This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.
> This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.
Which is itself a reference to real-life results involving motion detection/computer vision/image processing (this was a particularly bad problem in the earlier days of the field, but still persists today to some extent).
Oh boy, in a world that is focused on productivity (aka deliver asap something even if it is partially broken) and not too much of quality, this can happen very easily.
ASAP? The watch had been in progress for many years and was even announced and demonstrated publicly 7 months before it started to ship. It was definitely not rushed out the door.
Sorry I was focused more on the making process than the actual product. This happens with software more often than with hardware. I started to work as a hardware test engineer back in the day, and I know how hard is to deliver something without problems like this.
The proclivity of hipster-douches with full sleeve tattoos in tech makes this even more shocking.
All jokes aside (I can live with the downvotes), I could see this easily falling through the cracks for a company new to wearables. What about hairy arms? What about skinny arms?
I have a feeling that the Apple of old would have caught this instantly, when it was largely the boutique brand for creatives. Today's Apple? Not surprising at all.
I'm not sure that's the case. This feature (which is entirely optional and can be disabled) is looking for skin. Metallic ink tattoos don't look like skin, and only a small percentage of people have such tattoos on their wrist. However, a massive percentage of people have hands that are shaped like hands, and yet the Apple of old made a mouse that doesn't seem to be designed for anything even remotely resembling a human hand.
They've literally always been form-over-function. They may have caught this issue and said "those people can disable this completely optional feature".
Their “puck” mouse design was intended to ameliorate RSI by encouraging a grip with only the fingertips. Unfortunately, nobody got the memo about the “proper” way to hold the mouse, and tried to grip the mouse the same way they were used to... which of course sucked. (And it was also difficult to guess the orientation of a round object.)
It’s definitely a bad design especially given the context of existing mice, and a case of poor communication, or insufficient user testing, or even hubris maybe. Your dismissive summary of their intentions is not at all fair, however.
I make no judgment of their intentions. Merely stating that even back in the day, Apple was known for making some questionable design decisions. Good intentions or bad intentions, it was not a highly functional mouse.
The Apple of old (and by that I mean Steve Jobs) decided to tell people they were holding their phones wrong rather than launch a device which worked no matter how you held it.
The iPhone 4 did work no matter how you held it, as evidenced by its long tenure (sold for 4+ years), and high sales and customer satisfaction ratings.
If you carefully held it in a very particular way, you could make it lose a couple bars. Jobs said: there's no reception problem, just don't hold it that way. It turned out he was right.
No I mean a 80s and 90s hacker culture where weirdos were valued and guys with tats would be testing things. Apple today just seems way too button down, for good or bad.
Not only do you need a tat, but you need a tat covering the skin under the watch that's done with metallic ink. What fraction of people with tats have such a tattoo? I have a lot of friends with tats, but none that meet those criteria.
No it means you can't use wrist detection to auto-lock because the metallic pigments in some tattoos interferes with passive skin sensing. There's an option to turn it off.
How many people have metallic pigment tattoos on their wrists?
It's pretty exciting to anticipate how developers might do innovative things with the Watch...but until then, I'm pretty bearish of the device as something of real utility. It's not just the particulars of Apple's execution and implementation, but just that the physical form factor of a watch inherently limits it...and the coolest things we've seen watches do in fiction, such as Dick Tracy's wrist-walkie-talkie, are done just fine via smartphone. And glancing at your watch all the time is not much less of a social interruption than pulling out your phone.
What annoys me in reading consumer-facing reviews of the product is how much of the perceived potential is through things that should be done by software...for example, the ability to filter notifications from the phone...there's no reason why a second (or third, fourth, etc) layer of notification triage can't be implemented as a phone setting...in fact, I think iPhone's Do Not Disturb mode is fantastically better done than its Android equivalent. But to think that the Watch, or any ancillary device, is needed to inherently solve the problem of filtering information overload...it's as if rather than developing better spam filters, email providers just encouraged consumers to make multiple email accounts to handle the deluge.
So hopefully Apple increasingly opens up the API for developers, to do things far beyond what Apple has anticipated in its marketing plan.
Your comment on social interruption really resonates with me. As somebody who has been wearing a Pebble for a couple of years, the main utility I have discovered is in minimizing the number of times I take out my phone. But it's not really about reducing the onerous physical labor of putting my hand in my pocket. It's about being more present.
Right now I get wrist notifications maybe 5-10 times a day. E.g, my next meeting, a text message. I can sneak a glance in during a meeting and then either carry on or smoothly bring things to an end so I can deal with something urgent. That's about what I want; anything else can wait until I'm free, at which point I'll pull out my phone and skim the non-urgent stuff that has stacked up.
Despite having poked at the SDK, and despite having built a personal-use Android app in the meantime, I haven't really had the urge to build anything for the Pebble. I don't want more on my wrist.
Apple Watch v1 is a first step. I am pretty sure v2 will be huge. (akin to iPhone2 aka 3G, and iPad2)
For certain occasions like doing outdoor sport, an inbuilt low-power 2G phone modem would be awesome, so that one can use it without a smartphone in the pocket. One can also imagine an improved Siri app. Both combined with a improved battery that lasts 2+ days would be an instant buy.
Do you have an Apple Watch? Is this review based on your experiences using it for some time?
I think in practice some of your guesses about notifications and interruption are proving wrong for most people because of the phenomenology of the Taptic engine.
I haven't used it but I think there are some biases going in that would affect how I feel of it regardless. For example, for my iPhone, I limit notifications to calls and SMS. Except for the occasional marketer, phone calls are normally "important", and I'm not sure, Watch or not, how I could effectively whitelist calls in such a way that would not block the myriad of important calls from first-time numbers.
In terms of text messages: I guess it's hard to think of a situation in which the ability to glance at my wrist instead of investigating the vibration in my pocket is a huge advantage. Text messages can sometimes be important, but if I'm expecting a text message in a given time period, I'll put myself in a situation in which having the phone out is not a problem (i.e. not be in a movie theater).
I guess one situation in which having a watch is better than a phone: when you're moving around in such a way that you don't notice/hear the phone going off. I've missed calls that way. But I guess I'm not in that situation enough to justify a new device...I mean, that's helpful, but we're not yet that far removed from a time when we had to arrange our rendezvous and appointments with no expectation that we could contact people in mid-transit (i.e. before cell phones).
I don't consider myself a huge Luddite. I waited in line for the first iPad, but with that, I felt the value proposition was obvious: this is a computer you can walk around with in one hand and read/navigate/etc....even just reading from a tablet is obviously appealing, in the way that reading a physical book/magazine/newspaper is more appealing (despite limitations) than from a laptop or desktop. The value of iPods and iPhones was never hard to figure out either, even if you doubted whether or not they were worth the price over their competitors.
I wish more folks took your perspective on notifications. We need to reduce distractions, not make distractions less distracting. Of course for many companies like Facebook this leads to slower growth and less engagement, so I don't see it happening anytime soon—that is unless we all take your perspective with respect to technology and change the default settings to notify us of only important/time sensitive information.
Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not block the functionality.
>Can I access the users Heart Rate? No.
This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be a priority. This works on AW right now.
This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want AW and Pebble to continue being the only smartwatch game in town. This seems to fall into the Apple conventional wisdom of, "New product? Wait until Rev A." AW isn't perfect but its kind of what I expect for a smartwatch platform. Its lightweight and somewhat of an accessory to your smartphone (not another app/ad platform), but still feature rich and developer friendly.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; I couldn't agree more. Not being able to build a watch face is incredible. Android Wear and Pebble both had this ability really quickly (Android Wear was at launch, I believe Pebble added it shortly thereafter) and much of this was done years ago.
But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.
Android Wear didn't have it at launch either. It took six months or so to release an official watch face SDK. People did immediately hack watch faces together by making an app whose UI was a custom drawn watch face animation, but that was a little clunky in that you had to have an app on your phone for the face, and some of them were pretty rough on the watch battery.
But yes, overall I agree. It's a bit surprising just how locked down it is. Especially when it's hard to see the gain from it. The Apple Watch seems to have a shorter (or at least not longer) battery life than most of the Android Wear models that allow taxing the watch battery to do quite a lot more stuff.
Apple is almost always conservative with the feature set of software shipping on first-generation devices. Maybe they learned an important lesson in the 1990s about the dangers of not building on a solid foundation.
In time, Apple may change this and allow them. But with exposed functionality, start with a minimum viable product. What you add you can't easily remove.
My Moto 360 lasts all day and has all this functionality and neither Google or Motorola has been sued by anyone. Its weird how people will excuse Apple with made-up assumptions instead of the time-tested "rushed product" conclusion that is more often true than not in the tech industry.
It larger as it in has a larger screen which draws much more power. Not sure where you are going with this. There are AW watches that are smaller and last all day also, and then some. LG G watch, Zenwatch, Gear, etc.
A bigger battery generally more than offsets a bigger display (see the iPhone 6+ getting better battery life than the iPhone 6 even with a larger display). All of the watches you list are still larger than the largest Apple Watch.
[Caveat: I am not suggesting that there won't be a market for software that runs on the current generation of wrist located wearable computers. I just think as an interactive interface, the form factor will wind up as an evolutionary dead end for reasons similar to those by which touchpads have largely displaced trackballs.]
I referee soccer. This means that some number of times a year, I regularly get paid for an activity where a wristwatch is my only piece of tech and I rely on it while breathing heavily and making spectators, team officials and players express their unhappiness. I have half a dozen wristwatches in my referee bag. When I run center, I accumulate wristwatch-wearing-hours two at a time because I have to get things right. No amount of software sophistication can overcome the ergonomics of wristwatches.
The wristwatch form factor has poor ergonomics for an interactive device because it always requires two hands. Placing a small machine on the wrist puts it out of harms way by placing it behind our primary method for interacting with the physical world. Wristwatches work ergonomically because they require limited manipulation and are primarily displays.
To the degree wristwatches offer interaction, quick interactions are done by feel. Timex's Ironman series performs its intended function well because the lap button is easy to locate without looking. However, basic wristwatch ergonomics mean that hitting that button is two handed and slows down a runner. Even worse, bringing an arm across the chest briefly inhibits full expansion of the chest and thus lung capacity. Only because the information the watch provides is so valuable is such a biomechanical cost a viable engineering tradeoff.
Running a wristwatch off a phone turns two-handed one-device operations into potential two-or-three-handed two-device operations. Sure, the obvious solution is a voice interface...but when everything runs on the phone, then a wristwatch is just a bluetooth microphone with a small display...with wrist mounted microphone versus headset mounted.
On the other hand, The wrist is a well protected place for mounting sensitive equipment on the body and the wristwatch is a reasonable form factor for sensors, yet in the long run serious sensor platforms want to be open as do the platforms for analysis of sensor data. Proprietary interfaces are not likely to be the direct road to the quantified self.
Interesting that apple seems to be following the same model as they did with their mobile devices in terms of developer functionality. Their view seems to be to start off really tightly locked down and then gradually open up additional features to developers. It makes sense in that its much easier to open stuff up after its been locked down then to lock down stuff once people have built stuff on it.
I think this goes well with their other line of thought:"It is so difficult to remove a feature once we've added it, so it is best to be careful adding new features and start with a few great features first." That's how they have developed iOS.
I recall a high-ranking individual (Jobs, Cook, or Forstall) from Apple saying this a couple of years ago, but I don't remember when, where, or context. Sorry.
"Your Apple Watch app acts like a separate process running on a separate device, however behind the scenes the OS runs a ‘skeleton’ like version of your host application on the user's iPhone and the Apple Watch extension in tandem, both on the iPhone"
I totally missed this limitation until now. So the iWatch works only if you have an iPhone and the phone is in communication range with the watch?
What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?
> What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?
I believe the watch face continues to work but anything that requires interacting with non-native apps (most of apple's apps are native on the watch fyi) or network connectivity just won't work. On the plus side it will work with bluetooth and wifi so you can at least go some [minor] distance away from your watch. But this same limitation exists in Android Wear and Pebble as well (though Pebble has native applications so less of an issue there).
If the phone is not present or turned off the watch will stay connected to wifi networks that you've joined in your phone previously. This is only useful/available for native apps, but it means that you can still use Siri over wifi without a phone.
It's a less restrictive version of the idea on Android Wear as well. Most apps do currently require your phone to be present, but the watch itself is generally running a bit more autonomously than the Apple Watch is. The phone can actually just send data to the watch, and the watch deals with it. It's not just blitting a computed image onto the screen (which is an exaggeration of the Apple model, but it's closer to that with Apple than Android currently). You have access to the sensors on Wear. You can create custom layouts.
I'm not sure why, but I get the feeling that these watches aren't all that smart. It sounds like the portable pocket computer we already bought does all the heavy lifting, while the smartwatch itself functions as a secondary display?
I never gave them much thought until just now, but learning that really saps some of the novelty away from the whole thing for me.
I can't imagine a good reason to own a watch in 2015 and learning they're only functional when paired with a phone reinforces that belief.
>But this same limitation exists in Android Wear and Pebble as well.
This is not true. Both pebble and androidwear allow developers to write native applications that run directly on the watch, and can continue operating without the tether to a phone. Without the phone they have no network connection which limits their potential a lot, but they can still access the sensors on the watch, record data, and provide interactions based on stored and sensor data.
You cut off the rest of my sentence to say what the rest of my sentence said. Well except I missed android wear having native apps. But I still think my point is valid; you're still limited without the phone just a little less so and some apps, like running apps, really need the GPS on the phone to function well on Android Wear anyway.
You're also missing that Android Wear gained wifi support in the last update - without the phone, you just have to connect to a wifi network (not the same network as the phone necessarily) and you have full functionality again.
You can still go on a run, for example, without the phone and listen to a few gigs worth of music. There's apparently a bit of machine learning that allows the watch to do all of its health metrics on your run, once it has gotten to know your patterns.
I've never seen a sleek, tiny watch that had GPS. The Fitbit Surge is the smallest I've seen and it's still pretty huge - more like a bracelet than a watch.
I don't know the nuts and bolts details but I think GPS has power/size requirements that preclude it from fitting in the size of something like a "normal" watch, at least until there's a major advance in battery technology.
Well, the watch isn't all that tiny, and Garmin does make a line of GPS watches similar in size to the 38mm watch.
I have no comment on accuracy, as I bought the expensive and much larger Forerunner 910XT. The current top of the line Garmin is the Fenix 3, which again is similarly-sized.
So, what I've heard -- and I'm not sure what the source was -- is that if you go for a few runs with your phone in your pocket, the Watch will be able to map the run without your phone, after it has learned your stride, etc.
I can't foresee GPS being a standalone component on watches due to battery drains. Garmin's watch currently gives me 10 hours on GPS, but that's also due to the fact that all it does is track my run.
To clarify--this is a plain-English rundown of the features and functions that a developer can include when building an Apple Watch app. For example, it says that devs do not have direct API access to force touch or the digital crown.
(As opposed to a consumers' view of what you can do with it.)
However, development for the Time so far hasn't been as easy as I'd thought, e.g. some of the examples provided to develop watch-faces, etc. online didn't seem to be fully up-to-date to use with color/Time.
Every restriction that Apple made makes total sense for the short/medium term. Watch faces need to be impeccably programmed or are likely to dramatically reduce battery life (some of the existing ones use OpenGL). Developers shouldn't be redefining the behaviour of force touch or digital crown before users have had a chance to properly learn them and access to heart rate surely had FDA implications.
Tim Cook has stated that the focus for iOS development through to version 9 and likely a release or two afterwards will be performance and stability. Only then if Apple can push the battery life a few extra hours will they likely open the platform up a bit more.
Fully agree with the author how amazing it is seeing so many buggy apps after having a week to play with my watch. Even from some of the established players e.g. getting quota exceeded errors using Twitter.
The current Watch will be outdated really, really fast. I don't think owning the current generation of Watch will make people buy an iPhone over an Android in 2016 or 2017.
In terms of lock-in strategies, iCloud Photo Library feels a lot more powerful to me. Can't wait to see if Apple can get their services fixed in the long term :)
They will probably "unlock" all the features you want in the upcoming version so people will buy those to have things that should have been there from the beginning.
I am having trouble finding a reason to strap a $400+ device to my wrist. I have not had a need to wear a watch permanently for over 20 years. Heart rate monitor? I have a Polar watch in my gym bag for that. Swimming? I have several swim watches, however, I will typically use a finger-mounted SportCount because it doesn't require interrupting the stroke to bring both hands together to operated (you operate it with your thumb, single handed). Time? I have my phone, computer, TV, microwave and, yes, el-cheapo LED nightstand clock for that. Even while travelling if I don't feel like taking my phone out of my pocket there are clocks everywhere. And, you might laugh, but years of sailing, kayaking and outdoor activities have taught me to estimate time to a useful degree of certainty by looking at the position of the sun. Silly, I know. I am simply saying that I can't remember the las tome I thought "If I only had a watch on my wrist permanently...". Anwering the phone? Please.
One thing that I've always imagined but haven't heard much in these discussions is the real potential behind the Apple Watch being the near-magical NFC interactions that could be achieved with its position on the body. For example, paying for groceries, opening locked doors, starting cars, etc. I feel that someone would only need to see a Watch user wave their hand and magically do something once before wanting that same "power".
For cars that problem has been solved for several years--keyless entry / ignition is pretty common these days (with the added advantage that your key lasts for years without charging and you can give it to someone).
You can do bi-directional notifications between host app and extension with MMWormhole, which uses CFNotificationCenter: https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMWormhole
I think overall Apple has done a fantastic job of v1 of this product line, it's pretty polished. As an App developer who has been working on a watch App, while there is a lot you can't do I understand why you can't do it, it will come in time (native Apps later this year), and what is there right now is pretty good. Shameless plug, the App is currently in review: http://napkin.io
WWDC is right around the corner, so we're likely to see the APIs open up a bit.
Apple's rollout strategy makes sense here. Restrict the number of ways developers can kill the battery, because it's the Watch people will blame, not the poorly engineered apps.
Probably developers who want to make money off a "free" sales model. In an age of widely-known popular logos, might not take much space at all to render an "ad".
The exclusion of ads from the Watch could (wild speculation here) point to a future without ads in the Apple ecosystem. Ads are typically obnoxious, tolerated only because the host app is free. Given their very un-Apple-like feel, maybe there's a plan to wean them out of the walled garden.
I agree that it has problems (visibility of quality apps, abundance of trashy apps, high competition) but profitability does not seem to be one of them.
EDIT: (Answer to TorKlinberg below) I guess so, I don't see why it should not figure. "People don't like it" it's just an opinion which I don't see being backed up by data, in the end people "like" with their wallets.
App store revenue includes in-app purchases, right?
Does Apple publish the percentage of revenue that is from in-app purchases, and specifically game microtransactions?
This is a pretty important summarization of Apple's biggest issues in my opinion (even if you were a little too strong with the word 'failed').
- Ads are intrusive. No one likes ads and they don't pay very well anyway (Google for instance has had their ad money per ad go down year over year). I feel like their days may be numbered.
- Paid apps don't give a user a chance to try an application and if the price is too high, even if the app is truly worth it, it may never get a shot with the user's. Granted Apple still makes a ton of money with these but the app developers have spoken: they make more money with the freemium model.
- Free apps with in app purchases make the most money for developers. Unfortunately the whole thing is kind of an ethics conundrum; is it okay to give someone something but they can't use parts of it until they pay you for it? What about schemes that are actually hinder the product just to try and make the user give the app more cash (e.g. buying "energy" or whatever games will use to make things go slow). This model seems to be getting a lot of backlash lately.
- The other important one you missed is subscriptions; they are probably more fair but who wants to pay something every month when they probably already have 20 other bills to pay each month? Especially when you look at services who tie little things to paying for a subscription like adding the ability to use subtasks in an application requires a subscription.
It's hard to figure out how to sort all of this mess out. Personally I like the option of being able to try an application and if I like it pay for it outright. No ads or in app purchases or subscriptions. Granted subscriptions are sometimes necessary too especially if you're consuming external resources on a constant basis (e.g. "cloud backup" or sync, etc).
I'd love to entertain alternatives even if they sound worse at first just to go through the exercise of exploring them and trying to find better ways to make this all work.
"Personally I like the option of being able to try an application and if I like it pay for it outright. No ads or in app purchases or subscriptions."
This goes directly against your criticism of IAP, though. The trial is usually implemented by having a "lite" version downloaded, with an IAP to unlock the real version.
> This goes directly against your criticism of IAP, though. The trial is usually implemented by having a "lite" version downloaded, with an IAP to unlock the real version.
Fair; I don't think I articulated that well enough. My distinction between the two was a trial would allow me to test the app before paying one fee for unlocking everything whereas I always see IAP are being multiple items I have to pay for. Though that isn't a huge distinction and I don't think it's ultimate the best solution anyway.
It could be a gold mine for advertisers, whose job is mostly to manipulate people into buying particular things. For watch owners, though, it's being mined.
My concern is only modestly with privacy; it's more about intimacy. Defending against manipulation requires a bit of space, a bit of distance from the manipulator. There is zero chance I would let ads on my watch, a surface I paid a fair bit of money for because there's some information so useful that I basically want it to be part of my body.
I work for small business owners, to say their "advertising" is primarily to "manipulate people into buying particular things" would be a very skewed characterization.
Characterizations like that show a bias, and while they may "feel right" when talking about large brands, when you realize your local market, or restaurant wants to "advertise" or promote a special - suddenly advertising doesn't seem all that evil.
> suddenly advertising doesn't seem all that evil.
Speak for yourself. An ad is an ad, even if I like the company or product. I'm in agreement with the grandparent, ads would be even more intrusive on a watch than on my phone (where they are already annoying).
And tell me again the point of promoting a special? It's to manipulate people into becoming regular customers of restaurant A over restaurant B. Even the notion of specials has mainly become a promotional device; the tail of advertising has now wags the dog of cooking.
I like small business owners. And I get the necessity of advertising in today's markets. It's an arms race; if your competitors advertise, you generally have to do so as well. People being people, I'm also provisionally ok with some modest level of manipulation. But let's be real: advertising is mostly calculated manipulation of other people for your own profit.
I've been working on a pretty complicated watch app that will be going live to our users in the next few days. The simulator actually does a pretty good job at faking a real watch. I was worried about the communication between the phone and the watch over Bluetooth being slower then the simulator however I've had a apple watch since Friday and there is no noticeable delay (though I'm not sending images)
In the time window just before release apps with WatchKit extensions went from "Waiting For Review" to "Ready for Sale" in less than 24h with the "In Review" time lasting less than an hour. Now we're back to 48 - 72h review times
My thinking is that if you want to say you have thousands of apps on launch day, but barely any developers have run their apps on real hardware, you have to relax your standards a bit, and figure it will work its way out in a month or two.
Personal anecdote: I got one and am happy with it so far. I roam around the house / office without really thinking about where my phone is. The health aspects have been the stickiest feature for me -- I actually appreciate the "stand up for a bit" notifications, and enjoy hitting my daily goals.
Phone calls work surprisingly well -- much better than speaker phone IMHO, because you don't have to hold a phone, and you don't really need to hold your watch up to your face either.
Voice recognition is solid.
Glancing at a notification feels a lot less distracting than digging out my phone to see of it's important and then getting sucked in because now my phone is open. (I know, self-discipline...)
The customizable watch faces make me wish the phone had a similar feature -- I find myself trying to "glance" at my phone, expecting it to light up automatically. My face has the weather, calendar, and activity tracker on it, so I get a lot of use out of that.
The build quality is nice (I went steel, and it definitely has a luxury feel to it).
Mostly it has a fun retro-future quality to it. Some apps are a little buggy, but it doesn't really matter -- we're living in the future :)
Interesting that they are using a separate process on the iPhone. Is that to prepare for a future where the whole extension will actually run on the watch itself?
I totally cool with apple watch to be the toy for kids.
Kudos to Apple's marketing abilities for pimping it as a luxury thing (I wouldn't even call it a watch. Wearable perhaps?) and making people to salivate over it.
Apple's marketing is something worth paying for to learn from.
http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_ta...