Apple announced a downturn in expected revenue, and the market choked. Which followed on the heels of the Facebook stock plunge as a result of its myriad privacy issues.

What happened? Let’s look at the Apple playbook: for years, Apple has released a new iOS ahead of the sales of a new phone. The new iOS slows down older phones, in order to induce people to buy the new one. Which might have a few new features, but not enough to warrant the purchase of a new phone, save that the older models are now artificially slower.

Planned obsolescence.

You know that there will be another new phone in not too long a time, and now that you’re on to the Apple scam, why not put up with the inconvenience and wait for a model or two, when perhaps there will be a perceptible difference in the phone’s features. Done. You are no longer that much of an Apple fanboy that you need the company to be the most valuable one on the planet. For now, you’ll just suck it up.

The Steve Jobs days are over. We haven’t seen true innovation in a long time. Instead, Apple has perfected the art of iteration, which they’ve been rolling out in all of their products, in digestible waves.  It seems the tide might finally have turned.

Elsewhere in tech, given the seemingly growing number of data breaches and privacy issues, will you buy a device that will be listening in, especially one conveniently located – we say this with tongue held firmly in cheek – in the privacy of your home?

Hockey Stick Decline

Silicon Valley and tech have long enjoyed hockey stick growth, seemingly at any cost, re any price to the consumer, be it planned obsolescence or privacy. As a result, we’re now seeing something of a hockey stick decline.

It was long overdue.

It might not have been lost on users that after British MPs seized private emails that revealed Facebook’s blatant disregard for user privacy – correspondences between senior executives, include Mark Zuckerberg himself, that Facebook fought to keep out of the courts in the US – followed by the New York Times’ revelation that Facebook had secretly allowed Netflix and Spotify to read users’ private messages. Think anyone noticed the hypocrisy there?

A special note to entrepreneurs who attempt to force people to access their products/services by offering only a Facebook or Google sign in, try again: people are tired of being tracked and commoditized. We appreciate that your service is free, but in light of all of the revelations of late, we’re tired of paying the price

Square One

It’s a new year and given the beating that the tech stocks are taking, time to go back to basics and define what technology is all about: to make processes easier and to find information. The internet was and essentially still is an information superhighway. Whether people are looking for human connections, items to purchase, answers to questions or news, they’re basically looking for information. But note to self, and in case it was just too subtle: we the people are not the information. Onward and forward.