Getting Apple scoops with this one weird blog
John Gruber has good news for hardcore Mac users: Apple is releasing a completely redesigned Mac Pro next year and new iMacs with pro-level specs this year. Intriguing, but I’m more interested in how this news was delivered:
There are only nine people at the table. Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and John Ternus (vice president, hardware engineering — in charge of Mac hardware) are there to speak for Apple. Bill Evans from Apple PR is there to set the ground rules and run the clock. (We had 90 minutes.) The other five are writers who were invited for what was billed as “a small roundtable discussion about the Mac”: Matthew Panzarino, Lance Ulanoff, Ina Fried, John Paczkowski, and yours truly.
Gruber runs a one-person independent blog that he started as a hobby and now he’s one of five people on the planet that the largest company in the world invites in for an unprecedented preview of new Mac hardware. (And I would argue he’s perhaps the only one invited who would be viewed as indispensable — you could see the others swapped out for Mossberg or Pogue or Swisher or Manjoo, but not Gruber.) That’s incredible and inspiring. It may be the twilight of the independent blogger, but Gruber continues to show how a small-but-obsessive site can do things no one else can.
Update: A pal just alerted me that Daring Fireball is having difficulty serving pages, something that usually only happens to sites DF features. “Is this the first self-fireballing in Gruber’s history?” (via @djacobs)
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