To earn a place in the hallowed halls of Douchebag’s Row usually requires a career’s worth of hit-whoring, but for our latest inductee, I’m going to make an exception based on a single piece. As inevitable as the thousands of articles praising Steve Jobs – as inescapable as the thoughtful words of people such as President of the United States, countless Silicon Valley icons and leaders from every industry on the planet – some one-off classless scrawling about how Jobs was really not that big of a deal and that people should get over it was equally likely. I could tell you I was surprised that it came from Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, but that would be bullshit. In addition to severely compromising its users’ personal information and using stolen goods to blackmail people, Gawker methodically produces this kind of excrement with the frequency that a farmer milks a cow. It’s the entirety of their business model. Hamilton Nolan’s piece “Steve Jobs Was Not God” has no doubt generated hundreds of thousands of hits for the blog network that includes some of my personal favorites like Deadspin and Lifehacker. I, for one, will continue enjoying them, but from this point forward, I refuse to give them a single hit.  Whether through RSS reader or other means, I will scrape the shit out of their content, but I will not allow Gawker Media in any way to benefit from my presence. I’d encourage everyone reading this to do the same.

I don’t link to scum like Nolan, but I want to expose my readers to the full context of what’s got me so hot. To save you from having to visit the site yourself, here is the article in its entirety, which will be followed by a section where I swear a lot. If Nick Denton doesn’t like me scraping his content wholesale and dumping it into my blog, he can thoroughly and vigorously fuck himself.

Steve Jobs Was Not God

So, Steve Jobs is dead. A tech genius has passed on. Sad. Certainly a devastating loss to Steve Jobs’ close friends and family members, as well as to Apple executives and shareholders. The rest of you? Calm down.

Among my Facebook friends yesterday, more than one wrote publicly that they were “crying” or “can’t stop crying” or “teared up” due to Steve Jobs’ death. Really now. You can’t stop crying, now that you’ve heard that a middle-aged CEO has passed on, after a long battle with cancer? If humans were always so empathetic, well, that would be understandable. But this type of one-upmanship of public displays of grief is both unbecoming and undeserved.

Real outpourings of public grief should be reserved for those people who lived life so heroically and selflessly that they stand as shining examples of love for all of humanity. People like, for example, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who—along with his family—was bombed, beaten, and stabbed during his years of principled activism in the US civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth died yesterday, the same day as Steve Jobs. He did not die a billionaire.

Death, of course, is not a competition. All deaths are sad for the living. Everyone deserves to be mourned, and well-known people will inevitably be mourned more loudly than others. But it is actually important to keep our grief in perspective. When we start mourning technocrats as idols, we cheapen the lives of those who have sacrificed more for their fellow man.

Steve Jobs was great at what he did. There’s no need to further fellate the man’s memory. He made good computers, he made good phones, he made good music players. He sold them well. He got obscenely rich. He enabled an entire generation of techie design fetishists to walk around with more attractive gadgets. He did not meaningfully reduce poverty, or make life-saving scientific discoveries, or end wars or heal the sick or befriend the friendless. Which is fine—most of us don’t. But most of us don’t provoke such cult-like lachrymosity when we pass on. When even the journalists tasked with covering you and your company are reduced to pie-eyed fans apologizing for discomforting your insanely powerful multibillion-dollar corporation in some minor way, some perspective has been lost.

I’ve never owned an Apple product. Yet here I am, talking on phones, typing on computers, and reading the internet every day. If you like Apple products, fine. They are products. They do not have souls. They are not heroes, and neither is their creator, no matter how skilled he may have been. Let’s mourn Steve Jobs as we mourn the passing of any other good man—modestly, privately, and quietly. Those of you whose remembrances have already taken on a quasi-religious tone: seek help.

Let the sentiment wash over you. Read it again if it helps. Ask yourself if the the condescension of a blog hack telling you how to express your grief over the death of another human being is worse than the casual talking-point diminishment of Jobs’s contributions to the way we interact with technology. How do you feel about being gamed into guilt about Jobs’s death when you didn’t mourn a civil rights activist who died of natural causes after a long life? What does the phrase “fellate the man’s memory”, one that I’m sure got Gawker 100,000 clicks alone, do for you? Nick must be so proud of you, Hamilton.

Here’s my wish for you, Hamilton Nolan. That some day, you’ll be sitting across from a potential employer talking about your work and that he’ll come across the putridness that you will – by that time, if not already – regret having written. My wish is that he’ll ask you about it and that you’ll know, in that moment, as your heart creeps up into your throat and your brow explodes in perspiration, that you’re fucked. I hope this piece is the only thing that keeps you from a cushy writing gig and that it happens at a juncture in your life when you can least afford it. I hope that your interviewer tells his friends who you are and that the experience repeats itself, humiliatingly, over and over and over. My hope for you is that you’ll be condemned to life writing the literary equivalent of crackwhore blowjobs, scraping the bottom of the barrel for hits while your 15 year-old band of starred commenters cheer you on.  Welcome to Douchebags’ Row, dickhead. Everyone else here would be revolted to be in your company.

And no one will remember you when you’re gone.

Douchebag’s Row Reluctantly Welcomes Hamilton Nolan originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on October 7, 2011.

Let me just lay it out right now: there is no way, in 100 million fucking years, that Apple would partner exclusively with anyone–let alone the also-ran carrier of choice. Period. This makes zero sense on every possible level.  I refuse to even outline the obviousness of why this makes no sense, as I neither want to expedite the onset of carpal tunnel nor risk an aneurysm. Putting a question mark at the end of your link-baiting headline only alerts everyone unfortunate enough to have landed on your site of what you’re up to. This is possibly one of the most transparent, ridiculous pageview grabs in the history of Apple reporting and I seriously hope this comes back to bite BGR directly on the asscheeks–hard.

BGR: the iPhone 5 Will Not Be Exclusive to Sprint, So Shut Up originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on October 4, 2011.

/cue sinistermusic.aif

The internet is more efficient than technology reporting is thorough, so the anatomy of all “I knew it all along, you Apple scumbags” stories take some time to come full-circle. Your average timeline looks like this:

00:00 – The story breaks from the source. In this case a discovery that was leaked by two researchers from O’Reilly.

+00:00.000014 – Every news outlet, blogger – basically any human being who was ever written about the technology space – cuts and pastes the source’s press release in the hope of monetizing some of the hatred that people are drawn to comes to Apple. Comment sections fill up like the Port-a-Sans at a St. Patrick’s Day parade with “AHA!”/demands for official Apple fanboy responses/pantomimed hand-wringing posts. Jacqui Cheng gleefully gets to exercise the “aggressive” half of her passive-aggressive relationship with Apple and post 500 words of complaint.

+01:00 Some camera hogging politician will hold a press conference, write a letter, or hold a press conference about the letter they wrote attempting to grill Steve Jobs on the topic. Apparently Chuck Schumer was either relinquishing his well-known role, on vacation or in the hospital because Al Franken actually scooped Schumer on “Datafilegate”.

+06:00 Apple never says squat in reply to stories like these, so it’s left to other people to get to the bottom of it. After about 6 hours, the first rational people who know what they’re talking about step in and qualify or otherwise debunk the Apple claims as either irrelevant or sensationalized. Everyone starts to get back to their knitting, the torches are extinguished and the pitchforks are put away. The first article TMA saw came from Alex Levinson and basically said the file is not transmitted to Apple, has been around forever and would appreciate it if the researchers would credit other people’s work on the topic. Then it came to light that Apple actually addressed elected officials’ concerns a year ago when they replied to a letter sent by two senators. Apparently Franken couldn’t be bothered to read a document that would’ve answered 90% of his questions. I can just see Schumer giving Franken a sincere congratulations on getting in front of this important story. And doing it using his best Stuart Smalley impression. Apparently Al has a little bit to learn about pandering to the camera on popular issues.

TMA isn’t naïve, but the only thing marginally bothersome about this whole charade is that the location file on your iPhone is unencrypted, which I guarantee will be resolved with an iOS update. Unless somebody physically has your phone, or has access to your computer and you didn’t encrypt your iTunes backup, there’s no chance of getting at your information anyway. TMA calls this the “Pwn2Own Phenomenon”: every year when neckbeards mockingly decry OS X’s browser as “insecure”, they don’t make a lot of mention that the person has possession of your machine when he’s “hacking” it. Possession is 9/10 of the law whether you’re talking about the hundred dollar bill you dropped or the information contained on my consumer electronics device once you lose it. Somehow that still comes as a shock to some people. It also comes as no surprise to TMA that Android devices send location data back to the mothership approximately 500 times a day. But no one ever had an 100,000-hit day on their website bashing Google. And Google does a pretty good job hiding unflattering press about itself, but that’s another post…

Oh–and I hope those researchers didn’t do anything stupid like short Apple stock in anticipation that their “breakthrough discovery” would have some effect on its price: it’s still up over $10 from before the call.

Apple’s Evil Plot for User Tracking EXPOSED! originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on April 25, 2011.

Some habits are more awful than others. As a consumer (and sometime regurgitator) of copious amounts of bad tech writing, TMA has distilled the five most blood pressure-challenging writing habits in tech:

The “What company x can learn from company y” article

When a technology company does something right, it’s only a matter of time before some master the obvious points out that a company that does something poorly could benefit from doing that particular thing well – as if it were some transferable skill for which the failing company could go to night school. The reason so many people writing about technology companies don’t work for them – or for any company for that matter – is that they don’t understand what it takes to change behavior on a company-wide scale. Thank goodness they can oversimplify it and provide facile recommendations in their blog.

The interrogative headline

What does it mean when you read an Apple headline that ends with a question mark?

More than half the time, some asshole is trying to keyword his post in an attempt to drum up page views, yet cannot commit to a declarative statement in the headline. It’s almost like the writer thinks he’s invoking some trick of the trade designed to protect him against a lawsuit from Apple if he did, in fact, make an outrageous claim. These articles without exception are absolute crap. When I encounter a title in my RSS feed that contains a question mark at the end, I quietly answer “no” and move onto the next one.

What Apple needs to do with their cash on hand

There’s no more predictable activity for an Apple beat analyst than to call for Apple to do something with their cash reserves the day after they announce how much they have. I’m starting to think Apple may actually keep so much in reserve just to host a quarterly company-wide drinking game based on all the stupid suggestions that invariably come out of the woodwork. Here are some of my favorites:

• “Apple will buy Time Warner Cable” by Robert X. Cringely. Rest assured, Cringely: you’ve already got one of those “Reserved” table placards to hold your seat for the inevitable induction into Douchebag’s Row. Quick visual aid: what does this website header make you want to do?

If you answered “throw haymakers until I pass out from exhaustion”, you are correct.

Nice PS2 keyboard, BTW.

Douche.

• “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June” according to “a normally reliable source” by Mike Arrington. TMA has no doubt that the source was Google Analytics, who had notified him that his site hadn’t produced any eyeball-catching excrement in at least 14 minutes.

Here’s what Apple will do with their cash: continue to secure components like Flash RAM and LCD panels in bulk, which will allow them to beat competitors on price and help freeze the development of copycat products for a couple months. Oh- and they might buy TiVo.

Anecdotal sample sizing

Picture the image of the journalist from 20 years ago: determined, resourceful and quoting studies that are statistically significant. Possibly donning a cool fedora that didn’t make him look like a middle-aged man who for some reason started wearing a fedora (I’ve been seeing these people everywhere in NYC lately). Now contrast that with your average tech blogger: high word count, Wikipedia-driven and content to ask their three best friends’ opinion to substantiate a pivotal point in the article. Nothing says “I suck at journalism” as efficiently as the use of “everyone I asked” and “numerous people I talked to”. You’re writing about an industry made up of precision instruments – stop supporting your claims like someone who freelances for the National Enquirer, not that the two are mutually exclusive .

Asinine predictions to drive pageviews

If I could use one phrase to summarize the state of Apple’s coverage in the tech media, this would be it. I suppose it’s the biggest downside of being simultaneously super-successful and uber-secretive: every asshole’s sensationalistic projection for your products has a chance of seeing the light of day. Whereas Microsoft uses this tactic to play sites like Engadget like a fiddle to stifle competition with a product they have no intention of releasing, the constant generation of unrealistic expectations for companies that actually ship things could eventually lead to consumer disappointment. Thankfully, no one really listens to them. The sources of these predictions are usually “one and done” analysts/bloggers with a “strong connections to a reliable source” but many of them *cough* Scott Moritz *cough*remain bulletproof after several incorrect guesses fall squarely on their faces. Some of these asinine mouthforms are actually antithetical to their corresponding real-world events. Yet they persist. Guess TMA will have to keep writing.

So those are your top 5. I’m sure you can think of your own. I’d love to hear about them in comments as I’m in the market for a new drinking game.

TMA’s Favorite Tech Writing Cliches originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on April 8, 2011.

So TMA was not at all shocked when the Engadget hordes got wind of Apple’s new subscription model policy. Negative comments (yes, I know I’m an idiot for reading them, let alone responding to them) boil down to:

-30%?! Don’t they make enough money?!
Does anyone know how much it costs Apple to maintain a subscription through iTunes? Apple’s iTunes/App Store infrastructure cost billions to set up – do you think hosting and maintaining subscriptions should be free? And anyway: if the service stays in the AppStore, why the fuck do people care how much Apple takes? Do you think Netflix would pass the savings onto you? As an aside, I don’t agree with all of Apple’s “30% across-the-board” policy. It strikes me as fairer when Apple is doing the hosting and subscription management, as will be the case with periodicals, but Netflix? Notsomuch. If there’s any part of the policy that will end up segregating itself for renegotiation, it’ll be for that portion of content for which Apple is responsible for only managing the customer information.

-If Apple loses Netflix/Amazon/Sirius/insert your possibly-effected-but-still-too-early-to-tell app here, I am so never buying an Apple product again
First of all, do you think Apple just dropped this policy bomb on companies without at least notifying them first? I’m not saying they agreed with it, but you can’t think Apple didn’t approach a cornerstone app like Netflix and say “Listen, we’re starting this subscription model for periodicals and we have to apply it across the board – including you”. And if they didn’t give them a heads-up, shame on them. If individual apps start disappearing from the app store, you can bet your ass Apple will renegotiate the terms. People who think Apple is in some throne-sitting position where it can dictate unreasonable terms without repercussions need to schedule their head-from-ass-ectomies ASAP. Remember Apple’s insistence on the $.99 song, despite the labels’ whining? Well, now there’s variable pricing for music on iTunes, so you can pay for the full value of that Lady Gaga song.

-Apple’s anti-competitive practices are going to land it in anti-trust land
Probably not. I know I’m going against the wisdom of several dozen TechCrunch commenters, but you have to have a controlling interest in a market before you can abuse that market. Last I checked, there’s not a specific market called “good tablet computers”; even the sub-category of devices that Apple’s iPad dominates is populated by a few other knock-offs like the Galaxy Tab. Now that Apple has shown the entire tech sector that there is a huge market for these devices as well as what size the device should be, 2011 is going to be flooded with iPad wannabes.

-Google’s devices and One Pass system is getting my business now
Leave it to Google to take advantage of a sucking wound, or in this case the howling maws of publishers and pundits complaining about Apple’s 30% cut. Google recently announced a subscription maintenance plan that would charge publishers a low, low 10% fee. If you act now, Google will even give subscriber information for free. Apple, on the other hand, makes people opt-into allowing publishers access to customers’ information, something that protects the customer, but pisses off publishers. Google, obviously, has no such qualms about whoring out having users’ information parsed in exchange for a better deal and a knock-off product. It’s a big part of their current business model.

As usual, this whole brouhaha boils down to a small number of irate freetards and pundits that are paid to pit fanboys and freetards against each other talking down a policy by Apple that makes businesses pay to use Apple’s infrastructure and doesn’t let them have their way with your data unless you choose. Same ‘ol, same ‘ol.

Apple’s Subscription Model: More Sound and Fury for the Tech Press originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 17, 2011.

“And now, says Wiens (owner of iFixit), iPhones are getting (non-standard hardware) too – a “diabolical” move, he says, because pentalobe screwdrivers are few and far better (sic), though he has managed to source some and will sell you one, and a pair of replacement philips screws, for $10.”

“…pentalobe tools, which have been creeping into the Apple product line since 2009…but didn’t become widely used until the new Air debuted in 2010. Now the iPhone 4 has them, it seems highly likely that so will the upcoming iPad 2, and probably future Macs as well.”

“Wiens beef with this is that the use of obscure screws makes Apple’s machines less easy to repair. That, in turn, reduces the hardware’s longevity, ensuring that more machines will end up in landfill.”

“In fact, Apple machines – Macs particularly – (which the screws are not in) are notoriously long-lived, with owners passing them on to friends and relatives after new models have been bought. But eventually they will be binned and recycling will be harder (unless they’re not used in Macs, which, again, they are not).”

“Botched upgrades can lead to costly technical support, but other firms seem less concerned with this risk. Most of Apple’s rivals don’t feel the need to block tinkering to such an extent – Wiens maintains Apple has adopted pentalobe specifically to stop its gadgets being opened.”