I mean, Gruber is literally accusing Sundar Pichai of lying on stage: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425

I usually like what Gruber has to say about Apple, but this fanboyism is off the charts even for him.

It's classic Gruber. He wants you to definitely come away with the impression that this is a total fraud but he also wants complete deniability that he called it a fraud.

I don’t know if this is classic Gruber. I’ve read a lot of his stuff and it’s always been interesting. Now I haven’t followed him closely either, so maybe I’ve only seen the good stuff, but this is the first time I’ve come away from it thinking he was an idiot.

If you've been following the Markdown debacle closely[1], this is classic Gruber.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

Gruber's stock in trade is ambiguous 1 line response to an extract from an article he's linked to which he can then criticise people for mis interpreting.

Once you've noticed this pattern it's much harder to take his (often very good) long form pieces seriously.

Also his total and complete inability to admit he was 100% wrong about large screened phones being successful is painful.

Gruber/Apple is never wrong - but sometimes reality realigns.

Gruber didn't call it a fraud. He said the demo was not "distinguishable from a fraud," which is true. His actual recommendation is the title of the post, which is that we should have "a little Duplex skepticism."

And yes, Google certainly wouldn't demo a completely non-existent technology, and I'm sure Gruber knows that. But they might very well demo a technology that only works 60% of the time at present. Let's be honest, this wouldn't be the first time we've seen a large tech company demo incredible-seeming too-good-to-be-true tech that turned out to actually be too good to be true and never made it into real world use for one reason or another.

It is kind of weird that the broad tech punditry has just accepted Google's demo at face value with respect to what the tech is actually capable of at present.

For example, Google demoed object removal in Google Photos (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-ob...) last year at IO, and as far as I can tell it never shipped.

If a company in any other industry announced an insane-seeming new technology with a completely non-verifiable demo like this, no credible journalist who covers that beat would report it as credulously as tech journalists have covered the Duplex demo. Gruber is absolutely right that the lack of skepticism around Duplex is baffling and journalistically suspect.