And chances are, if it is a real problem, there will be a starred long-form blog post forthcoming from Gruber describing it in more detail.

This is among the more tiresome recurring complaints on HN. "Gruber is biased". Shocking! Next you'll tell me John Nack really isn't critical enough about Adobe! Can we give this a rest?

No, it's not, but given the influence that his blog has, being widely read both inside and outside Apple, it's a real shame that he doesn't. It would be a wonderful thing if he held Apple to account more often.

I actually don't agree with the narrative that Gruber is a shill, but even if we stipulate that he is to avoid an unproductive argument: so what?

As an Apple owner and fan, I enjoyed reading those intelligent criticisms. Clearly this has changed, but lets not go rewriting history.

The last line of his first blog post:

"But if it’s the latter — that is, if pro users are giving the finger to Mac OS X — things could get ugly."

I wonder why he felt more able to criticize them when they were "beleaguered" than now, when they're on top of the world. Possibly it's no more than being a crotchety OS 9 user thrust into the strange and uncomfortable world of early OS X. Some evidence of that here:

http://daringfireball.net/2002/09/welcome_indeed

On the other hand maybe he's checked his stats and found that trolling pays better.

And just for fun here's some claim chowder from one of his early posts:

"a vaporware Apple-branded mobile “iPhone” is getting a lot traction. Go ahead and read it, but remember that it’s all bullshit speculation at this point."

Maybe the tipsters were right and there was a skunkworks project working on the iPhone even then (Jobs says the iPhone grew out of iPad work that must have been going on for years before we saw the iPhone, never mind the iPad) or alternatively maybe Apple picked up the name for their product from the rumours. Either way I find it interesting, and it underscores the old adage that making predictions is a mug's game.

It’s an absolutely horrible bug but Gruber doesn’t say otherwise.

Oh, and also, this is no Antennagate. Nobody cares about iPhoto, at least if compared to the amount of people who care about the iPhone.

Chances are it didn't manifest itself before.

For what I know of Steve's reputation, I wouldn't like to be in the iPhoto team right now.

But then, I would always keep the photos as separate files on a directory tree with the metadata in a single file. This way, the chances of a catastrophic data loss would be very slim.

In fact, I was going to make another comment asking about how can bug like this happen. I am sure that Apple QA team tested the upgrade functionality and they didn't find it. I am really finding it hard to imagine what kind of corner case the code ran into, which caused deletion of precious data.

EDIT: Wow. This is interesting. So one person could upgrade w/o issues and that's why my comment which points out that there are other VALID, repeatable instances where upgrade did not go smooth gets downvotes. That's funny.