John Gruber wrote an ugly screed in reply to a letter that got leaked to The Verge’s Zoe Schiffer from Apple workers asking for more flexible time at home options. The office workers were told to return to the office three days a week later this year, and they would naturally prefer more flexible schedules. Gruber’s response is really ridiculous, this statement really sums up his attitude:
Companies are not democracies, but the employees writing these letters sure seem to think Apple is one.
I used to read Daring Fireball but stopped in 2019 after the last time I could put up with this bizarre backwards attitudes published there. At that time Gruber conflated a country and everyone in it with their government. Gruber wrote this in 2019:
“The Chinese are petty and petulant.”
After reading that I sent a polite e-mail asking that this be corrected at least to “The Chinese government is…” which isn’t even something I’d agree with, but at least separates the government from the people. I doubt Gruber would want to be associated with the United States government from 2016-2020 and said as much.
With that incident in the past I am almost completely unsurprised when I see antiquated anti-worker takes on Daring Fireball. A site where the author writes from home every day at his leisure, with no boss or coworkers. Apple’s leadership has been incredibly flawed since the start, but still produced incredible hardware and software products. These days it should be impossible to overlook the wide injustices inherent to the profit motive that corrupts every business and its leaders, but Gruber has been behind the times for years now and needlessly defends Apple leadership.
Let’s be clear: the workers design and make the products and are the people with the skill to distribute and sell them. The executives steal the profits because the workers aren’t organized. That’s the relationship with every business that isn’t worker-owned or at least unionized.
This is reminiscent of the bag check situation where Apple leadership was dead wrong in not paying their workers fairly for time spent waiting while they were treated like thieves, but even Gruber understood part of the situation then and that was just a year ago.
As a complete counter to their most expensive headphones, Apples’s Beats brand now has a $50 pair of headphones called Beats Flex that are Bluetooth earbuds connected to each other by a wire that is meant to go around the back of your neck when worn and the earbuds magnetically connect when you’re done with them. They don’t have a case, and at 12 hours they last longer than typical AirPods on a single charge which get 5 hours until you put them back in their charging case. The Flex are also available in a variety of colors (black, yellow, blue, gray) compared to the white AirPods and AirPods Pro. But the $50 price tag only gets you the first generation of AirPods chip, the W1, instead of the newer H1 in the 2nd generation of AirPods and AirPods Pro. The aforementioned AirPods Max have an H1 for each ear. The older H1 chip has more latency between the device making noise and the headphones receiving them, hands-free Siri access (which is almost entirely terrible if you call anyone in your life “Sweetie” preceeded by “Hey”). The H1 is also incredibly slow to pair to a device. The only thing the Flex have that AirPods don’t is that you won’t be as likely to drop one into water, due to the cable connecting the two earbuds together, and they charge via USB-C. The Flex also won’t sense they’re out of your ears and don’t pause podcasts or music until you magnetically link the earbuds. Apple also has an Android app for updating the Beats Flex firmware, something they don’t make available for their AirPods line of products.