Apple and Daring Fireball

On May 22, John Gruber wrote:

Ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I’ve kept the guest(s) secret, until showtime. I’m still doing that this year. But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.

And on June 5, he wrote:

They’ve invited members of the media to a screening of F1 The Movie Tuesday at 7:00pm in the Steve Jobs Theater. Thankfully, my press invitation from Apple has it marked as “optional”, because I have a conflict.

The scheduling conflict, of course, is the Talk Show Live.

I used to listen to every episode of his podcasts, The Talk Show and Dithering, and read John's blog almost daily. Then John started commenting on EU legislation repeatedly in a way that suggested he didn’t know what he was talking about, but had a strong opinion on the subject.

At the height of his rants on EU legislation trying to regulate tech giants, I read quite a few angry and annoyed comments on social media about him. And while he was still going, those readers commenting online, appeared to be abandoning his blog and podcasts out of frustration with his stubbornness. Me included, although I kept his blog in my feeds out of curiosity.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s executives wanted to distance themselves from John's opinion a little. In fact, Apple declining his invitation feels like a good development to me. Apple is a global tech giant, and John Gruber is no Kara Swisher.

Then again, I might be entirely wrong, and Apple simply declined because it has the F1 screening and prioritizes its own events over third-party events.