Pop Life, Episode 5: John Gruber
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Welcome, John!
Here I am.
Thanks for joining me, really glad to have you on.
Before we get into back story and all the various things you do, let me ask you a tough question…
You're picky about things. You sweat the kerning. You have an opinion on how clicky your keyboard is.
Is there anything where you don't care much about the details?
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Like, picture's hanging crooked on the wall, it doesn't bug you?
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That's a good question. I'm sure the answer is yes, but off the top of my head I can't think of what it is. Anything I notice, I care about.
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Hahaha. So if the ice cube in your drink isn't perfectly square, does the bartender hear about it?
Like, whatever the things are I don't care about, I don't even know, because they're things I don't notice.
No, I don't care about that. But I would notice if the drink wasn't cold enough, which is what matters. I wouldn't send it back though. I'd just complain to whoever I was with.
I can't remember ever having sent a dish (or beverage) back.
Makes sense. Ok, we have a bunch of audience questions I'm excited to get to and a number of things to plumb the depths of. Let me start first with the plug: daringfireball.net, your venerable and indispensable blog about Apple and design culture.
That's a good description.
(Yeah, the sending it back is a different aspect of personality than noticing the flaw.)
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Due to a lot of recent changes on the internet, it feels like DF is almost this crazy escapee from another era of the web, that somehow made it.
More and more, I see it that way too.
We saw Gawker just shut down, I'd closed down ThinkUp (about which you said many kind things! Thank you.) and of course your note taking app Vesper just announced its shutdown.
What’s your evaluation of the current state of independent blogging/publishing? Would you start Daring Fireball today?
I have mixed feelings about Gawker's demise.
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I would. And I think it's possible for DF-like sites to succeed today. My friend Jason Snell started his indie site Six Colors (sixcolors.com/) just two years ago, and he's doing great.
So there are exceptions. But Jason was already fairly well known & respected. Could an upstart do it?
In some ways, the quality-not-quantity approach might be more likely to work today than when I started, because it stands more clearly apart from the norm.
Is that true outside of tech reporting & opinion? Would it work for politics? Fashion?
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I don't know! But when I got DF off the ground, when it actually started making a little money, I really thought this was the future of short form writing. Being on your own. A blog for every writer. I was very wrong.
And let me get to the heart of something specific to your beat in writing about Apple…
Yeah, I thought everybody would have their own blog. We do, we just call it our Facebook or twitter or Instagram.
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So, it's increasingly hard to be credible about the clang compiler and Chinese ride sharing policy and the latest Hermés accessory fashion trends.
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I think what has happened is that now that there are so many web publications, budding writers get snapped up as staff before their personal sites can ever take root. We've circled back to where writers are simply trying to get hired, because it's so damn hard to make a living as a writer.
Along with retail merchandising and microchip manufacturing and typography, etc…
But these are just some of the areas that fall under the purvey of writing about "Apple". And it connects to your point about it being hard to make a living — nobody can get a gig covering all those areas.
When you started, having a site about Apple was radical. It was maybe even seen as too narrow.
Can one person cover Apple today?
You know this, but I've never thought of Daring Fireball's domain as "Apple". It's really just what I'm interested in. It just happens that Apple has been what I've been interested in for a long time. I thought they were really interesting as a niche tech company in 2002. And I think they're really interesting as an industry behemoth today.
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If they ever get boring though, I'll just find other things to write about.
They've almost always been the most interesting company in the computer business.
I don't think one person can cover "Apple" today. I certainly don't. There are aspects of Apple that I just skip over. Although the format of DF makes it possible for me to just link to the stuff I don't write about in detail personally.
I can see you writing about other things, it's just fascinating to watch as Apple remains relevant and interesting but becomes almost too big to comprehend.
For example, Apple's dealings with music labels and movie studios -- I just link to Peter Kafka.
Makes sense. Link to the best.
So there's an interesting shift since DF started, as you became a father, grew up, you've seemed more willing to engage on some social issues & political issues on the site. And lately we've seen Apple (post Jobs) stepping up in a similar way…
