A fluff piece, but still an interesting read about the origins of the Apple Watch. Two parts stand out to me. First:
Along the way, the Apple team landed upon the Watch’s raison d’~Aatre. It came down to this: Your phone is ruining your life. Like the rest of us, Ive, Lynch, Dye, and everyone at Apple are subject to the tyranny of the buzz – the constant checking, the long list of nagging notifications. “We’re so connected, kind of ever-presently, with technology now,” Lynch says. “People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much.” They’ve glared down their noses at those who bury themselves in their phones at the dinner table and then absentmindedly thrust hands into their own pockets at every ding or buzz. “People want that level of engagement,” Lynch says. “But how do we provide it in a way that’s a little more human, a little more in the moment when you’re with somebody?”
This makes zero sense to me. If your phone is indeed ruining your life, how is adding another tiny, finnicky screen on your wrist going to help? All it does is add another step between seeing a notification and acting upon it. Instead of staring at just your phone’s screen, you’ll be staring at both your phone’s and your watch’s screen. The watch will invariably suck for acting upon notifications (tiny screen, low battery, voice recognition will fail), forcing you to take out your much more usable phone anyway… At which point you might as well take care of everything while on your phone. You’ll be back at square one.
There are still interesting use cases for a smartwatch, but saving you from notification overload is not one of them.
Second:
The goal was to free people from their phones, so it is perhaps ironic that the first working Watch prototype was an iPhone rigged with a Velcro strap. “A very nicely designed Velcro strap,” Lynch is careful to add.
From the very beginning, I said that the Apple Watch looked a lot like a tiny iPhone strapped to your wrist – unlike Android Wear, which was designed from the ground-up for the wrist (not to a lot of success, might I add, but still). The fact that the Apple Watch literally started out as an iPhone strapped to your wrist is telling, and explains why the device seems to be so convoluted and complex.
Apple has a far better track record making stuff people want, so there’s a considerable chance this is exactly what people want, but not once while using my Moto 360 I thought to myself “if only this thing was even more complicated and convoluted, than I would not want to ditch this thing in a drawer!”.
A smart watch shouldn’t have ‘apps’; it should just do the right thing, at the right time.
Apple’s whole approach is anything but human, and more like the common ‘programmer locked in a windowless room’ approach where there has been no consideration of the physical world the software has to interact with.
Scrolling through photos on a tiny screen is not more ‘human’ than doing so on a big screen.
I wonder if people are making the same mistake they made when the iPhone was launched and the iPad was launched, that of viewing a new use paradigm through the lens of the old paradigm..
The core mistake is to think that a device on your wrist is a watch and smart watch should be a watch plus some add-ons. That’s similar to people who thought that a smart phone was a phone with just some add-ons and that the iPhone, sans keyboard, was just way too complicated and expensive for a phone. In reality the iPhone was a new pocket computing platform which reduced the phone to a mere app amongst many.
The Apple Watch in a similar vein is seen as a watch that is too complicated but actually its not a watch its a new computing platform that can be worn on the wrist which reduces the Watch to a mere app amongst many.
I don’t know whether Apple have got the Apple Watch design right or whether it will be a success but I suspect it will be a game changer, particularly a couple of iterations down the road. It’s interesting, and unsurprising that Apple was working on an iPhone killer, one of the core lessons Steve Jobs drummed into the DNA of the new Apple was that if you don’t disrupt your own business then someone else will.
This account of the reality of using an Apple watch helps lay out the sort of new use territory the Apple Watch is designed to fill. Its going to be very interesting to see how this all pans out.
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/03/21/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-app…
You do realise that account is made-up, right? It’s fake.
how short memory you have – iphone didn’t even have apps for the first year, apple had to be forced to support them
In context of the goal of decreasing notice overload, a device like the android wear or even the pebble make sense.
I don’t understand how you get from there to an apple watch.
But, my goal is to never get that overloaded with notices in the first place. Right now, I’m not. I don’t think I have a need for a smart watch right now.
Well, that depends. Although this is merely speculation on my part, I think the reason why people check their phones so much is because there’s one notification out of every 50 or so that they really want to see. So if you have a smart watch, it’s a lot easier to deal with the other 49 you don’t care about.
That being said, this is definitely a problem, but the smart watch is the wrong solution. IMO, what REALLY needs to happen is for phones to get smarter about only chirping when an important notification comes in. ‘Well, how the hell would a phone know which ones are important and which aren’t?’ And THAT is the million dollar question. You could probably start by letting people flag messages as urgent when they send them, and letting the user ignore ‘urgent’ messages from people that abuse that feature. Another thing you could do is to be able to identify a user across several different services as the same person, and tell the phone to do x whenever this person messages you, no matter what service/chat app they’re using …
Personally, I have a low-tech solution to this problem. I just tell people closest to me, ‘If it’s REALLY urgent, call me. Otherwise, if you msg me, I’ll get back to you when I get back to you.’ This works pretty well, although obviously it wouldn’t work for everyone, esp. those using their phones for business purposes. For these people, I think a smart watch would work pretty well.
Edited 2015-04-02 18:28 UTC
My pebble helps keep my phone in my pocket because I’d guess 9 out of 10 notifications(for me) don’t require an immediate response. Additionally, being able to tell if a call is important when your hands are full is great if you’re at work, or busy and don’t want to stop what you’re doing. Definitely not a “need”, but I definitely miss it when its gone. It’s lots of tiny advantages that when pooled together make it worthwhile.
Why does my phone have to tell me about things I don’t care about ?
That is the whole problem.
I’m almost always near a computer.
These have my e-mail client already open.
Every time I look at the e-mail client I have new mail I haven’t read yet.
So what do I do ? I decide when I look at it.
My phone doesn’t have the data or wifi enabled. This saves me a lot of battery life. I don’t have to charge my phone every day.
People that really, really need to talk to me can call me.
I can add more channels like WhatsApp or whatever.
But why would I want to do that ?
I don’t see the use.
I find myself thinking of the concept of triage.
What the watch does, and it goes for both this and Android Wear, is for the owner to quickly check if notice is something that require immediate attention, something to ignore, or something to come back to later.
And do so without the more elaborate gesture of reaching into a pocket, taking out the phone, looking at the screen, and then reversing it all until the next notification.
Glancing at ones wrist is a gesture so effortlessly that people around you will hardly notice. Frankly i always prefer reminding myself of the time by checking my wrist over digging in a pocket for something.
They probably shouldn’t notice, but they do. I often get asked if I am in a hurry or want to be somewhere else, just because I was wondering what time it was and glanced at my watch.
Much less disruption to check on a notification on the wrist than it is to pull out your phone. What is hard to understand about that?
As for your other critiques… The battery low, the voice recognition not working, you won’t be able to act on notifications, and it will be horribly complicated. It’s so funny that you insist you aren’t anti-apple by default and then you write article after article panning products you haven’t even tried.
I’m not interested in the Apple watch, it looks like a pure luxury item with minimal utility (like every other smartwatch). But at least I’d reserve final judgement until I’ve actually used one. Everyone laughed at the iPad as well because it was so limited. We’ll see.
I specifically state that Apple tends to know what it’s doing, and that I am most likely wrong… what more do you want from me?
Putting in a gotcha doesn’t change the rest of what you wrote.
Clearly either the thing works or it doesn’t. People certainly don’t want poor battery life, voice recognition that doesn’t work, and fantastically complicated interfaces. So if people want it (in large numbers, of course there will always be the fanboys/early adopters that will buy it no matter what) then it is apparently good. It can’t be both objectively terrible and popular.
I don’t want a watch. I don’t ever recall wearing a watch in my four+ decades of life. I don’t see the point of a watch other then as jewelry which I am not a fan of.
I will buy an Apple Watch because I want a mini computer strapped to my wrist that does things that my phone does without me having to fiddle with my phone. ( I still might return the watch because I might not like wearing it though. )
I have the following reasons …
– I need to know what’s happening pretty much ever waking moment ( partially for work reason, partially because that’s the way life has conditioned me ) and I find pulling out my phone at dinner, in my car, while I am walking, cycling or horseback riding disruptive and occasionally dangerous.
– I walk a lot and pulling out your phone to switch to a different song is a pain, especially in winter when it’s -15’C outside.
– I travel a great deal and being able to check in and get through security with my phone is very helpful so not having to actually get out my phone while holding my bags would be even more so.
– I sit around too much so having an activity prompt will probably be good for my health.
– I like order my tea from my phone. It’s pretty amazing just walking over to the counter and picking up your drink while other people are lined up ( looking at their phones ). I’ll be able to do that with my watch even more easily ( crown, tap, tap, tap, done ).
– I like to shop with apple pay a lot because it’s more convenient and a watch will be even more so.
I think these are pretty solid reasons. Hopefully I will find some others when I actually get to use the watch.
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IMO If Jobs would have wanted it, it would have been released already.
Nice, they’ve recreated the philosophy of Windows Phone 7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdpQir1sqiQ
Maybe they’ll also succeed in creating a non-addictive device.
Let’s stop people staring at their palms and let them stare at their wrist instead!
I was talking to my dad on the subject of the Apple Watch, and i nthink he summed it up perfectly. With a phone, you have 2 hands with which to manipulate it, or even 1 if you need a hand spare, with a smartwatch, you tie up both hands regardless, as you have one to manipulate the funny nipple on the top and one that’s it’s tied to. And that’s from someone who’s confessed to being technically illiterate.
On top of that, the Apple watch has many other failings IMHO. Terrible battery life; tiny screen; the fact it needs to be tethered to your phone to be useful;and of course, the big one, it’s too expensive and limited for a device that’s going to be outdated in a few years.
All in all, the Apple Watch just looks like a horrible waste of money to me.
Of course we don’t need a smaller screen trying to do the same thing as our phone slab does but on our wrist.
It’s all about new input methods and usage locations. Just like iPad.
Same people who said “why do I need a bigger smart phone?” will say “why do I need a watch?” Apple will sell billions and entire new app categories will be created.
Watch will be a new sub-platform in the iOS ecosystem. Nothing new here, it’s been their playbook for over a decade now.
The real newness here is the haptic input and output from the wrist.
Combine a Wii controller, iPhone, pedometer, velocity-touchpad, touchpad-output (on skin) and you have a input/output device like no other.
Hooked into the cloud and into your apple universe, the vibrations, sounds, sensors, make the watch the first actual wearable node on the network.
Some new movement commands with Watch:
Twist forward, 2x, twist back, 2x – to go along with shake.
Some new output styles with Watch:
location-vibration (like PS controller).
Whoever spoke about triage above got it right. The watch is about awareness and monitoring, not computing or composing.
It will be a much better reminder device than anything living in your pocket. and should allow you to be notified and even reply in very subtle ways that will allow you maintain eye contact with your guests.