I don't see how the overall point doesn't equally apply to the Apple Watch. Playing music via Bluetooth only and an interface to a nascent payment system don't really change the fact this is still the iPhone's $350+ wrist buddy for the vast majority of its uses.
This is something that nobody seems to want to acknowledge in (for lack of a better word) the Apple fanclub.
If you look at the features of the Apple watch, they are basically the same as every other smartwatch released by Samsung and motorola (except for the NFC/Apple Pay stuff, which I am genuinly excited for).
People are trying really hard to differentiate Apple Watch from the Android watches, but it all sounds so absurd because they are so similar (apart from the home screen zoom-UI). Even Apple made their watch square!
And we know that Android Wear kind of sucks. So if they're not that different, Apple Watch will probably not be that great.
The "digital crown" input mechanism is interesting. The Watch seems to have a crisp (tiny) screen. And the wrist bands look cool. But unless there's going to be some crazy battery in there, there's nothing revolutionary about this, and its functionally the same as the 6 watches that Samsung has released, and will probably be almost as underwhelming.
> If you look at the features of the Apple watch, they are
> basically the same as every other smartwatch released by
> Samsung and motorola
Which leads to one of two conclusions: Apple fans are all idiots caught up in marketing bluster, OR, there's something qualitatively different about Apple's take on their products, enough to stump up the extra cash. And you're welcome to the former of those opinions, but I think it's the second.
Fundamentally, I buy Apple for the same reason I shop with Amazon. There is - to me - enough implicit guarantee of quality (for Amazon, of the logistics, returns, etc) that anything else seems needlessly risky.
I'd probably enjoy and find value in a Moto '360. But I might not. I think I'd want to use one for a few weeks before committing to the cash. But my experience of Apple products to date suggests to me I'm going to love my Apple Watch, enough that I'll stump up the cash sight unseen.
> there's nothing revolutionary about this, and its
> functionally the same as the 6 watches that Samsung has
> released, and will probably be almost as underwhelming
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/smartwatch-wars-the-app...
Android Wear looks very primitive in comparison.
that's really the salient point isn't it? Apple's playing catchup, but shooting for targets that probably aren't all that great to begin with.
"The Runwell" is a $600 Shinola watch which only tells the time.
The "nascent payment system" which is Apple Pay is better supported by the credit card companies than Google Wallet. It only remains to be seen how many retailers will switch to NFC. Just about everyone who does EFTPOS in Australia uses NFC now, I don't understand why the USA is such a (payment) technology backwater.
For the market of people who listen to their music on $500 headphones while walking around or catching the bus to work, the Apple Watch is obviously not going to replace their iPhone or iPod Touch/Nano/Shuffle/whatever.
For the market of people who currently use bluetooth headphones while running, jogging, cycling, etc, switching to the Apple Watch (or other bluetooth enabled small form factor personal music player) might be worth the money.
Another point to consider is that with the iPhone moving into the "digital surfboard" screen sizes, having a "wrist buddy" makes more sense. Do I want to be hauling my digital surfboard out just to check the time? Am I prepared to spend $500 on a watch ever? What about a watch that combines with my iPhone to do much more than a simple chronograph?
All that taken into account, I don't think the market for the Apple Watch is digital gadget geeks. I suspect the actual market for the Apple Watch is people invested in the Apple ecosystem (as opposed to say the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem), who already spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on fashion accessories such as gold watches.
The primary use of fancy chronographs is to look good on your wrist. As an incidental function they tell the time, phase of the moon, current date, provide stopwatch and timer functions, etc. Smart watches will even tell you the current weather (as opposed to simply having a thermometer and barometer gauge on the face of the watch).
IMHO the primary purpose of the Apple Watch isn't to be an extension to your iPhone, it's to be a fashion accessory which happens to be functional.
Just because it doesn't make sense to you at any price doesn't mean it won't make sense to someone who already has two $5,000 watches.
Put differently, Wallet supports 100% of credit and check cards in the US, whereas Apple supports "many".
Pay, because of the need to generate purchase tokens and "one-time-use" cards, requires integration effort on the side of both Apple and the issuing bank. Pay is not a payment processor, just a gateway.
Regulations in the state requires every POS to support the EMV technology by October 2015. From what I've seen, most retailers will have to upgrade and the new machines pretty much all include NFC technology. So by the end of next year, NFC should be available with almost every retailers. I don't think it's a coincidence that Apple is releasing NFC now (they could have easily done it with the iPhone 5 or 5S)
You just summed up the iPhone as a whole, I think.
But Gruber says this:
> It has internal storage and Bluetooth, so you’ll be able to use it for music playback without taking your iPhone with you.
Is Gruber wrong about that? I admittedly don't know, but he sounds authoritative here that the Apple Watch has storage for tunes. That's pretty cool to me.
In other words Gruber's case on this is irrelevant.
He is expecting developments between now and release (ie. more information) to demonstrate that this is not the case.
> If it actually doesn’t do much more, or allow much more, than what they demonstrated on stage last week, I am indeed going to be deeply disappointed, and I’ll be concerned about the entire direction of the company as a whole. But I get the impression that they’ve only shown us the tip of the functional iceberg, simply because they wanted to reveal the hardware — particularly the digital crown — on their own terms. The software they can keep secret longer, because it doesn’t enter the hands of the Asian supply chain.
He thinks Apple is holding some details close to the vest and he has a plausible reason for why. Say what you will about Gruber's Apple partisanship, but he's always been great at reading between the lines of Apple's publicity events.
Furthermore, in his haste to differentiate Apple from the competition
> My impression of Android Wear is that it’s best thought of as a wrist-worn terminal for your Android phone and for Google’s cloud-based services. An extension for your phone, not a sibling device. Android Wear devices are almost useless other than for telling time when out of Bluetooth range from your phone. I don’t think that’s a device that many people want; it’s a solution in search of a problem. Call me biased if you want, but I think Android Wear is simply the result of the rest of the industry trying to get out in front of Apple, out of fear of how far behind they were when the iPhone dropped in 2007. On the surface, they do look like the same basic thing: small color LCD touchscreens on your wrist. But all Android Wear devices are larger and clunkier than the larger 42mm Apple Watch, and none of them are even close to the smaller 38mm one. Is there anyone who would dispute that Apple Watch is far more appealing to women than any other smartwatch on the market?
The new Sony Smart watch(1) already has more functionality (gps, waterproof, longer estimated battery, transreflective screen visible in sunlight) than the specs of the AppleWatch while the Asus ZenWatch(2) matches it in feminine looks (if not in expensive materials). Both will be out before the AppleWatch and likely for lower prices than the cheap entry-level AppleWatch. AndroidWear OEMs are iterating faster with a wider range of options. Gruber is comparing actual shipping products (Moto360) to promised unreleased products from Apple, indeed he's hoping Apple exceeds their promises. That's his bias showing
(1) http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/smartwear/smart... (2) http://www.asus.com/Phones/ASUS_ZenWatch_WI500Q/
And he also thinks that no android wear device manufacturer is doing the same, for no plausible reason.
He's basically saying "apple has secret plans, they are awesome" and "Nobody else has secret plans, because they are not Apple. Thus, we can ignore anything they haven't talked about"
That doesn't seem very sane to me.
But this...this was really a tough post to get through. I honestly felt like I was reading some long-winded justification article by a cult acolyte who just realized the apocalypse didn't occur last Thursday at 11:23am like he was promised and is vomiting justifications to account for it.
All that being said, it's one of the few Gruber articles I didn't flag because I was interested to see how he was going to eat his words.
The only saving grace of this entire post was this line "but I think Android Wear is simply the result of the rest of the industry trying to get out in front of Apple, out of fear of how far behind they were when the iPhone dropped in 2007." which I agree completely with. But agreeing with Gruber makes me a little angry and dead feeling on the inside.
But then I read this garbage "The digital crown feels amazing. It didn’t actually control anything on-screen on the demo watches I handled last week, but it has the most amazing feel of any analog controller I’ve ever used. Lubricious (in the second sense, if not the first as well) is the word that springs to mind." and I felt a little better. I mean geez, enough. Seriously. Just come out and say you want to make love to it. No Gruber, you really meant in the first sense.
I feel a little bit dirty though after dragging my eyeballs through this post.
Luxury mechanical watches need service too, it's a very standard thing in the industry. Apple can offer a CPU/screen/sensor improvement every two years for about a thousand dollars for the luxury models and owners would pay it as they pay the water seal replacement for their Omegas and Rolexes... only Apple's margins are going to be sky high because it may be an easy thing done by a grunt in a tech service shop, and luxury brands have to send your watch to highly skilled engineers sometimes in another country.
EDIT: I posted before finishing the article, Gruber thinks Apple may upgrade the electronics too, but for "hundreds" of dollars.
Given the cost of parts and assuming the chunk of gold accounts for more than 90% of the price, some sort of trade in system should cover this problem.
Apple abandons devices from OS upgrades and compatibility, batteries lose their charge. It'll very quickly (in terms of "collectibles") become a gold bar with a black rectangle in the middle.
(The game's a bit Candyland-esque; we always arrive at "yes": if Apple's strategy is inflexible post-Steve, they're doomed, if they make any changes, they are also doomed.)
Let's play anyway.
The big, flashing, worrying sign of changed-for-the-worse Apple isn't any hullaboloo about Warhol and luxury, it's that Apple didn't show us a product!
All they have is a fancy looking piece of hardware and a bunch of tech demos with a UI that clearly isn't cohesive or thought out enough to work in the real world.
And then, on top of that, they bragged a bit about how many features the Watch was going to have.
This is real "danger Will Robinson" territory for Apple, in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great: focussing on actual products with a a well-thought out core rather than a lard of features or pie-in-the-sky tech demos.
Gruber buries the lead a bit on this dramatic change. He doesn't get around to mentioning it until deep into the article, and then rather wavily dismisses the change with this bizarre explanation:
He suggests that Apple decided to demo a non-product because they couldn't keep the hardware secret long enough for the software to catch up.
If that's true, that means, what, Apple views secret-unveilings as its core principle?
But I think more likely is that Gruber mind is just going through reflexive contortions of justification here, and the truth is simpler: Apple is slowly losing the focus that for a brief few years really did make it unique among tech companies.
Certainly hope to end up eating crow on this, though. :)
Also, Gruber correctly points out that the Osborne Effect might help them here - if the product seems promising enough, some people will postpone buying something else to wait for the Apple product. We should still expect subsequent versions return to the "you can buy this next week!" model.
The thing is, Gruber's mutant power is the ability to turntwist just about anything Apple does into a core Apple value and what defines them and makes them great.
In other words, what Gruber thinks and writes about basically doesn't matter, because Apple could do just about anything and he'd clap for it and stand in line.
Apple Watch - well your turn to tell me how it is anything like the iPhone - Apple actually did not tell us what problem it is solving - why competitors' watches are horrible, why I need the Apple Watch etc. That's the worrying thing about this.
http://stratechery.com/2014/apple-watch-asking-saying/
This is the first Apple announcement I can readily recall where they didn't mention a shipping date, battery life and full pricing details for the new product.
I think Apple messed up here. I might be proven wrong after millions of people are joyfully spinning their little digital crowns between their thumb and forefinger a couple of years from now, but I would wager a small sum that I'm not wrong.
Would it not have been better to put a touch-sensitive pad along the whole side of the Apple Watch and/or give it the same pressure sensitivity as the front screen? Or if they chose a circular watch, give it a spinning band around the whole face of the watch. Much bigger controller, much more comfortable and better precision.
Perhaps there's some use case where the digital crown is a preferable method of input (setting a very exact numerical value for example), but I have a feeling those use-cases will be few and far between, and even then, the set-up to use the crown will require some form of touch and/or voice input.
That's exactly what I thought when I first saw it explained. Coming from the iPod and all this touch sensitive stuff (and then the "hard tap" being introduced here) a physical thingamabob to fiddle with seems really odd.
Before you continue on your criticism of the digital crown as an input method, why not actually try it?
I don't buy the false input argument. Smartphones already handle that pretty well but in the case of a watch I can additionally see people using their thumb on the base or the other side of the watch as an anchor to steady their hand before committing to swipe or a press gesture.
As I said before, though: all my opinions are subject to change.
Home automation.
"Is Apple losing the egalitarianism it never had? No, it had Macs, it was never egalitarian!"
Why was this in the article at all then? Using an analogy that in the end the author itself destroys is bad writing, or at worst extra reading for the reader for no gain. In his own article he never considers Apple egalitarian, yet he is asking a hypothetical question as though Apple was considered egalitarian to begin with.
PS. I'd have to disagree with even the statement that iPhone is "egalitarian" I would argue, there are tons of people in the world that buy Android because it's good enough, and cannot afford the cachet of Apple.
This is a worthwhile point to make, since people will compare the watch to iThings, not Macs.
Ignoring the fallacy of comparing an iPhone that cost hundreds of dollars when alternatives cost <$100 "egalitarian" to a sugary water drink, he uses the iPhone/iPad to pitch Apple as an "egalitarian" company then in the next paragraph refutes himself.
At the very least it is just not a very good analogy where he props one part of the company as something, when the rest of the company is definitely not that something.
HN is broken.
An interesting thought for the future:
Having two devices on a human gives you much richer spatial information, including accurate bearing and rotation speed plus measuring the difference in movement on the top and lower half of the body. Short term, this is great for fitness. Long term, this works well in a house with multiple other Apple products acting as sensors inside a home.
Even with the Apple Watch, some of them look beautiful imo: http://i.imgur.com/qGvqIqK.png
http://www.iphoneheat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/apple-w...
http://images.chinatopix.com/data/images/full/11317/apple-wa...
When it comes to watch design, circle != automatically good looking, in my personal opinion, the Moto 360 is very cool for being circular, but the casing itself looks like one of those $100 dirt cheap Movado-lookalikes that you can get from an outlet mall.
It has something to do with the combination of the thickness, and the specific rounding of the corners and sides, that I find off-putting aesthetically.
I want to wear a watch, not a gadget. So I want the technology to be submissive to the watch. When you look at what is on my wrist, I want you to see a watch, not an iPhone mini-mini posing as a watch. We're still a decade away from this being possible.
Though I do have to admit that going into this thing, my guess was that they'd be using a new color e-ink display to save battery life, not a "raise your arm to turn it on" sensor.
The iPod Nano with a particular after-market watch band was quite popular at the time.
The Moto 360 is the only competitor in looks, and it does indeed look great in renders. The problem is that it actually looks horrible (IMHO) in person. It's huge -- really massive. Nobody with a small wrist can wear a Moto 360 without looking a bit dorky. The strap attaches to the watchface at the very bottom as well, and it's a very thick watch, so the thickness is just emphasized in a very bad way. It's a bug chunk of metal sitting on your wrist on an inelegant way.
Apple is trying to reinvent the watch, not the LCD. The Apple Watch is capable of so much more than a mechanical watch. Why would they needlessly adopt the limitations that would come with a round face?
For a company that wanted you to think difference, which I interpret to mean "don't be a square", all this squareness and market conformity is really disappointing.
If I build a car with a joystick instead of a steering wheel and call it a "digital steering wheel" everyone would say, "No, somebody invented that already, it's called a 'joystick'"... they would not say "I am going to educate the uninformed and tell them that among car connoisseurs, a joystick is called a steering wheel."
