
Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations - rkudeshi
http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/apple_watch
======
Kylekramer
_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._

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.

~~~
rtpg
> don't see how the overall point doesn't equally apply to the Apple Watch.

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.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Ars Technica recently did a comparison of (what we know of) the Watch
software, and the Android Wear software:

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/smartwatch-wars-the-
app...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/smartwatch-wars-the-apple-watch-
versus-android-wear-in-screenshots/#image-1)

Android Wear looks very primitive in comparison.

~~~
rtpg
Kind of interesting to see Apple on the more information-dense side of the UI,
I actually think that most of the Android Wear shots look cleaner (though
maybe there's too little information), but I digress.

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.

------
tlipeep
Gruber bends over backwards and twists himself in knots trying to explain why
he isn't disappointed after considering the expectations he set before the
event. I don't see anything different in the AppleWatch functionality compared
to what he criticized Android Wear for earlier this year

~~~
jkubicek
I thought he was pretty clear when he said

> 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.

~~~
tlipeep
That's wishful thinking from Gruber so he can withhold judgement/criticism.
Apple clearly demonstrated the fundamental functionality of their Watch and
the hardware does determine the software — they have a hardware button
dedicated to one particular feature ffs. Any additional functionality via
WatchKit will at best be supplemental. It'd take a while for iOS developers to
get to grips with the new paradigm.

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...](http://www.sonymobile.com/global-
en/products/smartwear/smartwatch-3-swr50/) (2)
[http://www.asus.com/Phones/ASUS_ZenWatch_WI500Q/](http://www.asus.com/Phones/ASUS_ZenWatch_WI500Q/)

~~~
DannyBee
" Android Wear devices are almost useless other than for telling time when out
of Bluetooth range from your phone"

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.

~~~
jkubicek
> 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.

~~~
DannyBee
" 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? :)

------
tlb
The combination of solid gold and the obsolescence period of wearable
electronics is uncharted territory.

~~~
51Cards
Agreed, I don't see any decent percentage of even the high end market
investing that much in a watch that will be largely obsolete in 2 years tops.
You buy a Rolex to have it for years and pass it down. A $5000 watch that no
one will want in 2 years is not a wise investment.

~~~
freshyill
Even if the electronics are obsolete, you've still got a chunk of gold hanging
off your wrist. Gruber mentions this, and raises the possibility of trade-ins.
They do it with phones, and it makes sense for watches made of solid gold.

~~~
XorNot
The only way you could make this work would be to make the electronics
swappable out of the chassis, to give the object some sort of historical
permanence for the owner.

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.

~~~
freshyill
Well if it comes down to the bands, you just _know_ there will be knockoffs.
As for the enclosure itself, Apple seems really proud of their manufacturing
process for these things. If the guts of the thing are swappable (even if only
by Apple), it might be tough for anybody else to come up with a comparable
knockoff.

------
dilap
Here's a fun sport for Apple watchers, aficionados and detractors alike: has
Apple jumped the shark yet in the post-Steve era?

(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. :)

~~~
IBM
Much like the iPhone announcement then.

~~~
blinkingled
Ugh, I am not sure if you are being sarcastic but it in fact is exactly unlike
the original iPhone announcement. The OG iPhone solved a long standing problem
that no one else had managed to solve elegantly. It did few things and it did
them better than anything else before it.

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.

------
mladenkovacevic
I have no interest in the exclusive "I make more money than you" objects so
let's talk about that digital crown instead.

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.

~~~
bane
> put a touch-sensitive pad along the whole side of the Apple Watch

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.

~~~
stefanu
What about a cold weather? You can still turn the crown in gloves when it is
freezing.

~~~
bane
My Note 3 works just fine with gloves on (there's a screen sensitivity mode
intended just for that use-case)...and I'm not talking about using it with the
pen.

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.

------
swang
"The iPad/iPhone is soooo egalitarian!"

"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.

~~~
bane
Gruber deserves a prize of some sort of most concentrated example of cognitive
dissonance ever put into writing for this post. It's really one of the worst
of the worst I've seen.

~~~
jnevill
I am no Gruber fan and I am no Apple fanboi, but I think his points are dead
on in this post. He is hedging his bets, repeatedly, but given that we know so
little about the Apple Watch, that seems reasonable. At any rate, the main
point of the article being that the iWatch is not a play into the Wearables
market, but rather a move into the much more lucrative luxury watch market.
Given how bloated that market is and the value that the Apple name bestows on
its products, I think that it's a reasonable assumption. That being said, his
"Apple is not a technology company" line is weak. That's like trying to argue
that WalMart isn't in the retail business, but rather distribution. You see...
they do distribution better than any other company in their space (which is
retail) therefore they are in distribution.

~~~
bane
I respectfully disagree with your generous assessment of this post.

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?

------
marze
No doubt the most insightful essay on Apple's wrist computer/watch so far, and
HN allows it to be flagged to the bottom of the 2nd page.

HN is broken.

------
robszumski
I think Gruber's argument that this is Apple's first move into the mainstream,
non-tech product scene is correct. The Mark Newson news was a huge indicator.
They need two world-class designers to design electronics when Jony has
already been killing it for years?

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.

------
jedanbik
I can't wait to see the watches Casio and Nixon release next year.

------
cyphunk
What a slippery balance. Apple typically makes products people replace once
every 2 or 3 years. A watch has never fit this time frame of refresh. In-fact
the whole attraction to a time piece is that it just works forever and is
timeless. I wonder if anyone in the future will be wearing their grandparents
iWatch. I highly doubt it. so the large price points, are going to likely
fail.

------
pbreit
If true, I'll be a bit disappointed. I would prefer that Apple continue having
good success in the "accessible luxury" category and, if anything, go a even
more accessible. It's mission should be to get it's terrific products in more
hands. Not the opposite. It's outsized margins are no longer so important.

------
bigtex
What I found interesting was no mention of "Bozo" Kevin Lynch being in charge
of the Apple Watch development. Is he still a bad hire after seeing the debut
of the Watch?

[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/19/lynch-
bozo](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/19/lynch-bozo)

------
blainsmith
And yet it is still square and ugly because of it.

~~~
adventured
I actually like some square and rectangle watch designs, but in this case I
dislike the particular overall shape of the Apple Watch.

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.

~~~
glenra
The best thing about Apple selling this watch now is that it puts them on
track to make one half as thick a few years later that really _will_ be
aesthetically competitive. Within the decade, smartwatches will undoubtedly be
_thinner_ than mechanical watches, but they've gotta start somewhere.

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.

------
brentis
Does it have a speaker? Let's make this the must have speaker like the iPad
camera. (Never use either)

~~~
jgruber
Yes it has a speaker.

------
drcode
IT'S A F@#&ING KNOB! Just because you're Apple doesn't give you the right to
call it a "digital crown".

~~~
YuriNiyazov
As your comment rightfully deserves due to language and general non-
contribution, you've been down-voted into oblivion. Nevertheless, educating
the uninformed is a public service, so here goes: amongst professionals and
connoisseurs in the watch industry, the "knob" is called a "crown", so they
have every right to call it that; they didn't just make it up.

~~~
drcode
To defend my position: They're not calling it a "crown", they're calling it a
"digital crown", and digital knobs are common place objects that already have
a name.

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."

~~~
YuriNiyazov
FWIW, I am surprised to discover that I am having this argument with someone
whose work I've read and admire.

~~~
drcode
Haha it does amaze me that a single sentence criticism on the nomenclature of
a detail on an Apple accessory has gotten any attention at all... I guess I
shouldn't be surprised in the case of Apple.

