The fail is the fact that they used a link-obscurer/shortener for no benefit to me. Even the text around it doesn't give me any hint that I will be going to apple.com. The ___location isn't extraordinarily long, so it wouldn't have necessarily damaged the page layout, and they could have easily coded the link inside the text 'Apple's website', which would have given me a lot more information, and helped me in my decision to explore that link.

Finally, the link isn't even clickable to me. I had to copy it into the address bar.

I don't believe link-shorteners are inherently evil or destroying the internet, but seriously, why use them in an article like this? How does it help anyone (me, specifically)?

I guess that the article is the same as it was in the paper edition, which makes the shortifying more useful. They could have just written "check on Apple's website", of course. Or maybe even go through the trouble of editing the web edition.

wow you know I didn't even realize that when I was reading the article I had to copy and paste the link. It's been a long day.

A fail indeed.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who caught this. Who puts a shortened, unclickable link in a news article?

When the online version is a copy of the print version.

that's not even a reason, did they write it on a type writer?!

I complained to a friend of mine who works at the Times - they're fixing it.