Note: Not promoting or discouraging any brand.
The Verge was without question my favorite tech site, but now I can’t visit it because it’s clear they are biased against Apple. Like many I made the exodus from Engadget when Josh and the gang left AOL, I waited for and loved the infrequent posts when they updated This Is My Next, and I stayed up till midnight to celebrate The Verge’s launch as if I had been a part of the launch myself. I signed up for a Verge account hour one, was an active member of the forums, wrote several posts in various forums, frequently commented, and generally was an engaged user. That was until a couple of weeks ago.
Over Memorial Day weekend a rather innocuous post went up entitled “Size matters: how I went from an iPhone to a really big Android phone”. The post itself was rather ordinary, but I did find it curious that it was a featured article, as if it was breaking news some people like larger phones. I wrote a comment that was rather tongue-in-cheek, and it was deleted. I thought “that’s odd”, so I wrote something less sarcastic pointing out that it was odd this was the largest featured story on a site that produces some legitimately great content. That was also deleted. I decided that obviously commenting on The Verge wasn’t for me anymore and requested that my account be deleted. It was surprising, but thinking back on it I shouldn’t have been surprised.
It’s no secret that The Verge staff is close to Google and that Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky really loves Google. He famously called Windows “poison” (although he tried to backtrack), so it’s incontrovertible he plays favorites. That’s fine, whatever. However things began to bleed over into the site around the launch of Android 4.2. Google was set to announce 4.2 in New York City on October 29th, 2012, but the event was canceled because of Hurricane Sandy. Instead of rescheduling the event Google just announced 4.2, the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 10 via a press release. This left tech sites with boilerplate articles and images, except for The Verge.