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.

OK, this post is another for the Brits, since it’s about the upcoming voting reform referendum. There’s a great YouTube video by CGPGrey on AV versus FPTP. (Hat-tip: @sneeu.) The big take-homes for people who are undecided but who haven’t written off AV:

• AV is able to simulate a bunch of elections, where the least-popular candidate is eliminated after each round, without the time and expense it’d take to run a bunch of campaigns one after another.
• AV is a better system, because it produces winners that a larger number of voters can agree on.
• While the AV system has its flaws, any problems AV has are shared by FPTP: susceptible to gerrymandering; not proportional representation; trends towards two parties over time.
• AV has no spoiler effect, where a third candidate splits the majority vote. This has long been a massive problem in the UK, where the liberal/left vote has been split between Labour and a version of the Liberal party, whereas the conservative right has been unified. Under AV, assuming the ties between Labour and Liberal Democrat voters remain somewhat intact post-coalition (and therefore vote for each-other as second choice), AV would lead to the Commons reflecting the political make-up of the UK more accurately more often.
• Using AV, citizens can help support and grow smaller parties they agree with, without worrying that they’ll put someone they don’t like into office.
• AV requires bigger parties to be less complacent and campaign harder to get more people to vote for them (which is why the Conservatives are so rabidly anti-AV and why some Labour MPs are against it).

To my mind, AV is far from perfect. I would still prefer a proportional system, where the votes cast lead to a Commons that reflects those votes. However, AV is a step in the right direction, which is why I’ll be voting in favour of it.

Whatever your intentions, though, please ensure that if you vote you do so on the basis of the system you believe in, and not propaganda. At the moment, much of the debate centres on Nick Clegg, and the referendum appears in danger of being some kind of national Nick Clegg approval rating generator. Clegg is politically toxic; unless the coalition becomes massively popular by 2015, Clegg’s dead in the water from a political standpoint and won’t even be leading the Lib-Dems into the next election. To that end, he really doesn’t matter. Ditto the Lib-Dems as a party. The no-to-AV campaign seems to think it’ll propel the Lib-Dems into some kind of equality with the Tories and Labour—it won’t. Under current polling, AV might help the Lib-Dems save a few seats, but they’ll still be down by over 60 per cent under either system. And said saving would be ‘fair’ anyway, since it always takes way more votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Labour or Conservative candidate.

If you favour First Past The Post, that’s fine. But vote for it because you believe in what the system is and what it represents, not because you hate Nick Clegg. And if you’re undecided, watch that YouTube video, because it might make you think a change is just what’s required to make British voting a little fairer.

EDIT: Nice overview of no vote tactics here from @unloveablesteve.