Bummed Out by the Brand in the New Republic
Our staff roundtable looking at why people still support Apple after all these years got some attention from the New Republic, where Lydia DePillis used it to bookend her article “Apple Agonistes: What happens to Mac fanatics when the brand bums them out?” She talked to a lot of the right people, and the article catches some of the tensions currently being felt in the Apple community.
I think it only appropriate fpr TidBits to do an article about "What happens to TNR loyalists when the brand gets sold and bums them out?"
Chris Hughes bought a storied, incredibly written, 100 year old publication and morphed it into a combination of Newsweek and Huffington Post.
The article about Mac fanatics is just more shilling for readers.
A lot of words for someone who fundamentally had nothing to say. [In the NR article.]
Nothing new; nothing incisive. Mere regurgitation.
George, do you mean to say that Foer, Kinsley, and other contributors to TNR do not compare with the tiresome Victorians?
ccstone:The opinions of Engst, Pogue, Siracusa, Inatko, are certainly familiar ("regurgitation") to us Tidbit subscribers, but not to thousands of others, including sophisticated TNR readers.
I respect both your reactions, but I think some simple factual reporting is needed, when there is still a widespread contempt for everything Apple. The latest meme is that Apple Is a Religion.
As a relative, I quite improperly step in here, but I've been following Apple history closely since 1984 and depend on the brilliance of the Tidbit circle (like Kissell and Neuburg).
I linked to the article largely because we played a key role in it (yay us!), but I do think it's a useful contribution to the thinking on the topic, in part because it doesn't take place within the Apple echo chamber, where Apple can do no wrong. When so much of the mainstream attention on Apple is about how the company is great or awful, often with incorrect or at least mediocre reasoning on both sides, I think it's important that there be constructive criticism about what Apple is really doing well (hardware, for the most part) and less well (iOS generally, and Mac app updates).
And as far as shilling for readers goes, George, I fear that every publication is guilty of that, because if a publication hits the virtual and physical newsstands and no one reads it, was it even published? ;-)