I love it when one of the tech press — Daring Fireball’s John Gruber in this case — slaps down the mainstream media for their idiocy. In this case, the “topic” the media was tossing around was that the upcoming Apple Watch was going to be shipping without some of the health-tracking features that had allegedly been promised at the reveal last fall. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The story that started it all was on the CBS News website, featuring a quote from CNET’s Jeff Bakalar that said:
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““They were going for some super groundbreaking and innovative health tracking stuff. Heartbeat tracking, stress monitoring. In their testing it wasn’t filling that sort of void that’s in the market for fitness apps right now.”
Bakalar, who should know better as he’s allegedly a tech journalist, went on the air with some CBS talking heads and said that Apple was pulling features from the Apple Watch. A headline on the video blared “Apple Watch won’t track your blood pressure”, and Bakalar states that “it’s not going to come with all of the features Apple promised.”
Gruber pointed out in a post yesterday that:
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“This is ridiculous. Nothing has changed about Apple Watch’s health and fitness features since it was announced. They have a web page explaining just which fitness tracking features it has.”
That web page, which can be seen here, hasn’t changed one iota since the day the Apple Watch was announced.
Our take on the news: Always take whatever the mainstream media says about any topic with a grain of salt. Sensationalism sells, facts don’t. Many thanks to John Gruber for pointing out a very obvious location — Apple’s own Watch health and fitness page — where CBS News and CNET could have quickly fact-checked what they were asserting. Of course, why do those “news sources” want to ruin a good headline with a few facts?
