A less serious accusation is that Gruber now knows that his core readership consists of, essentially, the Apple faithful. He knows to pander to that crowd and that is how he gets paid. It's iPhone fans who feel that every Gruber observation about the iPhone is so critically important that it needs to be voted up on HN.
His readership, from the frequency with which his posts make it to the front page here, seems to include the hacker news community. Do you consider yourself, or the rest of us, “essentially the Apple faithful”?
As far as I can tell the subject of his blog could be summarized as something like “high signal-to-noise and semi-technical discussion of Apple, the web, and graphic design, with occasional sports and politics related tidbits.
“The Apple faithful” as a group is quite different from “technical and semi-technical readers interested in Apple and the web”.
I != the other person. It was a simple, obvious observation. In the same way that a writer for the right wing press isn't going to suddenly question conservative values.