“Boring” media gets iPhone 7 completely wrong

I tried to tell you, I really did. I wanted to make sure you knew that Apple’s iPhone 7 would be a huge success, even while people who really should know better in the media insisted it would flop. “There’s no headphone port,” they moaned, only to find out the world has moved on and they have not.

What is clear from today’s news nugget is that Apple had actually begun to fall for the media hype – why else did it estimate initial iPhone 7 sales so low? According to Digitimes Apple has had to significantly revise its component orders for the fourth quarter – ordering up to 30 percent more touch displays for the new generation devices than it had originally anticipated. In other words, the company had underestimated demand by around a third.

That’s the impact of deliberate negativity. Look around, it’s everywhere – it’s as if all Apple had to do was stand up for customer privacy and argue against the Google model of security and the entire world media has been unleashed on some negativity campaign. It’s shocking. From time to time you come across nasty slices of anti-Apple invective from journalists who’ve never behaved that way before, on the most spurious of grounds. Look at some of the insane criticisms being thrown at the new AirPods for example.

It looks like none of that negativity has got in the way. Mizuho Securities Senior Analyst Abhey Lamba predicted Apple would sell up to 230 million iPhone 7’s across 12-months. Meanwhile, of course, the people’s champion that is Samsung apparently still has tens of thousands potential time bombs out there in the wild following its botched product recall of exploding Galaxy Note 7s. And where’s the media outcry over that? Just shocking, and inexcusable: the media exists to inform, educate, entertain and inspire.

With its partial treatment of Apple and lack of outcry over competitors, our current tech press establishment lets the whole notion of the media down. They will never win a Pulitzer Prize – and they should be focusing on doing so, as the technology industry sits at the heart of the digital transformation that is impacting every part of society.

Surely there’s an important story buried in that, rather than a constant diet of mendacious click-whoring and partial reporting of things that actually do impact people?