In his defense Chief-TWiT, Leo Laporte, calls himself a pundit, who comments on the news, and not really a journalist or tech journalist, who does the original research of the news stories. Ok, and Leo is going to go for the joke and poke fun, especially when chief-curmudgeon John C. Dvorak is a panelist on TWiT’s flagship show, This Week in Tech. Who doesn’t enjoy old guys creatively calling stuff crap? As a long time follower, going back to the ZDTV days, I’m getting a little tired of the shtick.

Both Dvorak and Laporte have very long histories with the big players in the tech scene, but as commentators I feel like there’s a little too much old history influencing them in a way that is creating a different kind of echo-chamber that Laporte attempted to distance TWiT from by getting out of Silicon Valley and having a strict division between editorial and news at TWiT. He said that he modeled his tech shows using the User-Groups model, going back to the old hobbyist days of the early PC desktop revolution of the 1980s, saying that he wanted to speak for the users and not the manufacturers. My sense is that as companies like Apple try to move to being more of an electronics consumer company, that it’s creating some problems for the guy who wants to represent the user but insists that users have to have access to “the metal” for the tech to be great. Really going to the original Macintosh, Apple does not hold to that design aesthetic.

So when Apple released this past weekend their latest aspirational “humans doing cool stuff with our products” ad, Laporte’s summation was that it was just a bunch of disjointed images and, for God’s sake, don’t take pictures with your damn giant iPad! Funny, given that his phone of choice, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4, is nearly as big as an iPad… I guess it’s better to go for the funny, especially when Apple veers too close to being overly too sincere with their messaging.

Here’s the TWit (This Week in Tech) episode, that runs all of two hours and 21 minutes. You need to skip to 1:26:20 to get to the disparaging commentary.

Sources:

  • Robin Williams Apple iPad Air Commercial, posted by The Apple Nerd (2014-11-01), https://youtu.be/Ep2_0WHogRQ?si=KAnNLlbLgjlSeWLq
  • This Week in Tech 440: Sound by Steve, TWIT (2014-01-13), https://youtu.be/lSwLj1zb8mk?si=Ska_ly8uTACPZ_zy