> Also, though it sounds trivial, I enjoy the perfect 60 FPS smoothness of Apple Watch’s second hand — a smoothness no mechanical watch could ever match.
Based on a culmination of reviews and early preview articles I have read, videos and basically everything I have read about the Apple Watch this statement seems kind of ironic. The second hand might be smooth, but the very real performance issues people have encountered with the watch mean the rest of the Apple Watch experience is anything but smooth. What's the point of a smooth second hand if the rest of the experience is somewhat crippled and unusable?
I like the look of the Apple Watch and the very idea of it, but to an extent. It feels as though articles like Gruber's here are talking with reckless abandon, from the perspective that existing solutions aren't out there. From a user interface perspective the Pebble watch and Moto 360 especially are beautiful, well-crafted and smooth interfaces. Apple are not entering new territory nor are they introducing any ideas or improvements into the space (besides the physical appearance).
Lets not pretend that there aren't as equally good, if not, better smart watches out there. They might not have had the same amount of design and research put into them, but I think there is such a thing as over-engineering something. I am pretty happy with my Pebble watch, the battery life is great and so too, is the battery life.
I am by no means an expert, but I like nice watches and to me the Apple Watch will never match the build quality, feel and longevity of a nice traditional mechanical watch even if it is only from a battery life perspective.
But Gruber also spends an extraordinary amount of time these days using framing devices to either draw false comparisons that put Apple on top, or minimize the cases where Apple clearly screwed up. You could easily cut this review down by 2/3rds just by getting rid of the superfluous framing he uses throughout and not lose any information at all. The amount of hemming and hawing in this makes me think that he's not really buying it this time. It's not a crap device, but it's not clear what it's good for and it's not strictly better than just a normal watch. He didn't really effuse about Apple's stated use-cases for the device. His hope throughout is that maybe it'll appeal to non-watch wearers?
You'll also notice that he carefully doesn't compare it to all the other smart watches in the growing segment. He pretends like it only is comparable to regular watches, like the Apple watch was introduced into a market vacuum, cut from whole cloth (Apple's magical genius cloth), and completely uninformed by the three decades of smartwatch development.
Obviously Gruber is a big fan of Apple, but your criticism of him is a bit harsh. I assume he didn't spend a lot of time comparing it to Android wear because he hasn't spent a ton of time using Android wear.
I'm a little afraid of the first gen bugs, and some of the reviews I read today weren't completely sold, but pretty much every single one that I read said it was far and away the best smartwatch they've used, even if they still weren't completely sold and gave it meh reviews overall.
Do you have evidence of Apple secretly paying Gruber for apparent opinions? Because that's what that word means; it's a form of marketing fraud.
> You'll also notice that he carefully doesn't compare it to all the other smart watches in the growing segment.
The market right now can be divided into two sections; things like the Pebble, and watches-with-apps (Apple Watch, Android Wear). For the latter category, which way you go entirely depends on what sort of phone you have, so a comparison arguably isn't particularly worthwhile.
[citation neeeded]
This is great point, which I never considered. He consistently creates false arguments where Apple is favored.
Here's the thing - John Gruber is a partisan (to quote Siracusa), but so is his audience - so it's entirely reasonable that he would offer a partisan's analysis of the Apple Watch.
Even so - I thought he was more critical of the watch than most other Apple products - and perhaps it's because he does wear a watch, and was trying to decide whether he was interested in wearing an Apple watch instead.
His conclusion seemed to be that it wasn't clear he would.
Put another way, of the four reviews that I've read so far (NYT, Recode, The Verge) - Gruber's was the first one that made me think that buying a version 1 Apple Watch wasn't such a great idea - simply because it was a partisans review that was clearly calling out disclaimers.
You should try listening to his podcast(s). Just like pre-Functional-High-Ground-Marco, I find Gruber to be a lot more realistic and balanced when he is talking, not writing.
The internet, a crappy eMachines desktop, and AIM made this possible. Technically, I didn't "need" my own computer at the time, but it made interactions like this possible. Maybe the Apple Watch will create new interactions that could spark something great between people.
Shrug
I say this as someone who generally admires John Gruber's ability to sell me on 1000-2000 word blog posts on Apple minutia purely on the strength and clarity of his writing. This post was painful.
Neither of them wore an Apple Watch.
Quite poignant.
(I didn't do these things btw).
Which is beside the point, since it very well can, and inevitably will, be a reality.
Lots of folks upgrade phones every year or every other year.
To an extent, Apple is producing the Watch to offset the slowing growth of smartphone sales, which tells me that people aren't buying them as often as you think.
Which is to say, I think Gruber's on to something, but I think he's actually understating it with the way he presented it.
I mean, I kid. But I think that you're overestimating the amount of truly useful stuff that you can do where the only input is a tap or two and contextual environmental information, versus the truly useful stuff you can do with no taps and contextual environmental information.
I can already see how this might be useful in meetings with people who know morse code. :-)
[1]It could also be eye-roll-worthy bourgeois douchebaggery depending on your socio-economic perspective.
Now if that happens, it might be a sad commentary on the allocation of resources in our society - globally. But if the Apple Watch is successful, I would be surprised if it isn't common (>20% adoption) in thousands of USA high schools and lots of other high schools around the globe.
I would imagine high school ownership rate could well be higher than overall society ownership rate. Though I'll admit that is just a wild guess by a uniformed individual on this matter.
There is a huge group of users that put a high value on continuous connectivity.
For the high school kid, a limiting factor may be that schools will forbid them from wearing a watch in class.
And you, and your crush, each have both an iPhone, and an Apple Watch, both charged, both connected to the internet.
> You’re in school. You’re sitting in class.
Do, or will, many high schools actually allow students to use smartwatches while in class?
> You have a crush on another student — you’ve fallen hard. ... You’re afraid to just come right out and ask, verbally — afraid of the crushing weight of rejection.
But I assume you already have this crush's phone number or information in your contacts to send them a heartbeat or drawing?
I couldn't help but laugh at this part:
> Also, though it sounds trivial, I enjoy the perfect 60 FPS smoothness of Apple Watch’s second hand — a smoothness no mechanical watch could ever match.
Isn't a mechanical watch hand ∞ FPS by definition? Real life has got to be at least better than 144hz :)
Nothing can be infinity FPS because it would be limited by the frequency of the light that we use to see the watch hand. In the case of the visual spectrum, it caps out around 668 THz with blue light (red light is lowest at 400 THz). This would make it "only" ~4.7E12 times better than 144 Hz ;-).
With that said, though, I believe that the movement of the actual atoms making up the mechanical hands is still happening in an "infinitely smooth" sense, although the way we measure and observe that movement (via reflections of light or perhaps some other type of electromagnetic radiation) may be limited.
(Edit: only now have I noticed it was already mentioned in another comment)
Old Rolex tick 3 times per second on 6 beats/second balance wheel movements, and modern Rolex do 4 ticks per second on 8 beats per second movement.
> In 2010, Bulova introduced the Precisionist, a new type of quartz watch with ultra-high frequency (262.144 kHz) which is claimed to be accurate to +/- 10 seconds a year and has a smooth sweeping second hand rather than one that jumps each second.
Gruber is the unpaid wing of Apple's PR team. I doubt he cares.
I found this more informative because he used it a bit more like I expected someone to.
You guys are so silly sometimes.
Edit: for the record I love both of them after being initially dubious about the usefulness of such a device.
As one example, they could've picked recipients who they know haven't previously worn a smart watch.
The battery life is also very nice and lasts a full week.
The SDK is also pretty nice, I've made some simple apps with it.
There were mp3 players before the iPod (I had one! it sucked) and smartphones before the iPhone (I had one! it sucked as well).
Early-adopter products exist in a niche where their shortcomings are accepted and embraced because people like their concept. But we can't mistake that for meeting the high standards of the broader consumer marketplace.
Remember when the iPhone was released? There were other smartphones like the Treo and BlackBerry, but none worked the way the iPhone did. That's what defining a market is about - entering where there may be 'competition' but as soon as you release, nothing competes.
The digital crown looks like one such mistake. Swipe-to-scroll is so natural, particularly at this point, that moving back to an indirect method of scrolling seems just wrong. And doing so on a device that's already touch, and already using swipe-to-scroll, feels twice and wrong and unnecessarily confusing.
I understand the intent and the goal, but the inconsistent use of the crown -- if it's so great, why can I still swipe to scroll at all? -- is a tell. It would have been better to simply detect swipe-to-scroll along the right edge of the bezel (if not along the right side of the frame itself) to effect "scrolling without obscuring".
Four-ways-to-click (crown-click vs tap vs force tap vs tap-and-hold) is an eyebrow-raise-er all its own.
Also: displays should be wider. At fifty- to one-hundred-percent wider the display would be far better for notifications and would make the selection of A/B buttons more clear and precise.
The next time you get a notification on your phone, rest your phone on your wrist, so the notification is displayed roughly where a smartwatch would sit. Ask yourself whether that notification would still "work", if it were crammed into an Apple Watch-sized screen. Some certainly do. More can be made to work alright, if font size were reduced. IME, most simply don't work.
There just isn't enough room to get enough meaningful information onto a screen that size, in a comfortable font size, for me to make good decisions about what can be ignored and what should be addressed.
You can mitigate this problem if you can ignore all messages of a given type (e.g. don't even bother getting email alerts on your wrist). But even if you could do this, it would be better if you didn't have to. A screen that enables better decisions would make for a more useful object.
That's not the point of the digital crown. It's to free your "swipe to scroll" gesture which blocks a screen of that size, to a physical input. Apple has been very clear on it's existence, and it's taking a classic component of a watch and propelling it into the modern era.
Might want to rethink that first.
That's a spectacularly marketing-y phrase. It's a scroll wheel. There's nothing wrong with that, but we don't need to dress it up as anything else.
Regardless, I'm glad there is a way to scroll without covering the screen and adding more skin oil to it.
I would like to see these devices progress to more of a band form factor with a wider and curved display to fit the contour of our wrist.
I think a curved display could be pretty challenging. You write "the contour of our wrist," but the contour of your wrist and of mine probably aren't the same, right? So is the display flexible? Is it the same size for everyone? Will someone with a smaller wrist find the display "wrapping around" more than someone with a larger wrist? What interactions will be made better by such a curved display, and what interactions will be made worse by one? And is the tradeoff appropriate?
I can only imagine they are marketing first to the people who want something new, but don't want it to look like new technology.
It's probably also important as a point of differentiation that they keep it looking very different to a phone screen.
That's really the one of the biggest problems I can imagine. Pity that the "show the time at least somehow" wasn't engineered as a special feature, something like "e-ink for somehow time" and the OLED (if that's what they're using) for the full color. I know that nobody made something exactly like that, but I've read that a hybrid e-ink/LCD exists (1). Maybe it wouldn't look so pretty at the moment, but that's why the "magic" is needed, I don't think anybody designed any such hybrid specially for a smart watch. That e-ink or any other magic wouldn't have to be able to display everything, just the time. Even the big unchangeable segments like on old passive LCD watches would be (maybe?) enough.
1) And Apple even has some patents, discovered as early as 2011! http://www.wired.com/2011/04/apple-patent-hybrid-display/ Hmm.
Based on the back and white version, it indeed is not as nice looking, but I like that it comes as a watch that has smart functionality rather the other way around. And it lasts for 7 days.
Can't comment much on the Pebble Time, but the color display actually looks quite nice, it is always on and still last for a week on a single charge.
I rather scroll using the edge of the screen, I hate reading on my phone and interrupting with my finger to scroll, that's why I swipe at the very edge of the screen, almost scrolling with the metal.
When watches get thinner, and they will, the crown will give place to the scrolling edge, longer area, more ergonomic.
And I hope nobody patents it.
They've yet to actually implement it in a device, though Palm used an offscreen gesture area on its Prē later that same year.[2]
1: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=H...
2: http://prethinking.com/home/2009/5/25/how-to-the-palm-pre-ge...
I wonder if that small postage stamp portal to your wife's wrist will be the notable precursor to larger contact features and eventually touch-featured clothing or (ooooer) playsuits?
He has a fairly flowery and gushing writing style with Apple topics, but it's obvious he thinks everything through and looks for a deeper angle.
I wonder if many people will buy a pair of these watches as something to experience with their partner? Touch or smooth/personal gestures are certainly a bit more personal and emotive than blue and green text bubbles.
I always imagined the primary interface for shortcuts would be gestures such as waving away your arm to dismiss a message or flicking the wrist multiple times (if you try it right now, you can easily flick your wrist 3-4 times per second). It would make interaction that much easier and wrist flicking could even become a thing. One flick for health, two for time, etc. depending on the context.
Another thing that could be mildly annoying for a lot of people is that it can only ever be operated by engaging both hands. Phone by contrast can easily be operated with one hand using the thumb.
EDIT: If the watch has enough sensors, I am sure it could detect users not only flicking the wrist via rotation but also bending your hand down/up (which tends to pull/push the tendons on your wrist) though the watch would need to be worn snugly.
You'll also look very odd while you do it, which might have informed Apple not using it.
A person from a decade or two ago might find a lot of things odd such as taking selfies, Facebook checkins, talking on a bluetooth headset, holding a 5.5" phone to your ear when the 90s was all about miniaturisation, the shake-to-shuffle a song, etc.
It's only an oddity because it's not common.
I am sure that things will gravitate toward gestures as this space evolves. It just seems like a very convenient way to interface and offers the path of least resistance for users.
...if you return your watch to a charging station daily.
He goes on:
That said, compared to a traditional watch, daily charging is terrible.
Before entering into the smartphone market, I charged my cellphone less than 100 times per year. Now, I have to charge my smartphone at least once a day. It's a tax on my lifestyle that I don't mind paying.
I hated the daily charging of my smartphone at first. Now, I plan my day and commutes with respect to a battery to ensure I have enough charge for me to interweave the technology in my pocket with my experiencing of the analog world.
I suspect I and others will make the same allowance for a smart watch and the Apple Watch will be a very profitable device for Apple.
I'm still skeptical, the smartphone provided a tremendous advantage, namely that you had the internet with you, always. That made it easy to get over the tradeoffs. I'm still unconvinced that the tradeoffs a smart watch has will be compensated.
One exception to this is people who just never take their watch off. I did this for a couple of years. Having to charge it every night would have been a problem then. I don't know that people do this in large enough numbers to be significant though.
Or if the new OS update or a misbehaving app increases the battery drain.
Or if after a few years the battery life is shorter than the time between unplugging it in the morning and plugging it in at night.
Or if you travel and are unable to charge the battery while you sleep (e.g. on a train).
And so on.
Honestly, I think it's impossible for anyone above ~25 to imagine what it's like to be 16 in school today.
Context and social dynamics have changed too much for anyone that old (and probably anyone at all) to be insightful about the behaviour of groups of teenagers using a yet unreleased product.
Who the hell think that a watch that can't even function a day is an acceptable product? This just blows my mind. And yet, I'm pretty sure they are going to sell millions of them. I wouldn't want one if it was free.
You'll have your answer in a few days. You'll even be able to tell who these people are by looking at their wrists.
He said, the Apple Watch is as much a "watch" as the iPhone is a "phone".
I think the idea is that we are thinking about it all wrong. The "phone" functionality of an iPhone is just an app and is in fact one of the least used apps on the device.
The same line of thinking will probably start to explain the Apple Watch. It's actually a wearable computer with an app that tells the time.
The iPhone is fundamentally a phone. While it does a lot more than just make calls, and is likely purchased for more than the ability to make calls, it is fundamentally a phone first (it's in the name and the hardware), most people buy them in conjunction with a phone carrier or phone plan, and on and on.
The Watch (again, right in the name) is fundamentally a watch. It also will do a litany of other cool things above and beyond a typical watch's feature set, but this doesn't change the fact that it is fundamentally a watch. At best, it strikes me as a secondary display, or peripheral device to the phone.
I think of how Jony Ive talks about the products... what their essence is, how they strive to make them the "inevitable" ideal object or iteration of a given thing. So, to my mind, if we're calling this a wearable computer that simply also tells time, it isn't more than the sum of the parts anymore, it's an amalgam of features, already done in other form factors, that still won't last on full day's charge.
None of which is to say people won't buy it and love it. They will.
When I got my first iPhone (after a Blackberry Curve), one thing I noticed: everything my Curve did, it did better than the iPhone. It was a better phone, it was better for email, it was better for texting. (Ok, it technically had "apps", but they were so bad I never used any).
But my iPhone did a million things that my Blackberry didn't do (via apps).
Was it a worse phone? Absolutely. Did I love it much, much more than I ever loved my Blackberry? Absolutely.
Don't think of this as a "watch."
[slight edit for clarity]
We heard the same arguments about cell phones. Who would want a smartphone that would discharge in less than a day, when you could get a dumb phone that would hang on for days? or a wired phone that didn't have power problems (even when the power went out)? Then people discovered how darned useful that power-sucking capability was, and have adapted to charging daily.
I do wonder when smart watches will include self-charging "eco drive", tapping wrist motion for energy.
Just my personal anecdote. Those who aren't rushed out the door in the morning would probably have a different experience!
Also, one reason I am happy with the Pebble's 4 - 5 day battery life is because I actually like wearing it to bed because of it's vibrating alarm feature which allows me to be woken up without disturbing my partner.
No idea how the Apple one works, but the Moto guys figured it out pretty quickly. Just use the Qi standard, ship a cradle, or let people use their own Qi pads. I imagine Apple's "not invented here" mentality is going to make this a worse experience. It doesn't seem to be using Qi. Its proprietary. That's a mistake.
I agree that the toxic NIH syndrome at Apple harms their users - why not use Qi? Because then they can't charge $30 ($50?) for a replacement / secondary charging cable.
Tellingly I barely use my phone as a phone. I suspect we will see a similar pattern develop with smartwatches, where telling the time will be only a single bullet point far down a much longer list of features.
Pretty much every day. By some counts, a watch doesn't really change that very much, by other counts it pushes my daily-shit-to-charge list over the limit. It's nitpicky when viewed in a vacuum, but not in relation to the overall technology charging burden. It seems like we should be moving away from charger dependencies, not towards it.
It wasn't that long ago that your cell phone could last days or more on a single charge. Now many people have the routine of just charging their phones at night. The world didn't end, things just progressed.
At this point I wouldn't go back to using a watch with less than a few days battery life, it takes out a huge part of the value for me.
This is why I value Gruber's reviews. He's unabashedly pro-Apple, but he's also critical and observant.
I know it's not a direct comparison, but you wouldn't call me insightfully critical if I noted that a car was not a compelling device without wheels.
I understand he's not saying it's not present in the competition, but I'm trying to get what the fundamental differences are
>When my phone vibrates, it feels like it’s telling me, Hey, I need you now. When the Apple Watch taps me, it feels like it’s telling me, Hey, when you get the chance, I’ve got something for you.
I don't know, but if I get tapped on the wrist, that feels a lot more like a "hey I need you now" thing.
I don't think Gruber is particularly biased about Apple - they're just his area of speciality. He thinks very deeply about them, and has done for such a long time that he has an acute sense of them. But I think he calls them out fairly when he thinks they're wrong, whether that's policy decisions, devices, or software.
But that's in a very over-produced review with a credits list of about 15 people!
> You simply hold the connector near the back of the watch, where magnets cause it to snap into place automatically.
I would instantly buy a phone without a traditional connector port for headphone and USB - just metal pads flush with the surface (maybe laid in rubber to be watertight) and kept aligned by magnets.
Seriously, the amount of devices failed due to either bent (e.g. during gaming) or rusted/dust-damaged Micro USB connectors (and don't forget the headphone connectors, where even the tiniest damage can be heard) is ridiculous.
The only real option is to buy one of CATs smartphones or (iirc) one of the Galaxy series with protectors over the connectors - but again, the protectors start to annoy after a while. Too bad Apple holds a patent over MagSafe - and then doesn't even employ it in their phones!
I have one (Nexus 4) and I'm never going back.
A recurring event in the advance of technology. I saw it hit hard when Smith Corona's computer-y typewriters couldn't keep up with gadget-y word processing software, and the typewriter died. Likewise when computer-y photography (lots of image processing introduced into developing photos) lost favor with consumers vs gadget-y digital cameras.
"the established market — watches — is not despised. They not only don’t suck, they are beloved. And the best and most-beloved watches aren’t even electronic. They’re purely mechanical — all gadget, no computer."
Yet...all they do is tell time. Elegantly, yes, or cheaply, if you like...but time and little else. Attempts to add computer-y function failed for a decade, succumbing to horrible interfaces and anemic UIs; the author completely overlooks the computer-y phases which watches have gone thru (and failed miserably). That a $5 POS watch tells time more accurately, and with less maintenance, than my elegant $500 Movado or the improbable $500,000 watches seen on http://uncrate.com et al, was setting off warnings that the market was ripe for...something.
Only mechanical watches require maintenance and are less accurate.
I think he's the only one I've ever heard of who gets paid so much to write blog articles.
I think he's an excellent writer but let's be honest, he doesn't really "review" Apple products any more than their marketing department. Apple could re-introduce the Newton and Gruber would be writing about it's "elegant simplicity" and "thoughtful processing".
I'm sure the Apple Watch is neat tech, but from what I've gathered, it's suffering from "version one syndrome" a little more than most of their product launches. That said, it will probably be a wild success anyway if only because it's an even more conspicuous consumption signal than the iPhone...
While they have not re-introduced the Newton, his latest podcast mentions the Newton and very similar in tone.
Hmmm... that's a reasonably fair assessment of the Newton. Did you ever use one? Perhaps you could have picked a better sarcastic description.
At least until people start budgeting for their annual watch upgrade like they do for their phones, at which point it'll be commodity just like a smartphone.
There is no spec for Markdown other than his buggy Perl implementation. He also didn't exactly appreciate the fact that other people tried to standardize "his" language.
I'm not even sure Markdown in general can rightfully be called an invention (in the same sense as JSON is not considered such by its "inventor"). It's just one of several plain-text formatting conventions that happened to become popular (though, again, not really his exact implementation).
In fact, because of the limited scope Gruber's original Markdown addressed and the redundancies he implemented (such as the different "bullets" for unordered lists) are biting implementers now that the format is used for other things than originally envisioned (by making extensions difficulty or unintuitive).
In this day and age, with a phone on you, and everyone else, you can always get the time. A watch is a relic of the past. It's Tradition. It's ornamental. It's redundant.
With tens of thousands of brilliant people working day and night to build amazing third party apps, the smart watches can actually do things. A regular watch can't do shit. It's not a tool, it's not a workhorse. People that are satisfied with their traditional watches are kidding themselves, as much if not more than the people who will happily buy an Apple watch and tout it's features.
I am glad CDs are still around to stop this MP3 slime from washing away all the uncompressed audio!
But with regard to the content within the audio file, uncompressed is obviously superior to compressed. It is particularly apparent on decent speakers, not earbuds.
I never lend my CDs to those people who leave them in the wrong cases, bust the cases, leave CDs floating around drawers with pens, paperclips and scissors, attempt to get sleeve notes out by incessant gnawing at the edges etc. etc.
Cassettes were pretty robust though. They survive handling by the older generation far better than CDs ever did (or will)
CDs did suck for the mainstream consumer. Consumers are still opting for streaming music over high-quality FLAC tracks saved to their phone/PC/etc.
I think you meant to say: He was wrong as far as my use case was concerned.
In my defense, he said "CDs sucked" when he should have said "CDs suck in my use case" :-)
That's really interesting. How do you know this?
I stopped wearing watches but have thought about a Fitbit watch and why not have that be an Apple watch maybe.
However, I keep my phone in my pocket. Wearing a watch that millions of other people may have feels a bit weird to me. It's like taking that membership of the iPhone "club" and turning it into an external badge signifying membership.
Watches become part of your visual identity, and I'm not sure that I want something that ubiquitous as part of mine.
This isn't exactly new. Teenagers were sticking white shoelaces in their ears before the iPhone was even a thing.
'Phone' and 'watch' are just entry points. The form factor, UI, and controls will dictate what it actually is. I'm fairly certain, NOT a smaller iPhone.
People wont buy Apple Watch because it's better watch just as they didn't buy the iPhone because it was a better phone.
That is the point I was trying to make.
- Using the watch as a watch is broken. He spends almost 1,000 words across 8 paragraphs talking about how broken it is. It may be accurate, but it's overly complex, fussy and unreliable to get it to show you the time.
- The water resistance is unacceptable for a device intended as a fitness companion, some of this is due to compromises to the overly complex design.
- As a watch targeting people who wear watches, it's probably a failure. He repeats some variation of this a number of times.
- the build quality feels high, not as high as the early press hands-on
- the rubber watch band is easy to size and the material feels good, but swapping out bands is "fiddly"
- the watch is designed to hide the bezel, but in good lighting you can see it, again reminding that it isn't a great watch
- the shape (square) is not a good watch shape
- the gender-neutral design comes off as modern
- battery life will get you through a day of moderate usage
- the induction charger is easy to use and works as advertised
- one of the main marketing points, that it's a health and fitness device, is not useful to him in any way and he has no interest in it
- some of the fitness features intrude into non-fitness uses in a bad way
- other fitness features seem pretty accurate and potentially useful
- the digital crown works basically like a mouse scroll-wheel
- touch, the crown and haptic feedback work as well as you'd expect and they work together well
- haptic feedback works so well that you can turn off sound for notifications
- he had a 50% failure rate on the haptic feedback on his test watches requiring him to get a replacement watch during his week-long review
- the digital touch features were untested, though he provides a cute story of two rich teenagers flirting in class he provides no actual coverage of the feature
tl;dr none of the smart watch features were particularly interesting and it's not a great watch to use for time keeping
It's not really surprising, it's the same problem all the smart watches have, it's not really clear that the extra expense and fuss of a smartwatch, on a severely compromised display and interaction platform is worth it. The target audience he holds out hope for, non-watch wearers who wouldn't know any better, are probably not going to start wearing an expensive fussy fiddly device that provides no unqualified benefit that they have to charge every day. I'm not a watch wearer and the only smartwatch I'd even consider is something like the Pebble and that's only because it's focused on
a) being a watch
b) notifications
c) not making me charge it all the time
Except that I'm literally surrounded by clocks nearly all the time, so I don't need to tell time. My phone already vibrates and makes sound, and it's usually letting me know something that I'm already being notified about on my monitor. The one use-case I can really see for a smartwatch is to help with navigation, especially while walking since walking around with your phone out getting turn-by-turn isn't all that great. But it's something I need literally once or twice per year.
But his take on sending a heartbeat as a flirting 16 year old was awful. That was basically the same pitch for Facebook pokes, which initially were cute but quickly turned obnoxious. Sending taps sounds like it could be useful. Sending your heartbeat seems like a gimmick. Ultimately his last point is right, we won't know unless/until Apple Watch becomes a thing.
How can the the smoothness of an actual, physical piece of metal smoothly rotating in a circle at a constant angular velocity be "out-smoothed" by a 60 FPS simulacrum?
Not sure what Gruber is hinting at here honestly.
I disagree. Sundials are rubbish for telling time and they look different throughout the year. A (decent) watch does not attempt to replicate the inadequacy of a sundial; it just tells you the time.
No way am I wearing a $500+ wrist computer to tell the time.
What happens the first time that kid who was too afraid of rejection to talk to a girl he liked messes up in his "grown-up" job? Is he going to send his boss an apology over his watch? Or is going to break down in tears because he's never had to deal with an emotionally stressful situation "IRL"?
I forget how, but I eventually found a way to add her on MSN messenger, where we spent many evenings and weekends chatting. This allowed me to get over my initial shyness; we eventually dated for about a year. She was my first girlfriend, and I gained a lot in self confidence and social skills through this experience.
I don't lock myself in the bathroom when I mess up at my job these days.
I think your message is either a silly straw man, or that you really don't get teenagers.
On the other hand, there have always been non-verbal ways to communicate. Note-passing was common when I was in school. Presumably the boy with the crush on the girl who is sending the texts on his watch is trying to create an "IRL" relationship with her.
Why does everyone keep saying that every single new technology is going to kill face to face communication? Have you ever had a face to face conversation? That's not going anywhere. SMS didn't do it, MSN/AOL didn't do it, iMessage didn't do it, Facebook didn't do it. Hell we're even going in the opposite direction: Tinder exists solely to facilitate face to face (more or less) interactions.
Communication technologies do not make people unable to have normal conversations. It's just not happening. AIM was released 18 years ago, Usenet existed long before that, and written notes were quite common for hundreds of years.
Vaccines don't give you autism and neither does written communication.
On the other hand, supplier writes in an email that he's shipping the microcontroller PCBs tomorrow, no kidding this time, you have a written record you can call him out on maybe the day after tomorrow, and unlike verbal phone calls no one freaks out if you stockpile emails, in fact its pretty much accepted. And this is exactly why someone lying to you or stretching the truth or making stuff up will refuse to do business by email and insist on using the phone.
So your employees are in cognitive dissonance... you're trying to set them up to fail and they're either going to be annoyed or offended or even worse, apathetic about it.
Teenagers already do everything they can to moderate this. And plenty of people actually fail to learn to deal with rejection. Providing another mechanism that makes the learning curve smoother is more likely to help than to exacerbate the problem.
It feels like humans keep building more and more barriers to ACTUAL communication.
"Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born." - Alan Kay
I'm not sure what you mean here. Email, text messages, watch taps, Facebook likes, Twitter favourites, etc. are all forms of communication. Sure, they aren't face-to-face verbal communication. But that doesn't meant that when I'm having a Skype chat with my deaf grandfather in New Zealand 20 000 km away I'm not communicating. You seem to be making the mistake of privileging your preferred method of commuication over all others, and deciding that none of the other ways of iteracting are ACTUAL communication. This just isn't true.
However, I'm sure in the future we'll have people complaining that direct mind-communication via neural stimulation implant isn't ACTUAL communication, not like Apple Watch taps or instant messaging ;)
Yes the quality of communication is far lower, however if he wouldn't have otherwise approached her in person, then isn't this better than not having it?
EDIT 1: Gruber's articles have lot of useful information,analysis and insights but I feel, current article is too lengthy.
EDIT 2: Anandtech's reviews are also detailed but they are easy to select to go to required part of the review. Hope interface of DF may change in future.
I don't think a review that just gives an opinion without any context is useful. How can I judge the relevance to my life if I know nothing about the reviewer's? With something as personal and intimate as a watch, the details matter and the context matters.
Oh and don't look up John Siracusa ;)