PC Mag puts Apple gadfly John Dvorak out to pasture

For most of his 36-year career as a tech columnist, Dvorak got Apple extravagantly, shamelessly wrong.

Here’s how Dvorak tweeted the news:

Yesterday I was fired from PC Magazine under the bogus notion that the columns were put on hiatus and I could call next year. So after 36 years of loyalty I get no phone calls from “friends” Vivek Shah or Dan @dancosta but a curt email telling me I’m out. It’s rude. pic.twitter.com/CPlF8PAdQw

— John C. Dvorak (@THErealDVORAK) September 21, 2018

Under the headline PC Magazine unceremoniously jettisons bloated gasbag John Dvorak MacDailyNews celebrated some of Dvorak’s greatest pratfalls:

• The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse.” There is no evidence that people want to use these things. — John C. Dvorak, 1984
• Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures… Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see. — John C. Dvorak, 2007
• iPhone which doesn’t look, I mean to me, I’m looking at this thing and I think it’s kind of trending against, you know, what’s really going, what people are really liking on, in these phones nowadays, which are those little keypads. I mean, the Blackjack from Samsung, the Blackberry, obviously, you know kind of pushes this thing, the Palm, all these… And I guess some of these stocks went down on the Apple announcement, thinking that Apple could do no wrong, but I think Apple can do wrong and I think this is it. — John C. Dvorak, 2007
• The Apple iPad is not going to be the company’s next runaway best seller. — John C. Dvorak, 2010
• Within the decade, Microsoft should have a minimum of 300 stores. They should do as well as the Apple Stores. — John C. Dvorak, 2012

My take: I’m with “Herself” (from the MDN comment stream):

I like John Dvorak. He is a contrarian, which is attractive because cloying adulation leads to heart disease, and he has many entertaining opinions, and that is exactly the key to his success over the years. He isn’t always wrong, which you can’t say for most of the other pundits. When he is wrong, he is spectacularly wrong, not the kind of “whatever” wrong that other cheap pundits get away with every day. He has always stood up proudly to the catcalls, and moved on. Also, he is the only writer whose stealth tongue-in-cheek humour is over the heads of shrill antidisestablishmentarians. And he is the only Apple antagonist who had a column in a leading Apple magazine. I nominate him for the Howitzer Prize in Tech Journalism.