Low-End Apple Bloggers

On January 18th Horace Dediu made two observations and posted them to Twitter. Shortly after those tweets went live, I began constructing a short article around them. Either unable or simply unwilling to finish the article though, the beginnings of this piece have remained in Simplenote since then. Now, with my Instapaper queue finally completely empty for the first time since I bought the app, I finally have the time and — more importantly —  available attention to begin working through my back catalog of half-baked articles, the first of which is this one about Apple bloggers.

Horace’s first tweet, and the one that inspired me to write this aritlce:

“Apple critics have been disrupted by the low end of their profession.”

And the second, posted a few minutes later:

“‘Good enough’ criticism of Apple has swamped the sophisticated critic’s nuanced appeal.”

Over the last couple years in particular, sites like Tumblr and the like have made it increasingly easier to publish content to the web. As the barrier to entry lowered, the popularity of this new medium grew across all topics, with new writers of varying calibers popping up every day, hoping to attract an audience for their thoughts and ideas. In this sense, I wholeheartedly agree with Horace: the sophisticated critic’s nuanced appeal has indeed been swamped with mediocre criticism of Apple. I do not, however, agree with his first statement, that those sophisticated critics have at all been disrupted by these mediocre writers. If anything, I would argue that the existence of a low-end in their professions has made those exceedingly good at analyzing and critiqueing Apple stand out more so than would have been possible in their absence. Not that the existence of a low-end is wholly a boon to the Apple bloggers, but it’s also not quite as bad as everyone portrays it to be.

Those with interesting and unique things to say, the writers who convey those thoughts and ideas well, will eventually gain an audience and, by extension, the ability to effect change in this space; this much the internet has proven. Conversely, the copycats, mediocre writers, and those merely parroting the words of others will never have a significant impact upon the blogging community. This much the internet has also proven.