Cheers, ZA Tech Show

I hate unsubscribing from things. I especially hate unsubscribing from podcasts. I dunno, I guess I feel a sense of loyalty to a show once I've added it to my list. I'll patiently put up with a fair amount of crap before I'll consider going through the effort of removing it from my Google Reader. After all, it costs me nothing more than the time it takes to listen to it... time that would otherwise have been spent unproductively anyway.

So it was with a heavy heart that I unsubscribed from the ZA Tech Show podcast this week. I've been a listener of theirs pretty much since the beginning.

At first I particularly enjoyed the show because it offered a much needed portal into the South African tech scene. It provided useful and valuable information and filled a very empty niche. Awesome podcasting.

But as the show has "progressed", it's changed. They've mentioned on the show the oft-repeated criticism they've received for harping on Apple products all the time. The "ZA Mac Show" was the term used. Not being an Apple fan myself, I found it kind of annoying too. But I was willing to look past it for the good stuff. Besides, I'm a also a fanboy, if not for Apple. I get it.

But at some point in the last few months the quality of the content tipped the balance. The Apple Fanboy Circle-jerking started occupying a larger and larger portion of the show, with the grandiose claims being made about Apple and its products growing in grandiosity from one episode to the next. The giddy fawning over the Apple iPad in last week's episode was the culmination of that.

The rest of the content simultaneously deteriorated in quality, with more and more major errors creeping into their reports and with little or no attempt to correct or recant bad information given out after the fact. If I, a layperson, can spot their errors off the top of my head without having done any deliberate research into the matter, surely something is amiss? And these are professional technology journalists!

Once it gets to the point where I'm shouting at my phone in the car because the voices coming out of it are saying nothing but crap, it's time to say goodbye.

So, goodbye fellas. But before I go, there's one last thing I want to say for the record: Apple didn't invent the touch-screen smartphone. The iPhone was not the first smartphone capable of running downloadable third-party apps. Let's do a little research before stating things as fact, okay? You know, journalism.