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> John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. I think it's important to read Gruber and understand he's an Apple person. Not a shill, as muc

> John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. I think it's important to read Gruber and understand he's an Apple person. Not a shill, as much as his world is all Apple. Sure, he checks out an Android phone every couple of years, but for the most part he doesn't care what's going on outside the Apple ecosystem. And, that's fine. As a reader of Gruber, I read for his takes about Apple.

fgonzag 6y ago
Agreed, shill isn't the right word to use. Fan, cultist, or zealot would be more in line (depending on the desired impact and tone of the expression)
- coldtea 6y ago
  I think "cultist" or "zealot" applies more to the FOSS/Stallman crowd.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    There are multiple cults.
pgt 6y ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Fully-committed shills are not shills. Edit to clarify: I meant that a shill with skin in the game is less of a shill. Of course a shill can be "fully commited" to shilling, but if they are fully committed to the thing which they are promoting, then they are not a shill in my eyes.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
That's fair enough, I have occasionally read his blog over the years (mainly linked from other sites such as MacRumors). That's also how I saw how many scoops he's been given by them (because if they were actual leaks I'm sure he would have been cut off by now, knowing Apple's secrecy). But I don't remember him being this lyrical about Apple as he is here. However I used to be an Apple fan and Mac used to be my daily driver (even though I've always been an "every OS at the same time" guy). But my enthusiasm has reduced a lot lately due to the higher lock-in, and 'iPadification' of the Mac. Especially due to stronger ties with Apple services: As an "every OS" guy this doesn't work for me obviously. Basically it is getting decidedly harder to use Apple stuff well if you don't want to do things exactly "the Apple way". The Mac didn't use to be like that. It was more like a general unixy OS that wasn't so opinionated. So, as my opinion has changed it is possible his admiration for Apple is irking me more than before :) Sorry if I offended by calling him a shill. But he adopts Apple's flowery language filled with superlatives as if their products are some kind of magic inconceivable to their competitors. That rubs me the wrong way as I do consider the world outside Apple which is not bad at all.
- jitl 6y ago
  What lockdown is grating to you? I grew up on BSD multi-user systems and Apple things still look the same to me: crusty BSD with ancient coreutils in the terminal, nice rounded corners in the GUI. What is the iPad-ification? Just the code signing stuff? I guess you can't write to /System anymore these days? And there's something about app notarization, but it doesn't really affect any of my uses.
  - innagadadavida 6y ago
    Almost all GNU user land tools and libraries work on BSD and you can install them fairly easily with brew. Unless you are doing Linux kernel development, there is little you’ll miss out on.
    - nemosaltat 6y ago
      Mostly agree, and upvoted, however I think it’s important to acknowledge (in thread about M1 Macs) that full brew support will be a large undertaking for M1.
      - tim-- 6y ago
        It seems to be going well so far. I would say it's around 70% of the way there[0]. What's left is a few major runtimes (OpenJDK, golang is waiting for 1.16 to be released). Many of the packages that are not properly supported either require golang [4], rust [2], mono [3] or java to support arm64. It's impressive the amount of work Apple has done behind the scenes get M1 support in many open source packages, [1] for example. [0] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 [1] https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/mono/commit/3f2278e081484e6616ee5892895f999610453ca9 [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/73908 [3] https://github.com/mono/mono/pull/20014 [4] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/38485
    - asveikau 6y ago
      I'm typing this on FreeBSD. If the most interesting part of a Mac to you is the BSD layer ... Well, I doubt that. People like Mac for the UI and Cocoa stuff, plus hardware and integration thereof. The way you've substituted "BSD" for macOS really doesn't make sense. Yes, there is BSD code in MacOS, quite a bit of it in fact. But they're not the same thing.
et2o 6y ago
Agree. He is an Apple guy. He delights when Apple does cool stuff. Sometimes he takes Apple’s side on debatable subjects. But he has no issue calling Apple out when he thinks they are doing wrong. It’s unfair to call him a shill.

fgonzag 6y ago

Agreed, shill isn't the right word to use. Fan, cultist, or zealot would be more in line (depending on the desired impact and tone of the expression)

coldtea 6y ago
I think "cultist" or "zealot" applies more to the FOSS/Stallman crowd.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  There are multiple cults.

pgt 6y ago

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Fully-committed shills are not shills. Edit to clarify: I meant that a shill with skin in the game is less of a shill. Of course a shill can be "fully commited" to shilling, but if they are fully committed to the thing which they are promoting, then they are not a shill in my eyes.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

That's fair enough, I have occasionally read his blog over the years (mainly linked from other sites such as MacRumors). That's also how I saw how many scoops he's been given by them (because if they were actual leaks I'm sure he would have been cut off by now, knowing Apple's secrecy). But I don't remember him being this lyrical about Apple as he is here. However I used to be an Apple fan and Mac used to be my daily driver (even though I've always been an "every OS at the same time" guy). But my enthusiasm has reduced a lot lately due to the higher lock-in, and 'iPadification' of the Mac. Especially due to stronger ties with Apple services: As an "every OS" guy this doesn't work for me obviously. Basically it is getting decidedly harder to use Apple stuff well if you don't want to do things exactly "the Apple way". The Mac didn't use to be like that. It was more like a general unixy OS that wasn't so opinionated. So, as my opinion has changed it is possible his admiration for Apple is irking me more than before :) Sorry if I offended by calling him a shill. But he adopts Apple's flowery language filled with superlatives as if their products are some kind of magic inconceivable to their competitors. That rubs me the wrong way as I do consider the world outside Apple which is not bad at all.

jitl 6y ago
What lockdown is grating to you? I grew up on BSD multi-user systems and Apple things still look the same to me: crusty BSD with ancient coreutils in the terminal, nice rounded corners in the GUI. What is the iPad-ification? Just the code signing stuff? I guess you can't write to /System anymore these days? And there's something about app notarization, but it doesn't really affect any of my uses.
- innagadadavida 6y ago
  Almost all GNU user land tools and libraries work on BSD and you can install them fairly easily with brew. Unless you are doing Linux kernel development, there is little you’ll miss out on.
  - nemosaltat 6y ago
    Mostly agree, and upvoted, however I think it’s important to acknowledge (in thread about M1 Macs) that full brew support will be a large undertaking for M1.
    - tim-- 6y ago
      It seems to be going well so far. I would say it's around 70% of the way there[0]. What's left is a few major runtimes (OpenJDK, golang is waiting for 1.16 to be released). Many of the packages that are not properly supported either require golang [4], rust [2], mono [3] or java to support arm64. It's impressive the amount of work Apple has done behind the scenes get M1 support in many open source packages, [1] for example. [0] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 [1] https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/mono/commit/3f2278e081484e6616ee5892895f999610453ca9 [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/73908 [3] https://github.com/mono/mono/pull/20014 [4] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/38485
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I'm typing this on FreeBSD. If the most interesting part of a Mac to you is the BSD layer ... Well, I doubt that. People like Mac for the UI and Cocoa stuff, plus hardware and integration thereof. The way you've substituted "BSD" for macOS really doesn't make sense. Yes, there is BSD code in MacOS, quite a bit of it in fact. But they're not the same thing.

et2o 6y ago

Agree. He is an Apple guy. He delights when Apple does cool stuff. Sometimes he takes Apple’s side on debatable subjects. But he has no issue calling Apple out when he thinks they are doing wrong. It’s unfair to call him a shill.