John Gruber: Jackassery never goes out of style

The dean of Apple bloggers takes a whack at MarketWatch.

From Daring Fireball:

Daniel Newman, writing for MarketWatch, with “7 reasons investors should worry” about Apple:

3. Apple has an identity crisis. When Apple was a challenger brand, it disrupted. It innovated. It had to “think different” and be a rebel. The moment Apple became the incumbent, it lost its identity, its sense of purpose and its vision. That’s why Apple is trying to be everything now: a credit-card company, another Netflix, the Reader’s Digest of news (leading HSBC to downgrade the stock), maybe an AR company, maybe a car company… Worst of all, Apple keeps looking to the past for ideas instead of the future. Steve Jobs had vision. Tim Cook has spreadsheets. Spreadsheets don’t make great Apple products. Vision does.

I read this piece a few hours ago and decided to ignore it. But this one paragraph kept gnawing at me. In one paragraph Newman argues that during Apple’s good old days, it disrupted and innovated. And then one sentence later he’s arguing that the company is lost because it’s entering the fields of AR and cars. And how are AR and autonomous vehicles “the past”? It’s one thing to contradict oneself paragraphs apart, but it takes quite a mind to contradict oneself so completely in a single short paragraph.

My take: I confess I skipped Newman’s piece first time around. One’s arms get tired.