Linked List: May 2, 2018

Wednesday, 2 May 2018

Juiced Headline of the Week 

I point this out from time to time, but the way most websites’ CMSes work is that an article’s URL slug — like the “juiced_headline_of_the_week” segment in this very post’s URL — are derived from the article’s original headline. But when a headline changes, the URL shouldn’t change unless you have a way to redirect traffic going to the old URL to the new one. Most websites don’t do that. So when they change a headline, you can still tell what the original headline was by looking at the URL slug. For some reason, with a lot of news websites, they don’t bother updating the headline in the HTML <title> element either, so you can read the original headline in your browser tab.

Sometimes these headline changes are interesting. This piece at Quartz by Dave Gershgorn published a week ago is one such case. The original headline, still visible in the <title> and the URL slug, was “Apple’s Second Quarter 2018: Analyst Expect Poor iPhone X Sales” [sic]. The new headline, as seen on the page: “Almost Nobody Wants the iPhone X” (with the punny sub-head “Missed X-Pectations”).

As I pointed out in this thread on Twitter with Rene Ritchie and Gershgorn, the original headline was accurate but staid — the analyst(s) were wrong, but the headline was correct that they were predicting poor iPhone X sales. The new headline was not only juiced up with clickbait, it turned out to be flat-out ridiculously false.

(I, of course, write my URL slugs by hand for each post. The vast majority of the time they either match or mostly match the words in the headline, but every once in a while I like to slip something in like this.)

Daniel Eran Dilger Nailed Bloomberg on the iPhone X/Samsung OLED Story 

Daniel Eran Dilger, last week at AppleInsider:

Samsung didn’t say that its Display Panel segment turned in weaker results due to iPhone X. What the company actually reported in its earnings statement for the March quarter was that its DP “OLED Earnings declined due to weak demand and rising competition between Rigid OLED and LTPS LCD.”

It also stated that its DP segment “LCD Earnings stayed flat QoQ thanks to cost reduction efforts and product-mix improvements amid a decline in sales and ASPs caused by weak seasonality.”

So rather than Bloomberg’s contrived messaging portraying that Samsung’s OLED profits were declining because iPhone X was tanking, the reality is that Samsung reported that its entire DP unit was hammered in profitability during the quarter due to intense competition (from other suppliers and from other, cheaper screen technologies) and from weak demand and a decline in sales in general, across both OLED and LCD panels.

I usually call claim chowder on statements that prove false, but here’s one where I must tip my cap for being spot-on.