David Pogue and John Gruber have gone head-to-head, highlighting an increasing problem in IT journalism. Pogue reporting on the Samsung Chromebook:

How well does Google’s newfangled concept hold up in the real world? Unfortunately, not very well. […] With very few exceptions, when the Chromebook isn’t online, it’s a 3.3-pound paperweight. Truth is, considering how stripped-down the Samsung is, you have to wonder why it’s as big, heavy and expensive as it is. You can find plenty of full-blown Windows laptops with the same price, weight and size. Maybe the Chromebook concept would fly if it cost $180 instead of $500.

Wow, that sounds pretty poor. But Pogue concludes:

For now, though, you should praise Google for its noble experiment. You should thrill to the possibilities of the online future. You should exult that somebody’s trying to shake up the operating system wars. But unless you’re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn, you probably shouldn’t buy a Chromebook.

Pogue’s conclusion is weak, and the qualifier if anything makes things worse. He’s written about something with a lot of problems, but argued we should praise Google, for creating something that would have been exciting a couple of years back or if the iPad (or the MacBook Air, for that matter) didn’t exist. Gruber:

Would everyone have praised Apple for its “noble experiment” if the $500 iPad had been too big and heavy, felt like it was worth only $180, and was “a 3.3-pound paperweight” when offline? Fuck that. This is the big leagues. There is no credit for trying.

Only there is, all over the tech pundit world. Apple gets slammed for the slightest perceived drawback or very real fuck-up; by comparison, other companies are too often congratulated for churning out garbage, because, hey, you shouldn’t be expected to be Apple, right? That’s utter bollocks, and the sooner everyone is held to the same standards, the better the entire tech industry will be. This also goes in ‘reverse’, for Apple pundits, by the way, who argue everything at Cupertino is spiffy when it isn’t.

So, pundits, if something is utter crap, have the balls to say so. If something is at best a botched, half-arsed attempt to compete with another product, tell it like it is. And if a massive company spends years and millions of bucks working on a product that turns out to have some potential but in reality is a waste of time and space, don’t praise them and don’t call them noble—bury them.