It's posts like these that make me wonder why we put Gruber at such a high pedestal at HN and in the techno blogosphere in general.

On Sean Hollister's lament at the death of the keyboard:

I’d say it’s not strange at all, for all of the reasons
Steve Jobs explained, in detail, on stage in January 2007
when Apple introduced the iPhone. Software keyboards are a
superior general purpose design. But that’s neither here
nor there.

So, because Steve says so, must it be right? Jobs took issue more with the fixed buttons than the keyboards, and just took mainly issue that the keyboard were "there if you ended them or not." Slider keyboards are there only when you need them and offer a significantly upgraded tactile experience over their touch-only counterparts.

The whole “planned obsolescence” thing — started by New
York Times economics columnist Catherine Rampell, but
promulgated by Mims himself after the ball got rolling –
was a pile of horseshit. No company in the computer/mobile
industry makes products that hold their value longer than
Apple’s.

Value isn't just about resale value – it's about how long you can go with having the same product officially supported by a company. Right now, you can install Windows 8 on a top-spec PC from 2005, but the last OS that a 2006 MacBook Pro can run is from 2011. Tough, isn't it? I wouldn't say that the 2005 PC's experience would be better with W8 than it would with 7 or even Linux. Nor am I saying that it would be a good experience for the 2006 Pro to use a 2013 operating system. Still, the fact that Microsoft is going out of their way to support such older systems speaks of their commitment to value.

Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit
desktop-caliber CPU architecture. Four months ago, we did
not. If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC
or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even
bother writing about technology?

64-bit ARM is a large step, yes. But, to call it a major breakthrough is laughable. It's a natural evolution, the fact that Apple did it first does not make it more significant if Samsung or Qualcomm created their own ARM64 SoC. The iPhone 5s' camera quality is nothing significant either – the Lumia 1020 has a far better camera and is really true innovation – Zeiss optics, an enormous sensor... how is that less significant than a simple sensor upgrade? I didn't see anyone scoffing at the quality of the GS4 either.

No one could argue that iOS 7 wasn’t a major update, so
instead Mims takes to disparaging it. Is iOS 7 an
improvement in every single regard? Certainly not. But on
the whole, it’s quite good, introduces some well-needed
conceptual cohesion, and best of all, it shows that the
company is not afraid to boldly move forward from the
Steve Jobs era.

iOS 7 is certainly... bold, if you could call it that, but what core improvements does it hold that make it so much better than 6? On the surface, it's a pretty UI makeover with an ugly icon makeover, and few user-facing features such as AirDrop and Control Center. Yawn. Shiny new APIs? Nice, but, again, there's little in the way of "bold" innovation as Gruber claims.

It's incredible how somebody with such obvious blindness and bias towards a company he loves is heralded as a neutral reviewer. Gruber makes some important points, such as Android's lack of support time, but he insists that Apple is better at everything that Mims criticizes Apple about than everybody else – which is ridiculous.

Just a disclaimer – I am not an MS lover. Neither do I hate Apple. But I have become more friendly with Microsoft, and less with Apple, just because of my own personal experiences.

I had been a die-hard Apple lover for years. Since I saw my first modern Macintosh in 2006, I've lusted after one. I finally got my wish granted in 2011 when I bought my MacBook Air.

For about a year, I was ecstatic. I bought an iPhone and bought completely into the Apple ecosystem. It was a big mistake, for several reasons. Let's start from the top:

1. Apple now makes no effort to ensure that its users have a good long-term experience with their product. It used to be that once you bought Apple, you could expect a lengthy time of ownership and support, partly because of the machines' ease of access, repair, and maintainability. In the fall of 2012, I became unhappy with my Air's performance. My needs had changed, and running several Windows and Linux VMs quickly bogged down my system with its paltry four gigabytes of RAM. Initially, I thought I wouldn't need any upgrades to this system, because Apple's software optimizations and the SSD would make swapping faster and more seamless (how stupid of me). No problem, I thought. I bought a 15" MacBook Pro and didn't look back.

Initially, when the Retina Display MacBook came around, I saw it as a middle-of-the-road product for Apple – not an Air, not a Pro, more of a premium flagship "halo." I had no idea at the time of initial release that everything including the battery, was soldered/glued to the main board/case and what little was replaceable was all proprietary. When I came upon this information, I was shocked. Didn't think much of it, but my past experiences with the Air made me leery of it, so I stayed away from the rMBP.

Come 2013. The classic unibody Pros are all but dead, and the MacBook Pros have become more proprietary. People will defend this in the name of thinness, but I call bullshit, because the Dell XPS 15 is nearly as thin but contains DIMM slots. It's just a ploy to move more units, and I'm not pleased in the slightest.

2. Apple provides no more useful features in their products that would interest anyone beyond the average consumer. Whaaaaat?! How dare somebody speaketh this heathenous, trite, vile, garbage! BURN HIM!!1

In all seriousness, this is now true. When I look at Mavericks' feature list, it's pretty weak. Multiple display support is something that should have been addressed in a point release. Timer Coalescing is something Windows and Linux have had for ages[1], and compressed memory is something we saw years ago.[2] There has been no new replacement for the aging and outdated HFS+ filesystem. There has been no integration for UNIX protocols like X11, and Applescript has been left out to rot.

Apple is now squarely focused on the iOS segment of their business. I don't mind it for them, but I can't help but miss my pre-2011 Macs.

3. This is probably the most important: they pride aesthetics over true usability. This philosophy of Apple's has always been somewhat prevalent, but it's been irking me more than ever post-2011. Thin aluminum bezels that cut into my hand. Sharp laptop edges that are hazardous to health. Keyboards that feel like you're banging your fingers against a packet of Dentyne. This ties into complaint #1 as well: the fact that form-over-function results in a loss of self-maintainability is no secret either. No Ethernet on a professional machine? I can understand getting rid of it on the ultraportable, but if you want something to be used as a heavy-duty appliance, it needs to have the necessary connectivity options out of box. If you're going to make users depend on an inconvenient dongle, at least include the damn thing inside the package.

This is going to be anecdotal and completely unrelated to what I'm talking about, but I was in Atlanta last weekend and decided to check out the Apple and Microsoft stores. The Apple store left me with a cold, decoherent vibe. Nothing seemed interesting. iOS 7 was underwhelming, and the iPads were just iPads. They didn't have anything new. Everything was whitewashed and covered in super-thin Myriad. Shades of grey prevailed throughout, and the staff, while helpful, didn't seem to have much interest in the user so much as heralding the merits of the product. Enter the MS store. Everything felt... so new. Inviting. There was a real sense of warmth in the store. I hadn't tried a Surface before, so I picked it up and started using it. Boy, was I blown away – the entire experience was incredibly different from what I had used. I had dismissed touch screens with a desktop OS as simply gimmickry, but the Surface integrated the two exceptionally well, especially with the Type Cover adding significant functionality. I perused through the other paraphernalia and I really felt a sense of innovation and creation that I never did in the Apple store. Unlike the iPad, the Surface was productive! It ran a real operating system! It came with a ton of memory and could be used as a full replacement for a laptop! The ultrabooks I saw had neat form factors, and although I couldn't find myself using the other modes much, the addition of touch screens made Windows 8.1 make a whole lot more sense. I came through to the Windows Phones, and the live tile approach to a home screen is just perfect: it affords a significant degree of customizability while retaining user interface consistency across devices, something neither iOS nor Android have managed to nail.

I sold my 4s and bought a Lumia, and while I'm typing this on that Air I talked about earlier, I can't see myself using it for much longer, and neither do I my MacBook Pro. Because when it dies in another several years...

...I won't be buying a new one.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timer_coalescing

[2] https://code.google.com/p/compcache/w/list