The Applesphere’s First Two Stops for Hands-On Reviews

Just as Siskel and Ebert are legendary for being a binary star system of movie-reviewing magnificence, Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and David Pogue of the New York Times have emerged as the yin-yang rock stars of the Apple product-testing elite. The duo may not meet up once a week to argue and point thumbs, but their mindshare and clout are unmatched. Wired has dubbed Mossberg “The Kingmaker” for all the influence he wields, and when a new Apple product comes out, the Applesphere rushes online to read the opinions of the MoPo duopoly.

Along with the much less celebrated Ed Baig of USA Today, MoPo are among the select few journalists who actually receive Apple gear before it’s released to the masses, and, by extension, all bottom-feeding product reviewers. This gives them oodles of lead time so that they can publish thorough reviews on the very first day of a product launch. And even when MoPo don’t get a chance to trump other journalists with their semi-exclusive first looks, their placement in papers with such wide readership and influence holds considerable sway. At least one academic paper has tried to show a correlation between Mossberg’s reviews and stock prices (with mixed results, as a bump in prices only shows up for smaller companies, not behemoths like Apple).

So what’s it like to be such an influential top dog of tech criticism?

“If somebody is trading a stock based on Pogue or me, they’re kind of nuts,” Mossberg says. “When I sit down to write a column, my responsibility is to the needs of my audience. Not hobbyists, not enthusiasts, not techies, but average, mainstream, nontechnical people, who are very smart about many things, but don’t necessarily know how these products work inside—and don’t want to know.”

Pogue is similarly dismissive of his effect on market trends, calling it nothing more than media hype. Compared to Apple’s marketing machine, Pogue says, “Newspaper and magazine reviews are like gnats on the skin of a rhinoceros.”

“My credibility is all I have,” Pogue says. “There are a lot of people who trust my judgment, and there are a lot who think I’m an idiot. Either way, it’s a fixed point 
in the universe that you can steer your ship by—toward or away—because I write my reviews based on what I truly feel, without regard to the reaction of readers or manufacturers.”

Which is sort of the point. It’s MoPo’s very role as trained, responsible, grown-up journalists, rather than as Apple fanboys, that makes them the nonenthusiast’s comfy, reliable source for answers about new Apple products.

“There’s a lot of hype out there,” Mossberg says. “There’s hype about Apple, there’s hype about me and Pogue. People are very interested [in Apple] right now, and anything anyone writes about them gets disproportionate attention. But that wasn’t true five or ten years ago, and may not be true in two years time.”

Nary a Woman in the House?

It didn’t escape our attention that not a single woman made our Top 10 list. Is the Mac|Life staff dismissive of women? Or is it that not a single woman wields enough influence to warrant recognition? Neither, actually. Under different circumstances, we would have included Katie Cotton, Apple’s vice president of worldwide corporate communications.
Cotton runs the tightest public-relations ship we know of, helping to generate and respond to the unmatched buzz that’s described throughout this article. In some respects, Cotton might be the single-most important influencer in all of Appledom, as managing that perfect tension between reticence and revelation has been so incredibly integral to Apple’s success.
Nonetheless, we respect Cotton’s desire to remain behind the scenes, a silent partner to the exceedingly public-facing Steve Jobs. So all the mention we’ll give her is the mention you’re reading here.