. This is not what we worry about. What do we learn from a beer commercial showing hot girls? Or a tech commercial showing people dancing. These are feelings unrelated to the product. These specific examples don't scratch the surface. The best marketing, you don't see.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    > You would literally know nothing about any product or service without marketing. We can hardly imagine such bliss. Pop quiz: does anybody imagine marketing or advertising would exist in a) paradise, b) utopia, c) Heaven? > A farmer buying billboard space with a photo of his tomatoes is advertising. There isn’t anything unethical about either practice. Plastering every available surface by a road or in a common area, with adverts is tragedy of the commons material. How dare people litter like that, taking away our collective view of the world and replacing it to their advantage without our consent?
    - Frondo 7y ago
      People wouldn't need to spend significant portions of their precious life making, moving, and selling things to others in paradise, utopia, or Heaven. Of course there would be no advertising, there'd be no treadmill of consumerism to necessitate such a thing. Now, what that says about how far we are from paradise, heaven, or utopia here...
      - jodrellblank 7y ago
        After writing that, I wondered about how we always portray "paradise" as a desert island, beach, tropical exotic location far from civilization and 'unspoilt', and portray a dystopia as a heavily urbanized and dirty city full of neon signs and billboards and industrial pollution. Then the we talk reverses that, as if industrialization and capitalism as if bringing more products into our lives is making life better (read: closer to paradise), and so advertising and marketing are the heralds of all that's good about the future - if only you'd simply concede to stop whining and pay attention - it's for your own good after all. I can't deny the short-lived excitement of novelty, but perhaps if we overall stopped making daily life so dystopian and unpleasant, we'd have fewer dreams of escaping it. What would a country look like if tens of millions of people didn't spend decades looking forward to retirement and gambling to get there quicker and dreaming of travel and products as temporary escapes from such unpleasant daily surroundings as need escaping from?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    You're, perhaps unintentionally, doing a bait-and-switch argument. Sure, communicating about the availability of a product is important; in fact, it's crucial for functioning of a market. But this is not what marketing, or advertising in particular, is about in the real world. It's not what people mean by these words. I wrote about it some time ago at length[0]; skim the list and tell me how any of that - all of which is common practice and what you get to work on if you become a marketer - how any of that can be justified on the grounds of just "communicating about the availability of a product"? -- [0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
  - Synaesthesia 7y ago
    That’s actually how the world used to be.
hycaria 7y ago
Does anyone though ?
pavelrub 7y ago
I'm not really sure what you are talking about. An advertisement of what? Ultra wide lenses? The author is a photographer who writes about being excited to now have the ability to carry an ultra wide lense - something that has exited in the photography world for decades - as part of his phone. He then write a review about the performance of this lense. Nothing about this is even close to being an advertisement.
- CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
  Sure, and that commercial for Amoxaperacilin I just saw on TV was just a happy family running through a field on a sunny day, with sweet music in the background while they listed off a series of horrific side effects. It wasn't an advertisement either.
  - pavelrub 7y ago
    What a ridiculous non-argument. What about your advertisement is even remotely similar to the context of the above quote from an iPhone 11 camera review? Pretty much nothing.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  To use a word review, I expect at least an attempt to be objective. The article doesn't feel that way at all, even more if you actually shoot at least as a hobby, ie with some APS-C or fullframe. Discussing whether he is just subjectively biased towards Apple or outright paid is already kind of moot point
  - scott_s 7y ago
    Reviews are never "objective." They are always a single person's experience with a thing.
  - baddox 7y ago
    Why would you want a camera review to be “objective?” What would that even mean? Other than some tech specs (which the article does provide), there’s not a whole lot of relevant “objective” information about a camera.
scott_s 7y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. I understand it to be a review by a professional photographer - but one with an obvious bias towards Apple, as they have been a client of his, he uses their phone's cameras in his work, and he has a book about how to take pictures with their phones. But that does not make it an advertisement, as far as I know, he is not paid by Apple, nor did Apple provide the phone or control what he said.
- leesalminen 7y ago
  How did he get hands on a phone that hasn’t been released yet if Apple didn’t provide it?
  - dgzl 7y ago
    Early test releases are not uncommon.
  - scott_s 7y ago
    That's fair, it may be a provided phone. But then that puts him in a similar situation as any site that has a review for the phone now. You know his relationship with the phone itself and Apple. Consider his review with that perspective - but I still think it's a valid review.
    - extesy 7y ago
      And now if he doesn't write a glorious review then he won't be ever contacted by Apple again in the future. Really hard to trust objectivity of his review in these circumstances.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        The review by John Gruber of the Touch Bar based MacBook was critical of the feel of the keyboard - this was before the actual reliability problems came up. He along with everyone else was critical of the first Apple Watch. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/05/03/patel-apple-watch-slow https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/05/03/patel-apple-wat... Seeing that he still not only gets review units every year, he gets the prime live interview every year after WWDC with top Apple executives, I don’t think he has been blacklisted. Not to mention that Marco Arment is often critical of Apple and got a review unit of the Mac Mini last year.
pas 7y ago
I think almost anyone reading it will feel that it's drenched in corp-o-speak, and will simply ignore most of these paragraphs.
dagw 7y ago
I just scrolled down to the side by side images.
mfer 7y ago
Does the author have a bias? Certainly. Is this an advertisement? Ads are paid announcements. There was nothing noting it was paid for in any capacity. There's a difference between an ad and a bias. I find it useful to notice biases because we all have them. Ads are quite different.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
  First, there can be a big power discrepancy in cases where free product is provided for review purposes. It's different if you are part of a traditional media outfit and have a significant, steady readership. But for someone like this, there can be a lot of pressure to give very favorable write-ups. Second, this wouldn't be the first time someone did a paid promotion without noting it was paid. I don't know anything about this guy, so I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. (See game streamers and their odd tendency to open tons of 'loot boxes' on stream & get significantly better results than expected.) Finally a lot of the copy reads like it's straight from a press release, with capitalized words and everything. Whether it's enough to constitute an ad in a regulatory sense, I don't know. But you can be advertised to without the source being a literal ad according to a legal definition.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    Whats the point of muddying the waters without having verifiable facts? The thing with speculation is .. anyone can speculate, on anything, for any reason. That doesn't make it true. >I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. Who exactly said that?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Look at the quote at the beginning of this thread. If it looks like an ad, if it reads unnaturally, like something no real person would say to convey a honest opinion, then it's most likely an ad.
dadarepublic 7y ago
You sound mad. Are you mad at Apple? Mad at some random pro photographer who obviously likes Apple? It reads like a photographer who is a fan of Apple's camera tech. Shows some very nice photos (bc he's a pro or something I gather). Not an "advertisement". I can't see where any money changed hands from Apple to this photographer to write what he did. And I'm sure everyone who is a fan of shooting on Android phones will wait for the comparison reviews. So why you so mad bro? You read like an Apple hater. Edit: Some ppl are mad that I used the word "mad" to describe the original comment. The assertion that this article is some paid advertisement is unfounded by lack of any evidence that Apple paid this photographer any money. At most Apple gave this person a loner iPhone for review - Apple does that. Now would Apple "bet" that this person would write a glowing review? Quite possibly. Companies/people leveraging their fanbase is nothing new. But to say it's an "ad" is unfounded. You should be glad you can spot bias in a review. The question remains... why are you so mad?
- joeyprr 7y ago
  To be completely honest, your comment makes me think you're the one who's mad... or at least not very sane; you're assuming a person is mad about something based on 1 whole sentence (a sentence people seem to agree with) and proceed to go on a rant in which you ask the same question 3 times!
  - dadarepublic 7y ago
    LOL. I don't think you're being completely honest. From your reply, it would appear you are also upset and want to defend someone who's upset about an article that has a gushing review of an Apple product. Apple is just one of those companies that is very divisive within the tech community - for some reason or the other. I could make an assumption that you're another person who is 'annoyed' by the existence of Apple. But I won't. So you question my sanity bc I question why the OP was upset. Maybe you're just annoyed by existence. So why are you mad? grabs popcorn
matwood 7y ago
Austin Mann has reviewed every new iPhone for awhile in this manner. Reviewing equipment while taking travel photos is what he does.
s9w 7y ago
The replies to this observation are hilarious. The "article" is as marketingy as it gets. It's blatantly obvious. But noo, "I don't know what you mean", "you sound mad" haha.
- dadarepublic 7y ago
  The assertion by the original commenter was that this article was an "advertisement" - meaning paid. While the article may well serve as a function of marketing because some pro photographer got a loner from Apple and wrote up a gushing review. I don't believe the word "advertisement" holds water. I think this comment said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016402
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    Ads don't have to be paid. Promo-for-product is still an ad - sometimes called an advertorial. It's unprofessional at best and dishonest at worst to pretend that this isn't just corporate PR. And ironically, the image quality really isn't all that amazing. It's +/- other phone cams - better in some conditions, not as good in others. And in absolute terms, these photos are nowhere close to the sharpness, dynamic range, and saturation of professional equipment. Night mode is good, but the daylight shots are okay but not awesome. You could argue it's unfair to expect anything better from a (relatively) cheap phone cam - but it's a (relatively) cheap phone cam with a "pro" tag being marketed as a "pro" product. In photographic terms, it simply isn't - except maybe for the fairly forgiving social media photo niche.
    - dadarepublic 7y ago
      I think the replies from toasterlovin (below) summed it up on the diff between PR and ads so I'll leave it at that. The root of what you are asserting is that is ANY review is corp PR. Which is partially true - a review (good or bad), and esp high profile reviews, can shift conversations around its subject. For smaller entities, any publicity is good publicity, not as true for larger entities. So if Apple gave a review copy of a phone to a photographer, that based on his past writings, Apple was fairly sure would write something "positive" - they made a good bet and the review copy of the phone paid dividends. That being said, the article isn't corp PR - it reads like a "fanboy" review and that's exactly how I took it. Not an advert. Personally for camera tech I like sites like dpreview.com (no review site is perfect). I did like some of the example photos in this article tho - don't know if I could ever reach that quality but I'm not a pro photographer.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
It's not even meant to be subtle. Everybody knows how it works. You receive some gadget form a manufacturer, you present it in a positive way, you can keep it and expect more to come. If you break the rules, you won't receive the next one. There is no incentive to break the rules on either side.
pierrec 7y ago
It's in that zone where the limit between native content and advertisement becomes blurry. Where do you draw the line where an advertorial [1] starts? Or native advertising [2]? This type of content is likely to become more common, too. With the rise of ad-blockers, companies are putting more weight on alternative methods. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising
baddox 7y ago
Well, I'm not sure how to answer the "how," but I was certainly about to read it and not think it's an advertisement. Unless of course by "advertisement" you mean any review written by someone who is experienced with Apple products and has done other paid work for Apple in the past.

helpPeople 7y ago

Stockholm Syndrome? But yes, it's good that you were able to see it. I find marketing unethical, most people don't even realize that they are being advertised to.

jacobush 7y ago
If it's VERY CLEARLY shown, it's not too bad. But think for a moment if advertising only had access to one font, 1000 characters length of text, including spaces, and at most 15% of the ad real estate for images. Plus a warning sign, reminding everyone that repeated exposure to propaganda can change one's mind, even though one is aware. :-)
briandear 7y ago
> I find marketing unethical That’s a strange view. Taken to an extreme, that would be a restaurant without an exterior sign, menus, or even a waiter explaining the food. You would literally know nothing about any product or service without marketing. Marketing is the act of “bringing a product to market.” Marketing isn’t advertising. A farmer displaying tomatoes on a table at a farmers market is marketing. A farmer buying billboard space with a photo of his tomatoes is advertising. There isn’t anything unethical about either practice. Communicating about the availability of a product shouldn’t be considered unethical. Lying about that product on the other hand..
- helpPeople 7y ago
  >Lying about that product on the other hand.. What if things are not prove able? Like "most secure", but their metric is fastest patching. It's not actually secure, but they have logic. Technically true, but intentionally misleading. I don't suggest getting caught up in the Innocence of having a brick and mortar sign. This is not what we worry about. What do we learn from a beer commercial showing hot girls? Or a tech commercial showing people dancing. These are feelings unrelated to the product. These specific examples don't scratch the surface. The best marketing, you don't see.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  > You would literally know nothing about any product or service without marketing. We can hardly imagine such bliss. Pop quiz: does anybody imagine marketing or advertising would exist in a) paradise, b) utopia, c) Heaven? > A farmer buying billboard space with a photo of his tomatoes is advertising. There isn’t anything unethical about either practice. Plastering every available surface by a road or in a common area, with adverts is tragedy of the commons material. How dare people litter like that, taking away our collective view of the world and replacing it to their advantage without our consent?
  - Frondo 7y ago
    People wouldn't need to spend significant portions of their precious life making, moving, and selling things to others in paradise, utopia, or Heaven. Of course there would be no advertising, there'd be no treadmill of consumerism to necessitate such a thing. Now, what that says about how far we are from paradise, heaven, or utopia here...
    - jodrellblank 7y ago
      After writing that, I wondered about how we always portray "paradise" as a desert island, beach, tropical exotic location far from civilization and 'unspoilt', and portray a dystopia as a heavily urbanized and dirty city full of neon signs and billboards and industrial pollution. Then the we talk reverses that, as if industrialization and capitalism as if bringing more products into our lives is making life better (read: closer to paradise), and so advertising and marketing are the heralds of all that's good about the future - if only you'd simply concede to stop whining and pay attention - it's for your own good after all. I can't deny the short-lived excitement of novelty, but perhaps if we overall stopped making daily life so dystopian and unpleasant, we'd have fewer dreams of escaping it. What would a country look like if tens of millions of people didn't spend decades looking forward to retirement and gambling to get there quicker and dreaming of travel and products as temporary escapes from such unpleasant daily surroundings as need escaping from?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You're, perhaps unintentionally, doing a bait-and-switch argument. Sure, communicating about the availability of a product is important; in fact, it's crucial for functioning of a market. But this is not what marketing, or advertising in particular, is about in the real world. It's not what people mean by these words. I wrote about it some time ago at length[0]; skim the list and tell me how any of that - all of which is common practice and what you get to work on if you become a marketer - how any of that can be justified on the grounds of just "communicating about the availability of a product"? -- [0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  That’s actually how the world used to be.

hycaria 7y ago

Does anyone though ?

pavelrub 7y ago

I'm not really sure what you are talking about. An advertisement of what? Ultra wide lenses? The author is a photographer who writes about being excited to now have the ability to carry an ultra wide lense - something that has exited in the photography world for decades - as part of his phone. He then write a review about the performance of this lense. Nothing about this is even close to being an advertisement.

CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
Sure, and that commercial for Amoxaperacilin I just saw on TV was just a happy family running through a field on a sunny day, with sweet music in the background while they listed off a series of horrific side effects. It wasn't an advertisement either.
- pavelrub 7y ago
  What a ridiculous non-argument. What about your advertisement is even remotely similar to the context of the above quote from an iPhone 11 camera review? Pretty much nothing.
saiya-jin 7y ago
To use a word review, I expect at least an attempt to be objective. The article doesn't feel that way at all, even more if you actually shoot at least as a hobby, ie with some APS-C or fullframe. Discussing whether he is just subjectively biased towards Apple or outright paid is already kind of moot point
- scott_s 7y ago
  Reviews are never "objective." They are always a single person's experience with a thing.
- baddox 7y ago
  Why would you want a camera review to be “objective?” What would that even mean? Other than some tech specs (which the article does provide), there’s not a whole lot of relevant “objective” information about a camera.

scott_s 7y ago

I'm not sure what you mean. I understand it to be a review by a professional photographer - but one with an obvious bias towards Apple, as they have been a client of his, he uses their phone's cameras in his work, and he has a book about how to take pictures with their phones. But that does not make it an advertisement, as far as I know, he is not paid by Apple, nor did Apple provide the phone or control what he said.

leesalminen 7y ago
How did he get hands on a phone that hasn’t been released yet if Apple didn’t provide it?
- dgzl 7y ago
  Early test releases are not uncommon.
- scott_s 7y ago
  That's fair, it may be a provided phone. But then that puts him in a similar situation as any site that has a review for the phone now. You know his relationship with the phone itself and Apple. Consider his review with that perspective - but I still think it's a valid review.
  - extesy 7y ago
    And now if he doesn't write a glorious review then he won't be ever contacted by Apple again in the future. Really hard to trust objectivity of his review in these circumstances.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      The review by John Gruber of the Touch Bar based MacBook was critical of the feel of the keyboard - this was before the actual reliability problems came up. He along with everyone else was critical of the first Apple Watch. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/05/03/patel-apple-watch-slow https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/05/03/patel-apple-wat... Seeing that he still not only gets review units every year, he gets the prime live interview every year after WWDC with top Apple executives, I don’t think he has been blacklisted. Not to mention that Marco Arment is often critical of Apple and got a review unit of the Mac Mini last year.

pas 7y ago

I think almost anyone reading it will feel that it's drenched in corp-o-speak, and will simply ignore most of these paragraphs.

dagw 7y ago

I just scrolled down to the side by side images.

mfer 7y ago

Does the author have a bias? Certainly. Is this an advertisement? Ads are paid announcements. There was nothing noting it was paid for in any capacity. There's a difference between an ad and a bias. I find it useful to notice biases because we all have them. Ads are quite different.

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
First, there can be a big power discrepancy in cases where free product is provided for review purposes. It's different if you are part of a traditional media outfit and have a significant, steady readership. But for someone like this, there can be a lot of pressure to give very favorable write-ups. Second, this wouldn't be the first time someone did a paid promotion without noting it was paid. I don't know anything about this guy, so I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. (See game streamers and their odd tendency to open tons of 'loot boxes' on stream & get significantly better results than expected.) Finally a lot of the copy reads like it's straight from a press release, with capitalized words and everything. Whether it's enough to constitute an ad in a regulatory sense, I don't know. But you can be advertised to without the source being a literal ad according to a legal definition.
- la_barba 7y ago
  Whats the point of muddying the waters without having verifiable facts? The thing with speculation is .. anyone can speculate, on anything, for any reason. That doesn't make it true. >I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. Who exactly said that?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Look at the quote at the beginning of this thread. If it looks like an ad, if it reads unnaturally, like something no real person would say to convey a honest opinion, then it's most likely an ad.

dadarepublic 7y ago

You sound mad. Are you mad at Apple? Mad at some random pro photographer who obviously likes Apple? It reads like a photographer who is a fan of Apple's camera tech. Shows some very nice photos (bc he's a pro or something I gather). Not an "advertisement". I can't see where any money changed hands from Apple to this photographer to write what he did. And I'm sure everyone who is a fan of shooting on Android phones will wait for the comparison reviews. So why you so mad bro? You read like an Apple hater. Edit: Some ppl are mad that I used the word "mad" to describe the original comment. The assertion that this article is some paid advertisement is unfounded by lack of any evidence that Apple paid this photographer any money. At most Apple gave this person a loner iPhone for review - Apple does that. Now would Apple "bet" that this person would write a glowing review? Quite possibly. Companies/people leveraging their fanbase is nothing new. But to say it's an "ad" is unfounded. You should be glad you can spot bias in a review. The question remains... why are you so mad?

joeyprr 7y ago
To be completely honest, your comment makes me think you're the one who's mad... or at least not very sane; you're assuming a person is mad about something based on 1 whole sentence (a sentence people seem to agree with) and proceed to go on a rant in which you ask the same question 3 times!
- dadarepublic 7y ago
  LOL. I don't think you're being completely honest. From your reply, it would appear you are also upset and want to defend someone who's upset about an article that has a gushing review of an Apple product. Apple is just one of those companies that is very divisive within the tech community - for some reason or the other. I could make an assumption that you're another person who is 'annoyed' by the existence of Apple. But I won't. So you question my sanity bc I question why the OP was upset. Maybe you're just annoyed by existence. So why are you mad? grabs popcorn

matwood 7y ago

Austin Mann has reviewed every new iPhone for awhile in this manner. Reviewing equipment while taking travel photos is what he does.

s9w 7y ago

The replies to this observation are hilarious. The "article" is as marketingy as it gets. It's blatantly obvious. But noo, "I don't know what you mean", "you sound mad" haha.

dadarepublic 7y ago
The assertion by the original commenter was that this article was an "advertisement" - meaning paid. While the article may well serve as a function of marketing because some pro photographer got a loner from Apple and wrote up a gushing review. I don't believe the word "advertisement" holds water. I think this comment said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016402
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Ads don't have to be paid. Promo-for-product is still an ad - sometimes called an advertorial. It's unprofessional at best and dishonest at worst to pretend that this isn't just corporate PR. And ironically, the image quality really isn't all that amazing. It's +/- other phone cams - better in some conditions, not as good in others. And in absolute terms, these photos are nowhere close to the sharpness, dynamic range, and saturation of professional equipment. Night mode is good, but the daylight shots are okay but not awesome. You could argue it's unfair to expect anything better from a (relatively) cheap phone cam - but it's a (relatively) cheap phone cam with a "pro" tag being marketed as a "pro" product. In photographic terms, it simply isn't - except maybe for the fairly forgiving social media photo niche.
  - dadarepublic 7y ago
    I think the replies from toasterlovin (below) summed it up on the diff between PR and ads so I'll leave it at that. The root of what you are asserting is that is ANY review is corp PR. Which is partially true - a review (good or bad), and esp high profile reviews, can shift conversations around its subject. For smaller entities, any publicity is good publicity, not as true for larger entities. So if Apple gave a review copy of a phone to a photographer, that based on his past writings, Apple was fairly sure would write something "positive" - they made a good bet and the review copy of the phone paid dividends. That being said, the article isn't corp PR - it reads like a "fanboy" review and that's exactly how I took it. Not an advert. Personally for camera tech I like sites like dpreview.com (no review site is perfect). I did like some of the example photos in this article tho - don't know if I could ever reach that quality but I'm not a pro photographer.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

It's not even meant to be subtle. Everybody knows how it works. You receive some gadget form a manufacturer, you present it in a positive way, you can keep it and expect more to come. If you break the rules, you won't receive the next one. There is no incentive to break the rules on either side.

pierrec 7y ago

It's in that zone where the limit between native content and advertisement becomes blurry. Where do you draw the line where an advertorial [1] starts? Or native advertising [2]? This type of content is likely to become more common, too. With the rise of ad-blockers, companies are putting more weight on alternative methods. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising

baddox 7y ago

Well, I'm not sure how to answer the "how," but I was certainly about to read it and not think it's an advertisement. Unless of course by "advertisement" you mean any review written by someone who is experienced with Apple products and has done other paid work for Apple in the past.