You know what? I think we may have overdone it. The iPhone is a wonderful smartphone, yes. Apple puts on a great show, true. But this? This is overkill:
That’s the front page of Sina Tech’s Telecom section right now. The word iPhone appears 52 separate times on that page. It’s the sort of thing I would normally associate with paid “advertorials”, but that’s not what’s going on here, because it’s everywhere. iPhone appears 44 times on Tencent’s QQ News’s Mobile front page. Even the typically-restrained TechWeb has iPhone 23 times on its mobile front page. We here at Tech in Asia have run four stories about the iPhone 5, a phone that was released yesterday. Three of those four stories are by me.
So let me just say out loud what I’ve been thinking at myself for a little while now: WTF.
On the one hand, this is totally legit. From a reporter’s perspective, it’s the biggest story happening right now, and it’s what readers want to read anyway. There’s no denying that putting “Apple” or “iPhone” in your headline is a good way to bump pageviews (as opposed to the regulatory stuff I like to write about from time to time, which appears to be anathema to most of our readers). And there’s no denying that nobody puts on a show like Apple. Their presentations are exquisitely engineered to entertain, and you may consider them misleading or just PR nonsense, but they’re never boring. That’s something other tech companies can and have learned from; Xiaomi product announcements for example have a bit of an Apple flair to them.
On the other hand, this is ridiculous. It is a phone. Running twenty different stories about a single phone release is insane, isn’t it? At what point does it stop being news coverage and start being hysteria or, perhaps worse, free advertising? It can’t be all our fault — after all, people are crazy about these phones — but how much of this is the absurd demand for Apple news and how much is tech media milking the story for everything we can get out of it?
These aren’t questions I have an answer to, and I must admit we’re probably not done writing about the iPhone 5. But I’d be interested to hear what readers think about all this — that is, if you’re not too busy poring over all the latest iPhone reports.
(Of course, this isn’t just a China problem. Gizmodo has ten front page stories about the new iPhone right now, and they run a lot fewer stories on their front page than any Chinese portal does.)
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