WWDC presentation has driven bloggers senseless

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Well, I was anticipating hearing some great coverage from bloggers and Apple-related websites and podcasts, and they basically all suck, with commentators so overwhelmed they don't know where to start.



Only after a 4 or 5 days their heads are beginning to clear.



Tipb: They usually do a good job going down to the minutiae, but their coverage has been abysmal, and their podcast on immediately after WWDC essentially ragged and unfocused do to technical difficulties. They barely covered the tentpole features. The website seems fixated on covering developers that have been stepped on, jailbreaks, and negative stuff, while they barely have even delved into what's going into iOS 5.



9to5mac: There are actually doing an average job with going over the features, but it's been slow and sparse.



Macworld.com: They had the best podcast with coherent streams of thought, but really only covered the major tentpole features. They are doing their usual slow and NDA-minding selves with their website coverage.



MacbreakWeekly podcast: Thought it was a rambling and incoherent mess.



Angry Mac Bastards: They were their usual selves. They are going to have a blast next week.



Cultofmac: You can't count on them mirroring 9to5mac as much as possible, but both are basically one step above tabloid trash. Have to keep that in mind when reading.



MacStories.net: They have an excellently designed website, but they seem more a collator of stories from 9to5mac, cultofmac or Macrumors.



The Talk Show podcast: The usual from Gruber. Rambling, but has moments of good commentary.



I won't mention non-Apple related ones or the troll reporting. Overall, I've been amazed by the lack of good commentary and coverage of Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud features. Apple did the usual slides with most of the major features in user facing features and developer features. There's been an astonishing lack of people speculating on what those mean, and a prevalence of people not knowing what to say as they haven't absorbed it all.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    I've always suspected that writing was an art not mastered by many

    and the Tech Press has not failed to live up to my low expectations.



    It's become too easy to become an aggregator of information rather than

    discuss the context and ramifications of new Apple announcements.



    I'm finding that I need less and less RSS feeds and the like because few

    people are bringing anything new to the table.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    apple ][apple ][ Posts: 9,233member
    One good thing is that Apple released the live streaming keynote only one hour after the event was completed. If we can't get to see it 100% live, then a one hour delay is not bad at all, and hopefully it's a trend that they will continue with in the future.



    The worst is to have to follow a blogger's live comments about it. It ruins the whole experience and nobody wants to read the ill informed, ignorant opinions of certain people who are live blogging the event.



    I don't remember if it was macrumors or engadget, but whoever was doing the live blogging did a real crappy job, inserting way too much of their personal opinions into their coverage. Who cares about some moron writing "oooh, Steve Jobs looks skinny, he's not looking too great!". How about STFU and just type what is being said on stage.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Apple ][ View Post


    I don't remember if it was macrumors or engadget, but whoever was doing the live blogging did a real crappy job, inserting way too much of their personal opinions into their coverage. Who cares about some moron writing "oooh, Steve Jobs looks skinny, he's not looking too great!". How about STFU and just type what is being said on stage.



    MacRumors, it was.



    "Something's wrong", "Steve looks exasperated", "I don't have a clue what I'm here to report"...
  • Reply 4 of 8
    shrikeshrike Posts: 494member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by hmurchison View Post


    I've always suspected that writing was an art not mastered by many

    and the Tech Press has not failed to live up to my low expectations.



    They like to call themselves journalists, but the profession has basically given up any integrity or journalistic principle. There's very little pretense for being accurate. Headlines are purposely sensationalist. Fact checking is non-existant. People can be biased and opinionated all they want, but FFS, be accurate about what's being talked about.



    It's embarrassing to hear people talk about iCloud vs Google's services. It's like these techies never heard of fat clients versus thin clients before. They don't understand what the word "sync" means. Jobs repeated it at least 3 times in direct and simplistic language during the keynote.



    Quote:

    It's become too easy to become an aggregator of information rather than

    discuss the context and ramifications of new Apple announcements.



    They try to discuss it, but this time around, a lot of them were dumbfounded and didn't know what to say.



    Quote:

    I'm finding that I need less and less RSS feeds and the like because few

    people are bringing anything new to the table.



    Yup. Watching the keynote presentation will get you 90% of what the podcasts and websites were spouting. Some do some interesting analysis but those are few and far between.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    addaboxaddabox Posts: 12,665member
    I think the incoherent tone of the coverage arises from the scale of Apple's ambitions. We now see the outlines of a fundamental revolution in what we mean by "personal computing", a revolution that was only hinted at by the release of the iPhone.



    As such, talking about Apple's current strategies requires talking about very large and interacting systems of technology instead of devices. Which is sort of ironic, because the whole point of Apple's approach is to make those large systems disappear, for the user. All the user needs to know is that they have access to their stuff all the time and that it's always up to date and synchronized among machine they own. The cloud is the truth.



    The tech press is much more comfortable talking about numbers and horse races. iPod, iPhone, and iPad killers, more MegaGiga, more storage, sales numbers, etc. There really aren't that many writers who can talk eloquently about big picture stuff, and fewer still that can do that in relationship to Apple with resorting to predigested nonsense like "Walled Gardens" and "RDF."



    Android has been a godsend, because not 15 minutes goes by without another device "packing" the latest silicon or "rocking" a new screen. This is where "journalism" turns into "marketing", where excitement derives from endless proliferation and doesn't require any ideas beyond novelty and newness. I think a lot of tech journalists sort of resent Apple because they suspect that any thoughtfulness about hardware beyond "more" is a sign of unseemly intellectualism, and it sort of spoils the party.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    shrikeshrike Posts: 494member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by addabox View Post


    I think the incoherent tone of the coverage arises from the scale of Apple's ambitions. We now see the outlines of a fundamental revolution in what we mean by "personal computing", a revolution that was only hinted at by the release of the iPhone.



    As such, talking about Apple's current strategies requires talking about very large and interacting systems of technology instead of devices. Which is sort of ironic, because the whole point of Apple's approach is to make those large systems disappear, for the user. All the user needs to know is that they have access to their stuff all the time and that it's always up to date and synchronized among machine they own. The cloud is the truth.



    That's Apple's goal. People will see the same data on their devices without doing any work. But the devil is in the details.



    1. For the bottom line. Will this really sell more hardware for Apple? Are we really in a world where most people have multiple devices that require them to have the same data, perfectly synched? Not so sure that population is that big.



    2. The devil is in the details. The cloud is truth yeah, but I just made those changes, and they weren't synched fast enough, and I made some different changes on a different device. Who wins?How will all the changes be folded in.



    3. The devil is in the details (TDIITD). What about versioning on Lion. Will that history be synched.



    4. TDIITD. What about sharing of these data streams. Apple will eventually have to implement sharing and access control protocols. Can someone subscribe to one filestream? can someone subscribe a photostream? Who knows if concurrent editing is something they want to support.



    5. MS has to buy in with Office and develop adequate implementations of Office on iOS. That probably won't happen. Adobe as well.



    6. It will simply cost more to have cloud backups and cloud sync. TANSTAAFL. Having data + cloud data + bandwidth is simply more expensive than only having the data locally. You're buying down risk and buying a measure of convenience. Are these things worth the cost. If you have less than 5 GB, it's free, but 5 GB is a pittance. What if I wanted 1 TB? Than what about all those bandwidth caps? Then what about the increasing cost of Internet services, both wired and wireless? (Let me know when Internet service costs will decrease, as I've seen nothing but increases.)



    7. etc.



    The goal and implementation is right: everything should be transparent to the user and the data should just be there on every device. Everything is essentially silo-ed right now. Apple will have to work really hard on this to update, refine iCloud and convince developers to update their apps, get their apps on Lion and Windows.



    I'm fairly convinced Apple is on the right track. Much of the low fruit in device design is pretty much it. Touch-screen slates appear to be the pivot, and it's now continuous refinement. It's like were back in the early 80s and we have another 2 decades before another device pivot starts.



    The only other thing I can thing off that is ripe for advancement (to make lots of profits that is) is networking and services. That is: ubiquitous availability of data and networking services. Apple's made a foray into services with iCloud, but I'm actually hesitant about the actual benefits. I don't really need it. If I had more devices, maybe I would feel bigger benefit. I'm definitely not there yet. At some point, I'll feel that need for offline backup, but not yet.



    Quote:

    I think a lot of tech journalists sort of resent Apple because they suspect that any thoughtfulness about hardware beyond "more" is a sign of unseemly intellectualism, and it sort of spoils the party.



    Don't know if I would call it intellectualism, but as we all know there's a whole gradation of people with certain natural tendencies in how they process things. The so-called "neck-beards", hobbyists, and tech nerds, process things in a certain way, and when something is successful in a different way, it breeds confusion. There are so many that lack empathy for different perspectives. They are literally tone-deaf and don't seem to understand it.



    I am disappointed in the tech press who appear to not understand basic models of computing, the basic economics of computing, and the technology behind it. They love the bigger numbers as it's a simpler single bit for comparison, but often times, any context of what went into the technology is totally absent.



    I listen to the AndroidCentral podcast, and I can tell you how many times the panel didn't understand basic fundamentals of technology and economics. Their hobby is to tinker, and Android is great at that. That's about the depth of that. I basically go apoplectic when they swallow Nvidia's multi-core marketing madness or don't understand what subpixels in a LCD display are and why you need those subpixels to represent color. Hardly anyone seems to know what P = C*f*V^2 means on that podcast.



    Specs = Marketing. Many of these tech nerds simply don't understand that and in actuality, yeah, they revel in it. In reviews, the most fundamental things about a device's properties are never measured to verify the marketing, such as weight and dimensions. In reviews, they never get down to the nitty gritty and discuss what the specs mean. Eg, the GPU is superfast! But what does that mean to UI animation performance? In actual numbers, rather than "superfast"?



    But I digress. I am disappointed in the Apple "press" and bloggers. These are people who follow Apple religiously, yet are content to regurgitate what Apple said, and didn't attempt to delve any deeper than the 10 things about Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud that Apple was highlighting. They've done better before, but there's been actual paralysis in the last 4 days among a vast majority of them. I'd thought they'd blog, blog, blog about every tiny bit of details, but if anything, the blog volume appears to be lower. There were seemingly more blog entries about Jobs presentation to the Cupertino city council.



    Take a look at this blog entry from F. Vicci from MacStories.net: iCloud is the Operating System. WTF! This was posted on Friday. It took him 2 or 3 days to release this perspective, and it required talking to a Jane Smith to do it. What part of Apple not wanting users to see the file system did he not understand? What part of the syncing services did he not understand? It was all there, in demos, and in painstakingly simply animations. The "network is the computer" has been in the tech lingo for almost 2 decades. Client/server computing models with fat/thin clients have been around for 4 decades. The Joshua Topolsky dream of the "continuous client" is not his original idea. It's been around for decades. iCloud is just another way, and frell, nobody even mentioned that iCloud does that.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    The tech journalism in my country's English newspapers is usually okay... However on June 10th, one of them ran a syndicated (read: copy-and-paste) article from a US paper from last week, talking about what Apple was "expected" to introduce...



    I think iOS 5 and iCloud is too epic for everyone to grasp this time 'round.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Shrike View Post


    Well, I was anticipating hearing some great coverage from bloggers and Apple-related websites and podcasts, and they basically all suck, with commentators so overwhelmed they don't know where to start.



    Only after a 4 or 5 days their heads are beginning to clear.



    Tipb: They usually do a good job going down to the minutiae, but their coverage has been abysmal, and their podcast on immediately after WWDC essentially ragged and unfocused do to technical difficulties. They barely covered the tentpole features. The website seems fixated on covering developers that have been stepped on, jailbreaks, and negative stuff, while they barely have even delved into what's going into iOS 5.



    9to5mac: There are actually doing an average job with going over the features, but it's been slow and sparse.



    Macworld.com: They had the best podcast with coherent streams of thought, but really only covered the major tentpole features. They are doing their usual slow and NDA-minding selves with their website coverage.



    MacbreakWeekly podcast: Thought it was a rambling and incoherent mess.



    Angry Mac Bastards: They were their usual selves. They are going to have a blast next week.



    Cultofmac: You can't count on them mirroring 9to5mac as much as possible, but both are basically one step above tabloid trash. Have to keep that in mind when reading.



    MacStories.net: They have an excellently designed website, but they seem more a collator of stories from 9to5mac, cultofmac or Macrumors.



    The Talk Show podcast: The usual from Gruber. Rambling, but has moments of good commentary.



    I won't mention non-Apple related ones or the troll reporting. Overall, I've been amazed by the lack of good commentary and coverage of Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud features. Apple did the usual slides with most of the major features in user facing features and developer features. There's been an astonishing lack of people speculating on what those mean, and a prevalence of people not knowing what to say as they haven't absorbed it all.



  • Reply 8 of 8
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Apple ][ View Post


    I don't remember if it was macrumors or engadget, but whoever was doing the live blogging did a real crappy job, inserting way too much of their personal opinions into their coverage. Who cares about some moron writing "oooh, Steve Jobs looks skinny, he's not looking too great!". How about STFU and just type what is being said on stage.



    +1



    The liveblogging by AppleInsider for WWDC 2011 was somewhat sparse but at least to the point.



    I know some other livebloggers do try and make things entertaining but it is annoying when I disagree with them.
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