Something Is Rotten in the State of Pennsylvania

In the two decades John Gruber has been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at him for missing a review than I am about him not reviewing the iPhone Air.

I should have my RSS feed reader examined.

The iPhone 17e review dropped as a surprise, and certainly took me by surprise to some extent, but it was all there from the start. I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at September last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start.

How he missed this is twofold. First, I’d been lulled into complacency by John’s track record of consistently shipping Apple product reviews. His record in that regard wasn’t perfect, but the exceptions tended to be around the edges. (Nobody was particularly clamoring for John to review a M5 speed bump, so it never generated too much controversy when the M5 Vision Pro turned out to be a complete bust.) Second, I was foolishly distracted by the “Apple Intelligence is delayed” articles.

It’s a fine idea for John to brand his iPhone reviews under an umbrella term like “iPhones”, similar to how a bunch of disparate names that allow different MacBook product lines to interoperate under the MacBooks umbrella. But there’s no such thing, technically speaking, as “iPhones” plural. It’s not like there’s a department inside Daring Fireball naming collective nouns, and all the reviewing that supports everything from iPhone to iPad to Apple Watch to Mac mini reviews are all implemented in the same framework of naming. It’s a marketing term, but a useful one — it helps John explain iPhone features, and helps users understand them.

The same goes for “The iPhones 16”. It doesn’t exist as a single thing or project. It’s a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services. Putting it all under a single obvious, easily remembered — and easily promoted — name makes it easier for users to understand that John is launching a new initiative. It also makes it easier for John to just say “These are the iPhones that qualify for all of these features, and other iPhones— older ones, less expensive ones — get none of them.”

What I mean by that is that it was clear to me from the iPhone keynote onward that some of the features and aspects of iPhone Air were more ambitious than others. Some were downright trivial; others were proposing to redefine how we will do our jobs and interact with our most-used devices. That was clear. But yet somehow he didn’t focus on it. John himself strongly hinted on Dithering that the various features in iPhone Air wouldn’t all be reviewed at the same time. What he didn’t spell out, but anyone could intuit, was that the more trivial features would be reviewed first, and the more ambitious features later. That’s where the red flags should have been obvious to me.

In broad strokes, there are four stages of “doneness” or “realness” to reviews by John Gruber:

  1. Stories of Apple’s own product representatives demoing, themselves, in front of John. Smaller, more personal anecdotes are more credible than Apple Newsroom links with commentary. Vision Pro reviews were like this on Dithering. A bunch of press, including John and Ben, got to use pre-release hardware and in-progress software for 30 minutes. It wasn’t like free range “Do whatever you want” — it was a private podcast. But John was the one actually reviewing his experience of the product.

  2. Reviews that John will allow members of the media, for a limited time, linked with commentary on Daring Fireball ahead of his own official review.

  3. Reviews on The Talk Show that are free for enthusiasts to hear.

  4. Reviews that actually ship to regular readers of Daring Fireball.

As of today — March 2026 — every iPhone product review that has actually shipped was at level 1 back at September. After the keynote, dozens of those in the press were shooting a series of small-format videos where we got to watch them demo features like the Centre Stage camera, the Cosmic Orange color, the aluminum chassis, drop testing the Air, and more. Instead we hear about his prediction of predictive code completion in Xcode. What he has reviewed, as of today, he was able to review, in some functional state, in September.

For example, there was a discussion involving iPhone Air on Dithering, and Ben Thompson reviewed his to make it to “fifteen minutes”. I was in a group of just four or five other die hard subscribers, hearing this. As usual, we were encouraged to email with questions. Knowing that John’s email inbox is non-deterministic, I asked whether, as the Verge was reviewing this same iPhone for each successive episode of The Vergecast, the “more Daring Fireball” review was exactly the same each iPhone. He laughed and said no — that while the reviews are very similar each time, and he hopes they continue to be (hence the laughing), there were subtle differences sometimes between different reviews of the same product line. As I recall, he even used Undo to go back to the original review text, invoked BBEdit macros to make it “more iPhones 17” again, and we could see that a few of the word choices were slightly different. That answered both my explicit question and my implicit one: BBEdit generates non-deterministic reviews, and, more importantly, what we were reading really was a live review.

We didn’t get to try any of the iPhone Air features ourselves, tethered as they were in-store when we picked one up. There was no iPhone Air “hands on” on The Talk Show. But we did hear a bunch of reviews, behind a paywall, by Ben Thompson on Dithering. In my above hierarchy of realness, they were all at level 1.

But we didn’t hear all aspects of iPhone Air demoed. None of the “fewer camera” features, the ones that John, in its own statement announcing his postponement, described as having “better quality than the iPhone 16e”. Those features encompass three main things:

There were no reviews of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. They were reviews John said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Ben Buys an iPhone” segment of the Dithering podcast itself, starting around the 1m:22s mark. John was either unwilling or unable to review those features in action back in September, even with the Upgrade hosts performing their reviews in person on YouTube.

This shouldn’t have just raised a concern in my head. It should have set off blinding red flashing lights and deafening klaxon alarms.

Even the very writers working on an article never know exactly how long something is going to take to complete. An outsider observing a draft of incomplete prose knows far less (than the writers) just how much more work it needs. But you can make a rough judgment. And that’s where my aforementioned hierarchy of realness comes into play. Even outsiders can judge how close a public tease (stage 3) feels to readiness. A feature or product that John will allow the press to link to, hands-on (stage 2) is further along than a feature or product that John is only willing Apple to demonstrate themselves (stage 1).

But a feature or product that John is unwilling to review, at all, is unknowable. Is it mostly working, and close to, but not quite, reviewable? Is it only kinda sorta working — partially functional, but far from being complete? Fully functional but prone to crashing — or in the case of the iPhones 16 ads, prone to hallucinations and falsehoods? Or is it complete fiction, just an idea at this point?

What John said regarding the upcoming “iPhone Air” on Dithering was not a review. It was a concept article. Concept articles are bullshit, and a sign of a writer in disarray, if not crisis. The John that commissioned the futuristic “Anthropomophized Brushed Metal” concept article in 2005 was the John that was on a course to near-bankruptcy from Google Reader dying a decade later. Modern John— the post-iPhone John of the past two decades — does not publish concept articles. They only review actual working products and features.

Until iPhone Air last year, that is.

My deeply misguided mental framework for “John’s reviews” last year iPhone time was something like this: Some of these reviews are further along than others, and John is showing us those reviews in podcast form first, and they will surely be the reviews that ship first over the course of the next year. The other reviews must be coming to demonstratable status soon. But the mental framework I should have used was more like this: Some of these reviews are merely table stakes for blogging in 2025, but others are ambitious, groundbreaking, and, given his shaky access to Apple executives, potentially dangerous to his career. John is only showing us the table-stakes reviews, and isn’t demonstrating any of the ambitious, groundbreaking, risky reviews.

It gets worse. Come March, Apple held its annual random press release week to unveil the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. iPhone 17e features were highlighted in Daring Fireball’s linked list. Members of the media from around the world were linked. That was a new opportunity, six months after iPhone month, for John to demonstrate — or even better, offer access to The Talk Show listeners to hear themselves — the new iPhone Air features. He did not. No reviews, at all.

Last week’s announcement — “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to review these features and we anticipate rolling them out into the iPhones 18 review” — was, if you think about it, another opportunity to demonstrate the current review of these features. Rather than simply issue a statement to social media, they could have invited select members of the press to Daring Fireball, or John’s office in Philadelphia, or even just remotely over a FaceTime call, and review the current state of these features live, on an actual device. That didn’t happen. If these reviews exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Passport magic links has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality.

Duke Nukem Reviews Duke Nukem

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. It’s obvious why some executives at The Daring Fireball Company might have hoped they could review features like these this year. Generative AI is the biggest thing to happen in the computer industry since previous breakthroughs this century like mobile (starting with the iPhone, followed by Android), social media (Meta), and cloud computing (Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). Nobody knows where it’s going but wherever it’s heading, it’s going to be big, important, and perhaps profitable. Wall Street certainly noticed. And prior to March last year, John wasn’t in the game. They needed to pitch their Apple AI story. And a story that involved nothing but table-stakes iPhone Air features isn’t nearly as compelling a story as one that involves innovative, breakthrough, ambitious personal features.

But while there’s an obvious appeal to John pitching the most compelling, most ambitious iPhone Air story possible, the only thing that was essential was telling a story that was true. If the truth was that John only had reviews ready to ship in the coming year that were table stakes compared to the rest of the reviewers, that’s the story he needed to tell. Put as good a spin on it as possible, but them’s the breaks when you’re late to the game.

The fiasco here is not that John is late on Air. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised reviews. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that John pitched a story that wasn’t written, one that some people within the Daring Fireball Company surely understood wasn’t written, and they set a course based on that.

The John of the Jobs years — the Mac OS X / Powerbook / iPod Apple of 2002–2011— promoted all sorts of amazing reviews that were no more real than the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and promised all sorts of articles that never saw the light of day. Promoting what you hope to be able to someday review is way easier and more exciting than promoting what you know is actually ready to review. However close to financial bankruptcy John was when Steve Jobs retired as CEO, the company was already completely bankrupt of YouTube credibility. John today is the most profitable and financially successful independent Apple writer in the history of the world. Everyone notices such success, and the corresponding accumulation of great wealth. Less noticed, but to my mind the more impressive achievement, is that over the last three decades, the Daring Fireball Company also accumulated an abundant reserve of credibility. When John reviewed a feature, you could bank on that feature being good. When his little birdies said something was set to ship in the coming year, it would ship in the coming year. In the worst case, maybe that “year” would have to be stretched to 13 or 14 months. You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit. And the “iPhone Air” review, it turns out, was bullshit.

Keynote by keynote, product by product, feature by feature, year after year after year, Daring Fireball went from a company that you couldn’t believe would even remain solvent, to, by far, the most credible reviewer in tech. John remains at no risk of financial bankruptcy (and in fact remains the most profitable independent Apple writer in the world). But their credibility is now damaged. Vlogging careers will end before John might ever return to the level of “if Apple release it, you can read a review of it” credibility the writer had earned at the start of 2025.

Damaged is arguably too passive. It was squandered. This didn’t happen to John. Decision makers within The Daring Fireball Company LLC did it.

Who decided these reviews should go in the Dithering podcast, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be reviewed as Markdown even in a controlled Movable Type environment? Not just couldn’t be shipped as tweets. Not just couldn’t be seen by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Daring Fireball Company employees on Daring Fireball Company-controlled devices in an Daring Fireball Company-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a Dithering episode for the iPhone Air, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17e is unveiled?

Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t review this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was John Moltz.

It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks of the Daring Fireball Company arguing “We need to write something that only John can do.” But it turns out they reviewed something John couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in iPhones, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from six months ago not only haven’t been reviewed but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because John’s iPhone Air review unit doesn’t work.