I don't know, being an external PR rep for a large corporation to run your blog and keep your stock prices up seems extremely sketchy to me...
Even this inane article about how apple is sooo cool because they now sell phones includes a passing reference to why they felt the need to charge people for an iPod touch update.
He may have his long boring article full of numbers, but in the real world people change phones all the time, and lots of normal people are just as impressed with other manufacturers touch-screen phones, or don't want a touch screen at all.
His point is that the iPhone is making apple boatloads of money and that their phone platform could potentially eclipse their PC and iPod sales. The point, (and worry perhaps) is that apple could reasonably start focusing on phones more than on PCs and make boatloads of money. They clearly make a better [smart/media]phone than anything out there and this has shown in sales.
They don't "feel" the need to charge people for Touch updates, they have to legally, or at least thats the way Gruber presents it and I'm pretty sure that is the case. Why else would they count iPhone sales on a subscription base? I'm sure its a pain in the ass for the accounting dept.
Do these "Normal" people live in "real" america. Other touch screen phones are totally lame and anybody who has used an iPhone can attest to that.
(I don't own an iPhone. $90/month is out of my budget)
The way I see it is: magazine writers can make money from writing articles for papers. Gruber does something like that, except he self-publishes. He makes money the same way - advertising - he creates a gorgeous aesthetic to his site to convince people to read his stuff... he's like a one-man magazine.
I call it gorgeous because it does away entirely with distractions. It's easy-to-read, it's got minimal-but-present branding with the star logo, and I like the way he handles URLs - which is one of the only times he has any styling present. It's extremely uncompromising and I find that reading his essays feels very good on my eyes, which is really the only way I can judge online content.
Compared to TechCrunch or the Gawker bunch or even a lot of tumblelogs, I think his is gorgeous. I'd even put him above Kottke by a wee notch in terms of aesthetic, though it's admittedly close.
