Silicon Valley Reconsiders the iPhone Era It Created
January 09 2018 - 5:59AM
Dow Jones News
By Tripp Mickle
A tussle this week between prominent investors and Apple Inc.
over iPhone use by young people comes amid a nascent re-evaluation
of the smartphone's social consequences within the industry that
spawned it.
The smartphone has fueled much of Silicon Valley's soaring
profits over the past decade, enriching companies in sectors from
social media to gaming to payments. But over the past year or so, a
number of prominent industry figures have voiced concerns about the
downsides of the technology's ubiquity.
They include Apple executives who helped create the iPhone and
now express misgivings about how smartphones monopolize attention,
as well as early investors and executives in Facebook Inc. who
worry about social media's tendency to consume ever more user time,
in part by pushing controversial content.
Those are the kinds of concerns spotlighted in a letter to Apple
on Saturday from Jana Partners LLC and the California State
Teachers' Retirement System, or Calstrs, which control about $2
billion of Apple shares. The letter urged the tech giant to develop
new software tools that would help parents control and limit phone
use more easily, and to study the impact of overuse on mental
health.
On Monday, Tony Fadell, a former senior Apple hardware executive
involved in the iPhone's creation, also called on Apple to do more,
saying on Twitter that adults are struggling just as much as
children with smartphone overuse. Mr. Fadell, who started publicly
voicing concerns about smartphones last spring, said Apple and
Alphabet Inc.'s Google should add features to their mobile-phone
operating systems to allow people to track device usage.
"Just like we need a scale for our weight we need a scale for
our digital lives," Mr. Fadell said in an interview. He said he
became concerned about the issue in recent years as he saw families
at resorts spending time with devices rather than each other, or
couples taking selfies on ski slopes rather than enjoying the
views.
Apple late Monday issued a statement defending its parental
controls and other protections for children who use its iPhones,
noting that it started offering some of them as early as 2008. It
said many of those tools can be found in the settings section of
its devices.
Mr. Fadell's comments echoed similar remarks last year by
venture capitalists affiliated with Facebook, including Chamath
Palihapitiya and Roger McNamee. Mr. Palihapitiya, a former Facebook
executive, and Mr. McNamee, an early investor and adviser, have
raised concerns about social media's tendency to encourage users
through emails and notifications to open an app, causing people to
live in front of their screens.
Facebook last year acknowledged for the first time the negative
consequences of time spent on its service, noting that passively
consuming information on Facebook leads many users to report
"feeling worse." And Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg pledged to
spend this year working to address misuse of its products in part
by "making sure time spent on Facebook is time well spent."
"There's a dawning realization of the effects these companies
have had on us and a sense that we should no longer just go along
with it," said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies
Associates.
The smartphone has transformed society unlike any previous
device. Its ability to substitute for the radio, TV, computer and
gaming console has made it so powerful that U.S. consumers now
spend more than three hours a day on average on their mobile
devices, according to research firm eMarketer. That is an increase
of more than a one hour from 2013.
A handful of developers have responded to rising smartphone use
by introducing apps designed to help curtail time on devices,
including Checky, which tracks how often users unlock a device, and
Menthal, which provides a scorecard for device usage. Alex
Markowetz, who co-founded Menthal, said Apple should already offer
a similar time-spent measurement on the iPhone because customers
increasingly want to protect their most important assets -- time
and intellect.
"That's the one resource you should be willing to pay for to
look after, " Mr. Markowetz said.
Mr. Fadell, who helped develop the iPhone's hardware, said he
has broken "out sometimes in cold sweats" thinking about the
device's social impact. Speaking at the Computer History Museum
last May, Mr. Fadell compared creating the device to Steve Martin's
movie "The Jerk." In the movie, Mr. Martin portrays an inventor who
creates a bridge to hold glasses on people's nose. The bridge sells
well until people go cross-eyed and sue Mr. Martin's company.
"I think about that and when the kids are looking at the digital
screen and different pictures are coming up and there's grandpa, me
-- am I going to be hated by them for what we created? Or are we
going to be like Alexander Graham Bell?" Mr. Fadell said.
Write to Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 09, 2018 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)
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