This is typical snarky Lyons stuff. But it’s so arrogant and patronizing that when I read it was brought up short. Because I realized, this guy isn’t joking. Dan Lyons and people like him really believe that Apple just sits around, inventing absolutely nothing, selling overpriced shiny baubles. In their view, all technology is the same, and Apple just makes products whose ideas are all entirely obvious, despite the fact that no one did things that way before.

All offered by a man who couldn’t get one LOLcat’s worth of attention for his writing until he pretended to be Steve Jobs.

It’s just one piece of the puzzle, though, but as you can see we’re still working on rebuilding for a new era where Apple’s tablet computers lead the world and HP is ditching its entire PC business.  Anyone who says they saw that coming is just lying.  At best, they made wild-ass guesses. We only guessed that the world would change a lot and we needed an infrrastructure that would support that. It’s taking us some time, but we smile at the progress regularly.

For example, this news blog. The original site never anticipated such, and when we glued it on, it wasn’t very sticky.  Posting required using a CMS (to avoid hand-editing and updating of links), then publishing through two servers and running a shell script.  Now we can publish from any browser, or an iPad or iPhone app if we’re feeling “hip” (as the kids say these days).  With some luck, we can post some news updates even as we rebuild other parts. And maybe even allow comments at some point if we don’t think the spam will drive us crazy. (The last thing we’re seeking is additional ways to spend time!)

But we hope you’ll start to hear from us more, at least when we have something useful to say. Putting off saying something for several hours and reconsidering has, many times, convinced us that what we were going to say wasn’t worth your time. We’ll try to keep respecting that.

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A new study confirms what some in the technology industry have long sensed: that Apple commands an inordinate amount of the media’s attention.

A yearlong look at technology news coverage by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 15.1 percent of tech articles were primarily about Apple; 11.4 percent were about Google; and a meager 3 percent were about Microsoft.

It’s not as if Microsoft lacks for public relations people. But Apple is especially effective at seizing journalists’ attention, said Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, citing the anticipation for new devices and Apple’s “very public way of releasing products.”

Apple software powers only a tiny slice of the world’s computers, an area dominated by Microsoft. But its popular and innovative iPods and iPhones helped Apple exceed Microsoft’s market capitalization earlier this year.

Ms. Mitchell said she was surprised by the extent of Apple’s domination of the media’s diet, “even over Google.”

On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple, by Gil Amelio (former Apple CEO) and William L. Simon, 1998; chapter 11, “Crack of Doom—Dysfunctional Relationships,” paragraphs 3-7, pages 156-157:

The media blitz about Apple should have been a delightful experience; as hoped for in Barnum’s famous phrase, they were spelling the name right. I once asked for a count of how many articles on Apple appeared in a typical month. The answer our PR department came up with: over 1,000 stories, articles, profiles, and interviews. And this was in a quiet month, when we didn’t have any headline activities going on.

I could well understand an extensive interest about Apple in the Bay Area and the trade press covering high tech. But why this excessive level of coverage in other locations? So I posed the question to a New York Times staffer: “You’re a New York newspaper and we’re a California company, why do you include so much coverage of Apple?”

“Because we sell more papers.”

I asked him to be more specific.

He said, “I can give you the exact statistics. When we run a strong story on Apple, we sell three percent more papers. So we run stories on Apple. That’s the bottom line.”

You can forgive the Pew Research Center for not knowing this, but it’s difficult to extend the same generosity to the New York Times itself.

(Excerpted from MacNN RSS feed as captured at the specified date and time.)

John Gruber, Daring Fireball
Gestures as a Language

• The consistent touch UI you spent millions to research and develop is so compelling that I have decided your competitors must be allowed to use it for free.

About an hour later, we backtracked on part of that with a follow-up tweet:

We wouldn’t have recommended TUAW liveblog coverage had we known how vicious it would be. We’ll know for the future.

This generated only two responses on Twitter (both in agreement), and as far as we can find, none in E-mail. Nonetheless, Victor Agreda Jr. (who initiated TUAW’s liveblog coverage) called us this afternoon, identified himself as a full-time employee of AOL, and asked for an explanation of the word “vicious,” assuring us that they take such things very seriously.

One would think it wouldn’t be difficult for AOL to ask for a response on the Internet to a comment on the Internet. Either way, our policy is that since the comment was public, our response is as well, and here it is:

TUAW’s coverage of the event was not the same kind of “liveblog” as from Engadget or Macworld: the people posting the coverage for those two outlets were actually at the event. Only one of the TUAW commenters was actually in the room with Steve Jobs and the rest of the press today, making it, as one person put it (our paraphrase), more of a chat about the event than what we would consider a “liveblog.”

That’s fair, of course, but had we known, we wouldn’t have recommended TUAW’s coverage to begin with. However, what TUAW did wind up posting was all but useless as news coverage. It was aggressively impatient for any announcement that didn’t match the rumor mill that the site had been flogging (for traffic purposes) in the weeks preceding the event, and was indeed viciously dismissive of any reality that didn’t match rumor fantasy.

In other words, it was not about what happened. It started with an expectation of pre-determined rumored products (cameras on iPod Touch models, as predicted by John Gruber; Beatles music, and so on), and degenerated when those were not met.

TUAW’s livebloggers apparently had no idea about new iTunes 9 features, so they discussed (and applauded) items like better sharing, better app management for OS X iPhone devices, Genius for applications, and so on. But when Phil Schiller came on stage to start laying the foundation for any new hardware features, things deteriorated:

10:28 TUAW Host (Mike R.): Reminder all, Sam L. is live onsite

10:28 Tim Wasson: What else ya got for me, Steve?

10:28 Joachim: Phil’s on iPods

10:29 TUAW_DaveCaolo: Here comes Phil!

…

10:33 Erica: Phil tells us that the iPod is a great pocket computer. Two years late.

10:33 Erica: TABLET, PHIL, TABLET

…

10:35 Erica: Hey, I said it’s right up there with Ponies. I *want* but I’m not going to *get*

10:35 TUAW_DaveCaolo: We know the iPod touch is a computer. Move along, Phil.

10:35 Michael Jones: I hope he doesn’t do all of this netbook build-up to just talk about the existing iPod touch.

10:37 Sam Levin: iPhone demo of videos. nice.. ok, where’s the new touch???

It’s worth noting here that Sam Levin was TUAW’s correspondent at the venue. Less than ten minutes after Schiller took the stage to remind everyone exactly where the iPod platform was today, the on-site correspondent was demanding that he stop so Apple could show the new hardware TUAW had been flogging as rumors.

This was necessary, because this event included correspondents from AP, CNBC, and other non-technology people who don’t follow this stuff with a microscope. To explain why the next product is such a great thing, you first have to explain why the current one is a smash hit.

The excerpts above omit many lines of TUAW coverage, but we invite you to compare what you read at TUAW with the same time period in the Macworld live coverage. Macworld provided facts in black text and commentary in brown text, describing what was going on. TUAW was heckling from inside and outside the event demanding rumor fulfillment.

The iPod/iPhone platform would be a nice curiosity without the App Store, but when Schiller took the time to demonstrate new games targeted for the iPod market—the subject once again of Apple’s holiday marketing campaign for the iPod Touch—the cynicism quickly took over:

10:38 Erica: Just announce the new iPod touch please […]

10:38 Tim Wasson: Just show us the camera.

…

10:38 Erica: Wasting time with demos from developers. Means they pushed another product back?

10:38 TUAW_DaveCaolo: If they’re spending so much time on something the touch has done since its inception, then iTunes 9 + iPhone 3.1 + New touch is it.

10:39 TUAW Host (Mike R.): Ars: Time to take a bathroom break

…

10:40 Joachim: did they need to take *this* long for demos?

…

10:40 Megan Lavey: *taps foot* Come on, Apple, I’ve got a copy of Rock Band: The Beatles to pick up.

…

10:41 Josh Carr: I’m afraid erica could be correct… they’re wasting time on dev-speak.

…

10:41 TUAW_DaveCaolo: Parade of developers = zzzzzz (with all respect to developers)

“With all respect to developers, you are boring and you’re boring us and you should stop that because we have rumors we’ve been flogging!“

There’s really just no way to describe this other than vicious. As soon as the event stopped providing news they hadn’t heard, and left unresolved rumors, the site’s correspondents (all text quoted is from TUAW staffers, not from the public at large) petulantly demanded that Apple stop providing information that mainstream reporters needed to come close to the proper context, and instead resume new announcements at a pace that would have created a fifteen-minute event. It was completely bereft of any understanding that such events have to serve an audience larger than, well, TUAW staffers.

It’s what our grandparents used to describe as “can’t see past the end of their own noses.”

To his credit, Victor Agreda (who asked us to explain our words) seemed to get it:

10:45 Victor Agreda Jr: So far all the games shown look pretty awesome. Maybe boring to us, but some Windows friends are most excited by these announcements

Sadly, most of his counterparts simply couldn’t achieve the same self-awareness. Schiller showed graphics demonstrating that a Dell netbook really isn’t a pocket-sized device, attempting to make mainstream reporters realize that the iPod Touch is pocket sized and very powerful. TUAW staffers said:

10:46 Erica: I’m still thinking: Why do the Dell tease at all?

10:46 Erica: If there is no payoff

10:47 Michael Jones: Erica: agreed. It seemed like an odd buildup if they weren’t going to do anything with it.

A few bright spots:

10:47 Tim Wasson: Erica, I think the payoff is that the touch is better than the netbook.

10:47 Megan Lavey: Or maybe the point was to show that Apple doesn’t need no stinkin’ netbook.

…

10:47 mikeschramm: I can see it as just a little jibe at the other manufacturers

…contemporaneously shot down:

10:47 Erica: Nobody games on netbooks

10:47 Erica: Nobody sane that is

(The above excerpts are more intertwined in the actual chat, which you can read for yourself.) In other words, showing the iPod Touch running gaming can’t be a shot at netbooks because “nobody sane … games on netbooks,” so mentioning a netbook must have meant Apple was meant to introduce its own netbook—a product type Apple’s executives have repeatedly said they’re keeping an eye on but that, at present, does not provide the experience they want to associate with the Apple logo.

There were plenty of other complaints that Apple had the temerity to talk to people other than TUAW’s hyper-focused crew, but you get the idea pretty clearly: demands that anything but new product announcements simply stop, completely, because if TUAW’s crew didn’t need demos, nobody possibly could have benefitted from them.

When hardware announcements did start, TUAW’s writers were temporarily mollified, but quickly returned to iPod Touch camera rumors as soon as they saw specs on a new iPod Touch that did not include a camera. When it became clear there was no iPod Touch camera, the disappointment came back fast:

10:57 mikeschramm: On a scale of 1 to 100, I rate this event an iTunes 9

It briefly crossed Erica’s fingers that the camera rumors might be bunk, but once a camera appeared on the iPod Nano, TUAW seemed to admit no possibility that the iPod Touch camera rumors were simply wrong:

11:02 Josh Carr: There have been rumors about the iPod touch camera failing in the test phase… with this report, i’d say there’s some chance it’s true.

Of course, for rumormongers, rumors can never fail: they can only be failed. Rumors are never wrong; something must have happened within Apple or its suppliers to explain why the rumors didn’t come true. This usually manifests as news stories blaming Apple for not having produced a product that the company never intended to produce, a shared lack of self-awareness.

Near the end, a bit of the missing self-awareness slipped in:

11:10 mikeschramm: Why is everyone saying this apple event failed? We got everything we expected but Beatles. No one really expected a tablet, did they? really?

…

11:12 mikeschramm: the camera in the touch is a legit complaint about this event, but nobody gets to whine about no tablet, that was a pie in the sky

Nowhere does TUAW’s coverage bother to address why no camera in the iPod Touch is a “legitimate complaint.” Because it didn’t meet the promises of people who don’t work at Apple and who do not design the products?

This is like us reporting that TUAW is about to roll out a new design that allows for instant thought-based weblog posts of any news item, eliminating all the typing and proofreading, so they’ll have the most accurate and up-to-date coverage of live events ever. When that doesn’t happen, should TUAW be criticized? Did they fail to meet expectations? Did the new system fall apart in testing, or they just incapable of providing what they needed? Assuming that any rumor must be true is ridiculous.

The most aware post of the entire “liveblog” came from Mike Rose near the end:

11:19 TUAW Host (Mike R.): OK gang we will wrap it up here… Thanks to everyone for turning out — I think our ratio of participants to actual news was higher than it’s ever been…

Perhaps that’s why TUAW’s participants were so aggressively unaware of their demands that the event be tailored to them, rather than understanding it was an event for the media at large, and that it was not there to valid the rumors they’d printed to generate traffic:

• Rumor: iPod Classic will get a camera

• What new goodies await us on the 9th?

• Rumor: Steve Jobs will appear at Sept. 9 event

• From Berlin with love: Hama cases for rumored iPod touch with camera

• Rumor: Apple TV news on Sept. 9

• Rumor: Could the new iPod touch be delayed?

• Rumors: The Beatles on iTunes? Yoko says yes, EMI says not yet

We like TUAW. It’s on our list of daily reads, and it’s staying there. Any outlet is free to cover rumors if it wishes, no matter how often such coverage proves to waste the time of its readers. Coverage of live events doesn’t need to be dry and colorless, either.

However, we found today’s coverage viciously unaware and unsympathetic of anything beyond TUAW’s own narrow view of the technology world. TUAW aggressively dismissed anything that wasn’t a new product announcement, said that Apple’s failure to meet false rumors were “legitimate complaints,” and provided no context for why anyone should have believed any of the rumors other than the fact that they were actual rumors.

Despite using the Flash-based CoverItLive service that made live updates flow smoothly to our (non-iPhone) browsers, it was not useful to our readers, nor to anyone who hadn’t spent time following and dissecting unsourced and unfounded gossip. We would not have recommended that readers follow the live coverage had we known this, and we will hesitate to recommend TUAW live coverage in the future because of it.

TUAW’s later published coverage of today’s events is more considered and useful, though it still maintains an unhealthy tone of wondering why rumors didn’t become reality, rather than ever asking why people believed rumors that turned out to be false. TUAW is far from alone in this myopia, but it’s not nearly at the level that permeated the live chat, and should not dissuade you from reading more if you seek more information about today’s announcements.

Without getting into the whole thing, Schiller says Apple did not ask the developers of the dictionary application (based on Wiktionary, which Schiller consistently misspelled) to censor their product; Apple only said that until parental ratings were available so such vulgar words could be restricted to “17+” purchasers, the app could not contain the vulgar words. The developers had no idea when iPhone OS 3.0 with Parental Controls would ship, so their choice was “wait for an unknown amount of time or censor the dictionary and ship it now.” They chose the latter. They might have chosen the former if Apple had provided any specifics about release dates before WWDC, but that’s another story.

Gruber writes that “after going back to Ninjawords’s developers and conferring with some trusted sources within Apple, I believe what Schiller says here is genuinely the case,” and later adds, “I believe Phil Schiller that Apple’s policy is not to reject App Store dictionaries for containing swear words.” Gruber then goes on to point out several clear examples of how “this policy has not been consistently enforced.”

We would take one further step back and remind readers that, in MDJ‘s view, Schiller does not deserve the benefit of the doubt because in the past, when Apple faced embarrassing press coverage over its own stupid actions, Schiller went to the press and said things that he either knew were not true, or should have known were not true.

We last reviewed this story in MDJ 2008.10.14, from whence the following excerpt originates:

To understand what’s going on, you should restart the WABAC machine and travel to the previous leap year. Until mid-2004, Apple’s security update policy was even worse than it is now. Security Updates included huge numbers of components not even mentioned in the release notes. For example, from reading the notes for Security Update 2004-05-03, you’d never know that this update included changes to Mail for the then-current Mac OS X 10.3.3, or that the Mac OS X 10.2.8 version included undocumented changes to Safari, Directory Access, Classic, the ISO 9660 filesystem, Web Kit, OpenSSL, Rendezvous (now known as Bonjour), and more. (MDJ 2004.05.05) Some of these were probably part of previous security updates that Apple “incorporated,” but it didn’t say so.

That 2004 release was just the latest of a long line of poorly documented Security Updates, but the fortress around security information rapidly crumbled. Security Update 2004-05-03 included a fix for an AppleShare problem, credited to “Dave G. from @stake,” that Apple said only “improve[d] the handling of long passwords.” However, @stake itself (purchased last year by Symantec) advised the world that this “long password” issue was in fact a buffer overflow concerning password handling, one that allowed attackers to execute code with root permissions. It wasn’t theoretical, either: @stake told MDJ that the firm had developed an exploit that allowed them to run code as root on any system with the buggy version of AppleShare. Apple, for its part, refused to admit there were any root exploits.

Shortly before this, Apple released QuickTime 6.5.1, fixing a bug that Apple described as a simple crasher: “Playing a malformed .mov (movie) file could cause QuickTime to terminate.” The company that originally reported the vulnerability to Apple, eEye Digital Security, then told CNET News that the bug was more serious and allowed attackers to hide executable code in a movie file.

Later in May, everything fell apart for Apple. Vulnerabilities in URL scheme mapping allowed malicious Web sites to remotely mount a disk image on your computer, so an attacker that induced you to visit a bad Web page could mount a disk on your computer, either by mounting it directly from a remote server or by forcing Safari to download a “.dmg“ file that, using Safari’s default settings, would then mount locally. A companion vulnerability in Help Viewer allowed the attacker to use a URL to force Help Viewer to open a system AppleScript that could then open any file—including an application on the malicious disk image. Just like that, attackers could make Safari launch a malicious program on your system (MDJ 2004.05.21).

Apple closed the Help Viewer vulnerability a few days later (MDJ 2004.05.24), but as people examined the custom URL scheme handling, it became more and more clear that it was just far too easy for attackers to use malicious URL schemes to open programs without your permission, or mount disk images, or execute command-line programs, or worse.

But if Apple’s dishonest documentation was unnerving, the next round of revelations was infuriating. The URL scheme bug and the Help Viewer bug had been reported to Apple three months beforehand, in February 2004. The German developer who reported the issues had Web server logs showing that Apple-owned IP addresses visited his test site to reproduce the issue in February, and then Apple buried it. The company released three separate Security Updates after the vulnerability was reported and before the developer went public with it—a move he had told Apple well in advance he would make if the company had not fixed the vulnerability within three months. Not only did Apple not fix the bugs, Apple did not even respond to the developer, despite his repeated urgent messages about the problem.

After he went public, the very next Security Update fixed the Help Viewer bug (MDJ 2005.05.25), but the next week saw Mac OS X 10.3.4 released without the Help Viewer fix included. Apple’s earlier fix in Security Update 2004-05-25 strongly suggested that Apple had no intention of fixing the Help Viewer vulnerability until it went public, because the fixed version was not baked into the OS update. (MDJ 2004.06.02) It took another week, with Security Update 2004-06-07, for Apple to rush out the beginning of “Download Validation” and quarantining that introduced the concept of “safe” files and warning you when opening newly downloaded files. (MDJ 2004.06.08)

By this point, the mess in the technical and business press about Apple’s huge security holes had real consequences. Security Update 2004-06-07 was the first one documented in the “modern” style, where every top-level component is mentioned with specific (and accurate, to the best of anyone’s knowledge) descriptions—no more including mystery fixes to components that weren’t even supposed to be in the update. In the next calendar year, Apple adopted the sequential yearly numbering of Security Updates, starting with Security Update 2005-001.

But Apple saw that there had been damage done, and rather than fess up to it, the company sent executives to the press to speak falsely about the issues. Phil Schiller, then as now a senior vice-president of Apple, told Macworld on 2004.06.07 that the risks of these vulnerabilities “are still in the realm of potential risks, not actual risks.” As MDJ said at the time, Schiller’s remark is the same as saying that a bomb is not a weapon until it explodes—transparently ridiculous.

Schiller also told CNET News that week that the February bug report “was only a small piece of the picture and didn’t present as great a threat,” and that “the complete picture of this current threat has actually been very recent. That, too, was demonstrably false: the developer explained the entire vulnerability in his February bug report, as he said in his public online warning and later confirmed to Wired’s Leander Kahney. MDJ has cautioned readers ever since about trusting any technical pronouncement from Schiller: the chronology makes it quite likely that Schiller knew at the time that his statements were false (MDJ 2004.06.08).

We do not offer an opinion as to whether Schiller is being truthful in the App Store censorship matter. We only point out that his past statements when Apple was under fire mean that he does not get the benefit of our doubt. If Apple’s policy truly is not to censor applications for “including references to common swear words” (or ask their developers to do so to gain approval, either explicitly or implicitly), we’ll see the results in the App Store, and Schiller will have won back some credibility.

If he is dissembling, we’ll continue to hear stories from developers whose software was rejected because of such references, and it will be clear to anyone paying attention that Schiller’s press statements about how Apple didn’t do awful or stupid things simply cannot be trusted.

We’re willing to entertain the idea that Schiller’s telling the truth. We’re just not assuming he is.