If you’re feeling down in the dumps, for whatever reason, there’s a very good chance you merely need to watch Cookie the Penguin being tickled:

(Original link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wTWWjYTe1I.)

A wave of paranoia has been unleashed by discoveries that your iPhone is tracking your every move (Guardian), prompting some to assume Apple is sending the data to the mothership, in order to have you beaten to death if you don’t look at enough iAds every month. MAN, THOSE APPLE GUYS ARE EVIL.

But wait!

Alex Levinson reports some shocking discoveries:

• Apple is not collecting the data;
• The location data is used by software such as Maps and Camera, in order to operate;
• The hidden file is neither new nor secret (it’s just moved);
• The ‘discovery’ was in fact published in 2010.

But hang on… If this is all the case, then this is the media whipping up a bullshit frenzy about Apple, just because that’s more newsworthy than:

Location data still on Apple device, so location-oriented apps still work. Bloke writes app to pull data to desktop. World doesn’t explode. No-one really cares. Well, apart from editors who know they can fire up the link-bait machine. Oh, and people going ARGH, THEY KNOW WHERE I’VE BEEN while tweeting their geo-location data, checking into Foursquare and Gowalla and posting to Facebook that they’re “away from home, in a pub on the Thames, if you want to join me,” which of course has NO SECURITY IMPLICATIONS WHATSOEVER.

Oh.

Poor Apple. It must be really hard for the company right now. As reported by yours truly (in a suitably bleary late-night manner), iPad sales ‘disappointed’ during Q2 and were ‘below expectations’—assuming you’re an analyst and don’t really have a clue, but like to play games with Apple stock by flinging your guesses at the internet, like a monkey throwing poo at a zoo.

But what about the iPhone? Henry Blodget already told us on Business Insider that Apple’s device was dead in the water. According to Apple’s Q2 report, here’s what ‘dead in the water’ looks like:

The Company sold 18.65 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 113 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

“Fuck,” said Steve Jobs, surprisingly candidly. “Apple really is totally doomed. Despite second quarter revenue of $24.67 billion and record second quarter net profit of $5.99 billion, and us selling every iPad we can make, those analyst guys are always right, so we must be heading for a pretty big fall in Q3.” Jobs also added that the iPhone, having sold 18.65 million units in the previous quarter, was to be immediately cancelled “because that Blodget guy seems like he knows his stuff, and so I guess he knows something we don’t”.

Oh dear—my apologies. I appear to have accidentally tapped into a collective-consciousness wet-dream of Blodget’s and every analyst who reports on Apple. I HATE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS.

Here we go again. Before bed (I’m writing this gone midnight, because I need help), I checked into the BBC and saw a slightly odd standfirst on the Apple Q2 earnings article:

Latest profits for the computer giant Apple beat most hopes with a 113% rise in iPhone sales—but iPad sales disappoint.

From what I can tell, iPad sales have been insanely swift over the past few months, but, no, there it was in grey and white (the BBC doesn’t like contrast in its text): the sales ‘disappoint’. Clicking through, there’s a little more detail:

Apple’s figures were not uniformly positive. It sold 4.69m iPad tablet computers in the quarter, below expectations.

Clearly, I’m an idiot, because 4.69 million iPads sold seems pretty damn good to me (and Apple commented: “We sold every iPad 2 we could make”). So whose expectations were these sales below? Our chums the analysts, of course—those happy campers who pull whatever figures they fancy out of their arses, and then yell at Apple for being rubbish when the company fails to match their pie-in-the-sky estimates.

If you care, CNN Money provided an exciting overview of analyst analysis (i.e. guesswork) regarding iPad sales. The range was from 8.8 million and bottomed out at 5 million. This is, presumably, why Apple selling 4.69 iPads is somehow ‘disappointing’ and ‘below expectations’, despite the fact any competitor selling anywhere near that many tablets in a quarter would be cause for a year-long celebration.

Update: it’s also worth noting that these are the exact same analysts that initially predicted doom and gloom for the iPad, suggesting Apple would sell about 17 in total, if it was lucky. As The Macalope said to me on Twitter:

Apple disappointed the analysts who suck at estimating.

A really nice article by Ben Brooks on the most important benchmark ‘bullet point’ in computing rapidly changing in recent years.

Years back:

Growing up there was really only one bullet point on computers that I cared about: clock speed. I knew that the faster the CPU, the faster the computer. This drove my buying decisions […] for many years

And now:

Battery life is the new benchmark—it’s the first thing that I look at on any new piece of hardware. We can now, finally, make the reasonable assumption that both the hardware and software is fast enough on most devices—so now what matters is portability

I largely agree. I think there will always be people who consider chip-speed, RAM and other technical aspects of a device of paramount importance, but they will continue to diminish in number. However, while computers and mobile are mostly ‘fast enough’ and ‘powerful enough’ for a typical user’s requirements, you can bet most people would bite your arm off if you could double the battery life of their tablet, smartphone or laptop tomorrow.