I feel like this is an argument that is being irresponsibly being held in public:<p>1) Do Gruber or Marco honestly believe that <i>The Verge</i>'s ethics are questionable? Both have appeared on <i>On The Verge</i> and frequently link to <i>The Verge</i>... I really doubt they've suddenly developed serious misgivings about <i>The Verge</i>'s standards of ethics. And if they have, sniping about it in links and Twitter comments is immature at best.<p>2) Does Topolsky need to defend the ethics of <i>The Verge</i> in light of such sniping? If so, I feel like a personal, emotional and vitriolic response isn't the way to go. Double down with an editorial piece that restates the ethical stance and integrity of <i>The Verge</i> or ignore the sniping. All this does is bring Topolsky down to Marco and Gruber's level.<p>Either someone has serious ethical misgivings or nobody does. If there's a serious beef here, I feel like full-on articles and some investigative journalism (2 of the 3 parties are journalists and Marco plays one on the internet) is in order. If not, all three need to grow the fuck up and start behaving like professionals.<p><i>update: added formatting</i>
Basically, The Verge is being accused of not being sufficiently pro-Apple in its coverage. It's like people who sit around watching mainstream media all day and scream at their TVs "But, but but, you forgot to mention there are 5 scientists who disagree about global warming!" in every story on the environment.<p>It would be an interesting experiment if every story about an Apple launch contained references about prior devices that did a feature first.
Im glad Josh responded to those accusations. When I read the news on The Verge. I do not really have to worry about how biased it is. Which is a welcome change. I can read some quick facts about what is happening and move on.<p>I will say, I liked it better when they did more robust stories. It seems they are trying to cover news more like a newspaper. At the beginning it felt more like a magazine.
Am I the only person who doesn't give the slightest fuck whether a product looks a bit like another one?<p>The iphone looks like a rectangular case with a screen attached to one face, my android phone also looks like a rectangular case with a screen attached one face.<p>This isn't exactly the Sistine chapel.
I'd have to agree with Gruber on this one. The forums on the verge have some very anti-Apple group which complain about anything Apple. One of the features that they have on the Verge is where their writers show what is in their bags and 9/10 of the time, its a Mac laptop and iPhone. That really gets the anti-Apple folks in a tizzy for sure. Unrelated, this seems like a weird article to be discussing on Hacker News.
Responding to criticism in this fashion is a waste of time. It degenerates quickly into a "Did not!" "Did too!" argument. Better to simply write good articles and leave the critics to their own endeavors.<p>EDIT: Grammar
I'm a big fan of The Verge but this seems melodramatic and a little hollow. The HP machine doesn't just share a few design features with the iMac, it's lifted the design wholesale. <i>Way</i> more than any Samsung phone did w.r.t iPhone. Not mentioning this in the article was weird.<p>And Joshua is being "bullied"? Really? Sensitive types, these bloggers.
The funny thing is that when Joshua Topolsky made an off-hand joke about Windows being "like poison", he was attacked for being an Apple fanboy. Still is attacked for it to this day.
In another life I wrote numerous reviews of hardware and software for national magazines. It's a tough beat; if you don't get gear early, your article is too late and gets lost in the crowd. Articles are planned months in advance, so getting stuff lined up from vendors takes a lot of time, and having a good relationship with both vendors and their PR firms is essential to keeping your editor happy. The workflow just required so much lead time between getting the hardware/software, interviewing interesting people, writing the article, creating images, working with copy editors etc. Time is money, and relevancy is always paramount.<p>Ethically, things have changed a lot. Apple used to be extremely generous with hardware, but as they became more successful (roughly around 2004-2005) they were much slower in answering requests for editorial "loaners." The print industry changed a bit too, and it was unusual to be allowed to keep review gear. So "freebies" aren't acceptable anymore, nor should they be.<p>Editorial direction is where things can get crazy. I was writing for one publication, and in a review of SMB firewalls, I was told to include one make that was clearly not up to the standard of the three units in the review. I included an honest evaluation, and discovered that this manufacturer was an advertiser in the publication. Later on, review units were always specified in advance, and the publication quickly became a trade/advertisement journal instead of one with honest, critical reviews.<p>Online pubs have it worse. Their timeframes are even more compressed, and online readers are more fickle. Having an unbiased site is tough, and recognizing biases (as a pub editor) is harder.
Marco's claim is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know how anyone but one of the most rabid Apple fanbois could even make such a claim, or expect from them to mention that other products look similar to Apple's products in every story. Should they mention it when they are 100% clones? When it's 90% similar? 70%? 50%? What would make Marco happy? Maybe he'd like to send the same kind of criticism to sites covering new TV's or fridges.<p>As for Gruber's claim, that might not be 100% false. I've noticed that after being heavily criticized by a minority of their readers who are very active and Microsoft fans, about "being too hard on Microsoft/Nokia", TheVerge usually tries to "make up for it", by compensating with other positives or writing more stories about Microsoft/Nokia/WP. They even seem to have one full time writer that only writes about these sort of stories lately (Tom Warren).<p>Whether these moves are good or bad, that's for anyone to judge. I just think they are a little <i>too</i> reactionary, and I'm not particularly fond of it. I think they'd be better off if they did what they thought it's best, although listening to some feedback I guess can't hurt.<p>And all that being said, I think TheVerge is one of the more "objective" and impartial tech news sites around, and I think they generally do their best to keep it that way, which is something I like about them.
Marco and Gruber are right on the overall message: those HP devices are obvious Apple design copies. For some strange reason theverge and Engadget chose not to mention this fact. As journalists they have to mention that every single time. And for Josh to say he's being bullied or trolled makes no sense. If HP changed their logo to an apple would it be trolling to critize not pointing that out too? On top of that, getting overally defensive isn't a good solution. Gruber and Marco's claims were a little over the top, but everyone knew they weren't being literal. They, just like I, were confused on how respected online tech news orgnizations wouldn't point out the obvious.<p>The other part of his post I take issue with is Josh's swipe at smaller blogs. As if only massive blogs are worthy of contributing to the conversation in a community.
It would be fun to hear those calls from PR people.<p>Blogs are a PR man's worst nightmare come true.<p>As useful as these products are, they also suck in so many ways. Such is the nature of most computers. Cheap to manufacture, limited lifetime, and it shows. They are 1/100th as useful as they could be. Damned if we should have to pretend Apple's or anyone's products are just "perfect", and similar products are inferior, cheap knock-offs (the stuff is all the same on the inside! made in the same factories), or that we should have to "upgrade" whenever the manufacturer (or a TV ad, newspaper, magazine or blog) instructs us to do so.<p>Warn callers from PR firms their conversations will be recorded and then upload some mp3's of the phone calls.<p>Now that would be integrity.
Honestly, at this point I tend to regard Marco and Gruber as slightly more eloquent versions of Siegler. It's been a very long time since I went out of my way to read anything either had to say.
Marco's original comment that set this off: <a href="http://www.marco.org/2012/09/10/elephant" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/2012/09/10/elephant</a><p>Hacker News seemed to agree at the time: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500574" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500574</a><p>So the lack of the mention (especially around the keyboard/trackpad - I remember looking at the pictures myself, somewhat aghast) is actually, you know, notable.
The question is whether honest journalism demands that every product review come with a copied/not copied score card, and I do not believe that it does.<p>The audiences are very different. A copied/not copied story is really an industry story, for people who want to keep track of the competition and status within the computer product industry. Whereas a review is for people who want to learn more about that particular product--people who might not have much sense of the industry dynamics at all.<p>In addition, it is Apple themselves, and Steve Jobs in particular, who have repeatedly made the point that the only thing that matters is whether the product is great. If better than the original inspiration, it will win. Apple will keep winning as long as its products are better than HP's.
Though I'm an Apple user myself, the comments from Marco and Gruber and indeed some other Apple users reminds me of Christians in America - heavily imbibed with a misplaced persecution complex.