One of the Gruber’s main points against Daisey is that his deceitful theater has brought an undeserved negative attention on Apple. Other (even more disingenuous, in my estimation) commenters lament Mike Daisey’s lies, saying that his confabulations will take attention away from areas of interest that actually require scrutiny. To all this, I say: Fuck you.

Basically every Apple Blog does two things: 1) Never criticize Apple, and 2) comment on every Apple story. This has made a consolidated network (you can usually tell an “Apple Blog” I’m talking about by their use of The DECK ads or having a podcast on the 5by5 network) of rabidly pro-Apple discourse, and weirdly defensive Apple Blogging is now the industry standard. Which is fine, I suppose. There’s a huge market for Apple “talk radio” style commentary. But then, of course, it leads to dumbassery like this Gizmodo review of the iPad 3, which calls the iPad 3 a “letdown” over and over while at the same time saying,

In terms of glowing electronic displays, there is none better than on this device. Anywhere. There are a million more pixels in the new iPad than in a 1920 x 1080 HDTV. Think about that: This little 9.5-inch slate has more dots than the 50-inch flat screen you ooh and aah over.

I mean, I’ve gone to the Apple store and seen the new iPad. It is awesome. I definitely don’t think it’s a letdown. The screen is the first thing Apple’s made that’s actually borderline “magical”. Yet since no one in the tech/Apple blogosphere will have anything like a moderate/realistic/rational view on Apple’s impact on culture, politics, and, like, humanity, the more trollish blogs like Gizmodo are forced to write stupid shit like that to get all teh clickz.

So what I’m saying is that John Gruber (and the DECK people and 5by5 people) are so hyperbolically pro-Apple that they actually create a vacuum of reason that allows stupidasses like Jesus Diaz and Joe Brown to keep trolling Apple. Not that Apple doesn’t need a little trolling. But seriously guys. Gruber, MG Siegler, etc., your limpdick Apple boosterism then creates a whole cottage industry of limpdick anti-Apple trolling. And then Gruber will debunk the anti-Apple trolling, which will spawn more, etc., and then I have to take five minutes out of my day to write a stupid, stupid, intensely Inside Baseball-y, insipid post like this on my Tumblr. I wish everyone would just stop.

Be realistic. Apple stuff — like Google stuff — has what the pencilnecks call “negative externalities”. They’re just different ones. Apple is the biggest, best, most exciting company working today. But maybe just short of BP or BlackRock, Apple is also the most avaricious-seeming, bent-on-world-domination company working today. Its products are great. But they’re also so great that they seem to contain the possibility of an horrible, future-times dystopia on our horizon. We probably shouldn’t welcome that — from Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple. So just chill out and try to be good. Be a writer, cover your topics with courage, and try to be honest, won’t you?

Disclaimer: This post makes unsubstantiated claims about and ad hominem attacks on John Gruber personally, but I have tried to construct a facts-based argument against his intellectual position. I’ve searched through four years of Gruber’s industry-leading Apple blog, Daring Fireball. He gives no shits about Chinese workers or Apple’s corporate responsibility. Fact.

John Gruber is a psychotic asshole who must be stopped. Or, I just need to stop listening to his podcast and reading his blog. Probably the latter. But also, partially, the former. I listened to the latest Talk Show (his podcast), and it was the most smug piece of shit conversation I’ve ever heard two people (he and the host, Dan Benjamin) have in the history of me hearing conversations. Like, I literally could not believe it. At one point. Gruber and Benjamin riff on Mike Daisey being like a little four-year-old. And when Gruber talks about the thing that most incenses him, how Daisey has no respect for the truth or his audience (good points) the sniveling Dan Benjamin immediately brings it back to how Daisey hurt Apple so much. Because that’s the big issue here.

I typed up a transcript of the preceding bit, and pasted it at the end. But I just want to examine Gruber’s main argument: that Apple is doing a fine job reporting on and regulating itself and its own supply chain, and that its issues are well-known, and that Mike Daisey’s exaggerations have now put too great an emphasis on its supply chain and manufacturing process.

In a recent blog post Gruber wrote, he also makes an implicit argument (I think) that the media really need not bother with reporting on Apple because, again, their supplier responsibility reports are the best and most accurate source of information:

I can’t find anything reported by the Times that Apple itself hasn’t reported. The Times’s report is more compelling; it adds color and punch and presents its conclusions more powerfully and emotionally through its use of a narrative. But factually, the Times’s reporting gives credence to the scope and accuracy of Apple’s own public reporting.

So let’s take a look at some of these issues. I contend that Gruber only intermittently writes about Apple and China — and almost always to support Apple/Foxconn’s blamelessness for the work conditions. Further, he has devoted much more time and energy to debunking and generally assailing Mike Daisey — who was already debunked and assailed quite publicly on This American Life, did you hear about that? — so… I mean I don’t know why he keeps doing that. For a guy who is against putting too much emphasis on an already well-known public story, he seems to have a real compulsion to emphasize an already well-known public story.

Anyway, here is Gruber’s argument on this morning’s podcast.

Gruber:

I don’t think it’s ridiculous, I don’t think you could have to be seen as a die hard Apple biased booster, to make the argument that given the actual facts that the amount of scrutiny and interest in Apple’s labor and environmental conditions in Asian supply chain was commensurate with the actual problems before Mike Daisey’s story. It’s not like nobody had any interest in these things before Mike Daisey. Apple began publishing its public supplier responsibility reports back in 2007. They certainly didn’t start doing that on their own volition, out of the blue, based on the goodness of their corporate heart. They did that because people were asking questions and reporters were uncovering actual problems.

OK. This seems like a reasonable argument. Until you look at an Apple news site — Daring Fireball, say — and see how much it discussed Apple’s Asian supply chain back in 2007. Hmm… looks like one entry, a linked list post:

Apple Engineers Refer to Chinese Factory as ‘Mordor’

Entry for “send to Mordor” at the Double-Tongued Dictionary:

Hardware techies at Apple are regularly sent from California for intense two-week shifts to the city-sized FoxConn factory in Shenzhen, China where iPods are made and tested. Internally at Apple this is known as “being sent to Mordor.”

I’m sure it’s a lovely place. (Via Kottke.)

Hah! LOL! “I’m sure it’s a lovely place”, he says! That dry wit! Gruber sounds very concerned about Apple’s Asian supply chain here, right? This is some hard-hitting concern about Foxconn manufacturing. I feel like Gruber should win a Peabody and a Pulitzer. Is that possible for a linked list post?

Read More

WSJ:

Not surprisingly, Apple will be spending its money on the dividend and buyback using its domestic cash.

About two-thirds of Apple’s [$100,000,000,000, ie one hundred billion dollars] cash sits overseas since that’s where the company’s earns most of its revenue.

Apple pays an international tax rate of under 3%, according to Bernstein Research, so repatriating its overseas cash would come at a steep cost. Most large S&P 500 firms pay an international tax rate of between 13% and 25%.