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.