Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations(daringfireball.net) |
Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations(daringfireball.net) |
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.
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.
(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. :)
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm still a bit confused on the ease of use of Apple's UI ,namely the Zoom UI. I'll have to try it to understand.
The fact that this comparison even exists shows that Apple's attempt is not "revolutionary" in any sense of the word: Every Wear screen was duplicated on the Watch. The functionality is the same.
But the main issues with smartwatches are still battery life, size, and general uselessness without the phone. These points were not tackled. So Apple Watch could be a local maximum for this style of watch, but it's not the second coming unfortunately.
In the same sense that 2010 era iPhone was primitive? It's a different design strategy on part of Google - given the limited screen real estate they want to keep the information density minimal. That's actually a Apple-esq stance whereas Apple is taking Android-esq stance of adding ton of involved stuff which frankly doesn't sound too right for a smart watch.
Touchscreen tech has advanced quite a bit since the old days.
The demos of the watch show a mixed use-case. The crown for some things, the screen to complete the task. So unless they're supporting similar screen tech as what Samsung is featuring now, the glove use-case doesn't matter.
(eg: http://gizmodo.com/243222/iphone-generated-400-million-in-fr... )
Although one might argue that Apple TODAY is so much of a market leader they don't need the surprise factor as much as they did in times past. Apple used to be a clear underdog that punched way above its weight class by using gimmicks and clever marketing for their signal to escape an over-crowded playing field. Now that Apple is the big dog, they might not need that so much.
Tim's clearly no Steve, but maybe he doesn't need to be.
I think if he had basically said something more like "IMHO, Apple Watch looks better to me than any of the Android devices out there" I'd be fine. But all this weird egalitarian bullshit, and backpedaling on his previous claims of disappointment was impossibly tiring.
But I do agree that If there's a real point to made in his conjecture of where Apple is going with their prices, it's not only pushing upscale, but in a more Apple-y way, pulling upscale down. Meaning, bringing luxury items and buying habits into the mass market.
Loads of people can afford a $500 watch, they just don't buy them because
a) They don't need watches anymore
b) If they do, there's a $20 watch at Ross/Marshalls that looks good enough and will get the job done.
I think Apple is going to build a market for smart watches in a way that Google and Android can't because of their superior marketing and built in buying market. In 5 years, the thought of not owning a smartwatch will seem odd, but now the entire market will be in the $500 on up space instead of fighting it out at the lower price points.
After all, Apple has built entire markets on things that we got along just fine without, mp3 players, smartphones, tablets, why not watches?
Based on what I saw, Apple Watch seems to me, a lot more than just a notification device that Android Wear is.
Additionally, there's nothing in Android Wear that I've seen that focuses on the watch being, well, a watch. All the straps sucked, we don't know if the time is precise (this is the first thing Apple said about the Apple Watch), and most importantly, none of the watches out focus on user experience at all. They just wanted to be first out.
Existing.
The crown on watches and the crown on Apple Watch look the same. It's a crown with digital functionality. Thus, the digital crown.
iPods were fun to use, iPhones had enough UI differentiation with things like blackberries to be "different".
the Apple Watch doesn't seem to have that. As a cousin post commented, Android Wear's UI almost seems more Apple than Apple's own UI.
Maybe the Zoom-UI and the crown are it. maybe this will tackle people's issues with usability. But there seems to be little differentiation. I won't argue about it being the best on the market (it might be), I just doubt this changes the marketplace as much as we might want.
This might end up being like the iPad. A lot of people ended up buying iPads, but unlike the iPhone, we didn't get a very large new tablet market from it.
> iPods were fun to use, iPhones had enough UI]
> differentiation with things like blackberries to be
> "different".
> the Apple Watch doesn't seem to have that
The ZoomUI looked terrible to me. After years of huge iPads with only 4 icons across on it, because that supposedly makes them easier to use, the tiny tight grocery fruit pack of the icons looks like a usability nightmare. Fiddling with the knob (it's not a crown, crowns have specific functions in watches) also looks like a terrible time with every interaction. There's so many other ways they could have gone with it, and it's like they chose the wrong way just to be different.
The thing that's really interesting to me is that there's a million different ways Apple could have gone with their watch, and instead they just arrived at an Apple version of what's been going on in Android land for a while now.
and also, isn't it a little bit impractical in reality as well? gold being a soft metal will wear out if you wear it? then there could be less gold than what it says on the cert?
Of course, if you could do that though, then you're not really in the smartwatch business, since it would mean anyone could make compatible wrist-bands.
Conversely - that might not be a bad business to be in.
There is really no merit to this article at all - it comes across as a series of bending, twisting, confusing hogwash that tries to get you to somehow believe that Apple has gotten everything right and if they haven't gotten something right they surely have secret plans to get it all right. (There is one consistent thing with Gruber - he conveniently ignores or otherwise pooh poohs facts that get in his way. Apple didn't state battery life numbers and Moto 360 battery life is widely varied in the reporting - ranging from half a day to 40 hours - but that doesn't stop him from claiming Apple Watch will run throughout the day irrespective of usage and Moto 360 will top out at half a day! Given his emphasis that Apple is doing more with the watch than competitors and given the physical limitations the claim that it will last a day no matter how you use it - is dodgy a best.)
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/09/android-wear-moving-f...
Yeah. This is the part that gets me.
Gruber is willing to withhold judgement and assume apple has not shown off everything.
But android wear makers, you see, they've shown everything in their presentation. No android wear manufacturers are planning anything different than what was shown at I/O.
Most tech companies over-promise and under-deliver. Apple has a tendency to do the opposite (if you ignore they hyperbole). I'm sure most Android Wear manufacturers are planning beyond what they've actually announced, but I would be amazed if we see anything new before the new year.
So around the same timeframe that apple will actually release something? :)
That's the critical point.Both ecosystems are starting from a similar point. AndroidWear is iterating faster. And since watch apps are probably much simpler to build than phone apps, we'll probably won't see a big difference between the app ecosystems. And there's probably little that can be patent protected.
Probably the only difference would be that your phone will determine which watch you'll use. But the watches will pretty much be the same.
I'm sure there are plans for the next version to be better in lots of little ways, but i think it's perfectly rational to assume that what we are currently seeing from android wear is indicative of the general vision for android wear. If anybody had a truly game-changing idea, we would have seen some hint of it in their products by now. It's probably unreasonable to pin your hopes on apple have some revolutionary breakthrough with their smartwatch (they've been pushed to market by public pressure just as much as LG and Samsung have), but it's even more unreasonable to think that samsung has some amazing secret plan.
Um, the Android Wear manufacturers may not have any secret plans of their own, but... The Android Wear OS developer is practically jumping up and down in the corner saying "I have secret plans! I have secret plans!" See, for instance:
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-says-android-wear-about-to-g...
This shouldn't be surprising. The existing Android Wear hardware is unusually powerful (a 2010 smartphone or better?) for what it is currently doing. Given the importance of battery life, that's a strange choice - unless more is coming.
I'd also note that the GP commenter works for the previously mentioned OS developer, and the comment seems entirely consistent with someone who knows more is coming, but can't do much beyond hinting at that.
Just to note: While it's true I work for Google, I don't speak for them on hacker news unless i explicitly say otherwise. Here, i'm just some guy. If everyone starts treating everyone otherwise, a lot of commenters would not be able to comment.
I strongly disagree. I think they are both exactly as reasonable as each other :)
(and i also believe both are unreasonable. I'm not actually arguing they have any secret plans, i'm more arguing that the likelihood of them having secret plans, and apple having secret plans, is equal)
Everybody else's watches are shipping. If they've got secret plans, they should probably get around to revealing them.