When self-monitoring becomes uncomfortably intimate…
by John Naughton from Technology | The Guardian on (#13660)
The fitness tracker craze has taken a paternalistic turn with a US university asking students to wear wristbands. Has datafication gone too far?
'Apple's iPhone sales disappoint but profit beats targets," said the headline. It turned out that Apple sold "only" 74.77m iPhones in the fiscal first quarter of 2016, which is less than a 1% increase on the same period a year ago. So what happens? The share price plummets and Alphabet (aka Google) overtakes Apple as the world's most valuable company.
And right on cue, we get the usual kind of kindergarten "analysis" from the tech commentariat. Apple has run out of ideas. It needs a new "breakthrough" product along the lines of the iPhone. The iPad was supposed to be that product, but its sales are declining. And the Apple watch clearly isn't going to take its place etc, etc...
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