I'm not sure what you mean. I understand it to be a review by a professional photographer - but one with an obvious bias towards Apple, as they have been a client of his, he uses their phone's cameras in his work, and he has a book about how to take pictures with their phones. But that does not make it an advertisement, as far as I know, he is not paid by Apple, nor did Apple provide the phone or control what he said.
A lot of prominent bloggers and tech news sites, including John Gruber, The Verge, and many others, got advance devices to review. This is normal, and not unique to Apple. They also get Pixels and Galaxies in advance.
Sure, and respected camera review websites like DPReview get the majority of their revenue through people clicking through their site to purchase cameras. Is it a conflict of interest? Oh hell yes, and you should keep it in mind. Does it make the review wrong? Well...probably not, but keep it in mind.
Okay but there’s no concrete examples there. There’s a bunch of broad claims that Apple will blacklist journalists for X, Y, and Z but no names or evidence that it’s actually happening.
I can believe that Apple might do this (especially since he also cites openly breaking rules by doing things like live-streaming when it’s been explicitly forbidden) but this article doesn’t convince me it’s happening or educate me on how much of a problem it really is.
No it doesn’t. It contains a link to an article about supposed “whitelisting” and one about supposedly giving WaPo and exclusive interview in retaliation to the NYT’s critical reporting. These are both the exact opposite of the blacklisting the article asserts exists. Then it links to an article about blacklisting but dismissed it as inaccurate. So there’s nothing linked about actual blacklisting examples by Apple unless I’ve missed something. Elgan doesn’t even say why he is blacklisted.
This article is about somebody who got a loaner, which means they are specifically whitelisted as my article's link says, which means that they are uncritical of Apple products. I don't know why you are hung up on blacklisting specifically as I have not mentioned that, only that prelaunch reviews of Apple products are not credible.
It is also about whitelisting, which is the relevant section for this review ("an early review of an Apple product"). I never mentioned the term "blacklisting" until you brought it up.
Now that we have that out of the way, do you agree that early reviews of Apple products can only be done by reviewers that Apple considers favorable?
That's fair, it may be a provided phone. But then that puts him in a similar situation as any site that has a review for the phone now. You know his relationship with the phone itself and Apple. Consider his review with that perspective - but I still think it's a valid review.
And now if he doesn't write a glorious review then he won't be ever contacted by Apple again in the future. Really hard to trust objectivity of his review in these circumstances.
The review by John Gruber of the Touch Bar based MacBook was critical of the feel of the keyboard - this was before the actual reliability problems came up.
He along with everyone else was critical of the first Apple Watch.
Seeing that he still not only gets review units every year, he gets the prime live interview every year after WWDC with top Apple executives, I don’t think he has been blacklisted.
Not to mention that Marco Arment is often critical of Apple and got a review unit of the Mac Mini last year.
Those two bloggers will only criticize Apple products in comparison to other Apple products. They will never say a competitor's product is better even if most other reviewers say so.
Gruber has stated repeatedly how much of an embarrassment that the MacBook keyboards have become but he famously still uses an old ADB Apple keyboard so he doesn’t have as much first hand experience as Marco who buys computers more frequently.
They have both complained about Macs falling behind compared to what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line.
Marco routinely criticizes the Apple Watch and compares it to the non smart watches he prefers. Gruber also prefers regular watches.
Of course Apple did provide the phone. it’s not in stores yet.
And of course he gets ‘paid’. If not directly by Apple in dollars, but by Apple in exposure of his name and thus his business. He does this (great) PR piece pre-launch for Apple, we all learn his name, some will want him to be their photographer of choice and thus the cycle closes.
