An Open Letter To The Apple Blogging Community

I love you guys, I really do. You've given me so many tips and tricks. You've solved some of my more puzzling problems on my iPhone, iPad, MacBook or iMac and you've entertained me with your ripping apart of Samsung's adverts and products.

But recently guys, I've become disillusioned. Since the Apple Watch started being distributed to the eagerly awaiting public, you all seem to have merged in to one big, loud annoying voice. (annoying only because over here in the wonderful South Korea we have no idea when, or even if, the Watch will go on sale - not your fault, I know) - [UPDATE: Apple Watch is now in Korea] And that got me curious. When I went back though all your blog posts since the turn of the year, it seems that even before the Apple Watch you were all merging in to one voice. When Apple issued a new beta release of IOS8, for example, almost all of you wrote something along the lines of:

"Apple today issued an update to their IOS8 beta program. You can download it now at the Apple Developer Site. We'll update you if we find any interesting changes"

Then nothing. No "updates". It was as if the news cycle had moved on and you were no longer interested in telling your amazing readers what interesting things you noticed. It felt as if all it was to you guys was a race as to who could get the news out first. Once done, you would forget about it and move on to finding the next big news item so you could start the race again.

And there I was, you loyal reader waiting, and waiting for this update, but sadly it never arrived. I felt betrayed. It feels like once you got the news out, you were no longer interested in what changes there were. But come on guys, your readers do want to know. And they deserve better. (Okay, I know some did report back, but it was rare and usually contained little of any interest.)

Remember, without us you don't have the clicks and your sponsors will lose interest. 

Incidentally, for those of you who like to blog about your "wonderful" sponsors, how about maybe doing a feature on one or two of your not quite so wonderful readers? We follow your advice, we try your recommended apps and we eagerly update our OS’s when you tell us to. 

So please guys, I still love you and I do not have any plans to remove any of you from my RSS feed, but could you please look in to some differentiation? Mr Gruber, for instance, is brilliant. He has his own style, he never bores and I've never seen him write anything like "Apple today released a new..." When something of interest does come up, Mr Gruber of the Daring Fireball Blog will take the time to do the research and tell his readers the salient points, linking to the appropriate sites. It might take a little longer to get the news out, but the resulting post is well worth the wait. 

I beg you, nay, plead with you, please differentiate yourselves. Specialise in something, become the go to expert for the iPhone, Apple Watch or MacBook, not all of them at once. There really is plenty going on at Apple to go around. 

So when you all converge together at WWDC 2015, could you all have a meeting and decide among yourselves which part of the Apple world you will specialise in, so that your amazing, supporting and loyal readers can enjoy some different takes and expertise? I understand clicks are important and you all have a living to earn, but you won't get the clicks in the long term if you all regurgitate the same stuff. The winners will be the ones who furnish their dear readers with posts that are well researched and hit the buttons that are important to their readers and are different from what everyone else is writing about (for example the MacSparky blog and David Spark's unique approach to informing his readers about interesting and useful apps and how he uses them) 

Trust me, we don't remember who won the race to tell us that Apple had released their latest OS 10 update. We remember the ones who give us the information that has depth, (I don't mean long) is relevant and is a good read. 

Please guys, not just for my long-term reading pleasure, but for your future livelihoods as well, differentiate yourselves and rather than trying to be the ‘first’ try to be the best.  

This blog post was updated 19 July 2015 to reflect the Apple Watch has been launched in Korea :-)