The host, Nolan, sounds oppressively harsh but I don’t think he is playing devil’s advocate to provoke conversation on his show. His opinion is the same stance a lot of general public take when the first see the Watch. Shaking off the initial impression that the Watch is pointless and unnecessary is difficult, because in many was it is exactly that. It isn’t an essential gadget like an iPhone is.
The logistics of radio are interesting. I was asked to join the show at about 2pm over email. A screener assistant called me soon afterwards to get some thoughts off-air. I assume he was checking that I was actually going to be able to say something of interest on the real show. We exchange phone numbers and Skype information, as I had told him I have a professional mic (which I normally use for podcasting).
Then, at about 11:23, two minutes before Nolan introduces the Watch segment, the producer dials me in to the show. I had setup the Skype mic but I shouldn’t have bothered. They completely ignored the Skype arrangements and called my mobile number, which was supposed to be the fallback option.
When I pick up the call, the producer asks me if I can hear the other end of the line. I have no idea what would happen if I didn’t answer immediately or if something went wrong. There wasn’t any time allocated for problem-solving.
The first time I actually spoke to Nolan was live on the air. Once he says goodbye at the end of the segment I hang up the phone and that’s it. For BBC Radio, this must be standard practice but for me it was alien and a bit disconcerting. When I podcast, it takes ten minutes to verify if Skype is actually working.
Apple Pay: Pay quickly and securely. And setup is simple.
Activity: Track your daily activity and stay motivated to sit less, move more and get some exercise.
Workout: See metrics like distance, pace or speed, calories burned, and heart rate during workouts.
Ignoring the ridiculousness that it took Apple the day before the Watch ships to complete these videos, the Apple Pay video is really cool. The Watch plays this animation as your preferred bank card appears, with light glare reflecting off the surface. It’s also timed with a slick 3D transform.
The Activity and Workout apps also look well done, with a logical navigation structure and cute accompanying animations to guide the user along. One oddity I did notice, though, is that at the end of a workout Apple Watch specifically asks the user if they want to Save or Discard the workout record. I’m not sure why this intermediary step exists — workouts should just be saved automatically without user intervention.
Earlier today, images emerged of a red Sport band, and now Apple appears to be showing off several more exclusive Sport bands at tonight’s event in Italy. An image posted to Instagram shows dark blue, light pink, red, and yellow Sport bands. All of these colors were previously unreleased by Apple and never before seen.
I don’t mind that celebrities are getting free watches but I am annoyed that they are being given the choice of colours that aren’t available for general purchase. Some of the ‘exclusive’ sport colours look really nice and it is frustrating that I am barred from buying them because I am not a high-profile person.
In a new report from KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo, the usually accurate analyst estimates that global pre-orders for the Apple Watch will top 2.3 million units through May. A report earlier this week claimed that Apple Watch first day pre-orders were at almost 1 million units.
Further breaking it down by specific model, Kuo estimates that the Sport model of the Apple Watch accounted for 85 percent of pre-orders, while the Apple Watch accounted for 15 percent, and the Edition less than 1 percent.
At least according to KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo, who I tend to regard as reputable, the orders were overwhelmingly stacked towards Sport models. Although the Sport was always going to be the predominant model, 85% of orders is domineering with a practically monopolistic control of demand.
Another interesting point is that, under consideration of the raw financials, the stainless steel Apple Watch had the smallest effect on Apple’s bottom line. Even at just 1%, the Edition’s high profit margins will mean that the returns from this collection will exceed the profits from the Apple Watch models, which made up 15% of sales. Similarly, the Sport watches should exceed profits of the stainless models due to the volume shipped.
If the trends continue, the collection which shares its name with the product itself, Apple Watch, will be the most unyielding for Apple financially.
On March 27, one of ICANN’s advisory panels, the Intellectual Property Constituency, sent a letter to the organization asking it to step in and stop Vox Populi’s “predatory, exploitive and coercive” practices.
“ICANN is the sole entity in the world charged with the orderly introduction of new gTLDs in a secure, reliable and predictable manner,” president of the panel Gregory Shatan wrote. “If ICANN is unwilling or unable to put a halt to this, then who is?”
ICANN has since sent letters requesting an evaluation from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US and the Office of Consumer Affairs in Canada, where Vox Populi is based––a rare course of action.
The main issue here for me is that the .sucks TLD vendor is charging significantly higher fees ($2500 per year) for businesses to secure registered trademarks. It is clearly trying to exploit the fear businesses have about ‘hate domains’ springing up using the .sucks suffix. If the vendor charged the same fee to companies as they do individuals, I wouldn’t have any problem with it.
I sat on my couch this morning and had my laptop and my iPad open simultaneously. As quickly as I was deleting, favoriting, and modifying images in one device, they showed up on the other. These photos are all large file sizes and this demonstration of cloud-based syncing is impressive coming from Apple. After we’ve all made Apple the cloud services whipping boy for so long, I’m actually surprised more people aren’t making a bigger deal about how stable Photos cloud sync is just a few days after launch.
I think this would be much bigger news if it hadn’t been drowned out by the Watch and MacBook launches. Also, a lot of the ‘tech circle’ have been testing the new Photos app for months so the appreciation has been diluted.
I only installed OS X 10.10.3 on Wednesday so it’s a new experience for me. Like Sparks, Photos is a fantastic iPhoto successor and iCloud Photo Library is rock solid in terms of reliability. It’s late in coming, but great nonetheless. It really fulfils the promise of iCloud. Unfortunately, the biggest roadblocks for adoption is iCloud storage pricing and the continued stinginess of Apple’s free tier.
The Sport Band is a downright revelation — I’d go so far as to call it the most comfortable watch band I’ve ever worn. I’ve rolled my eyes at Apple’s use of fluoroelastomer in lieu of rubber to describe the material of these bands, but it truly does have a premium, richly supple feel to it. The way the end of the band tucks under the other side of the strap — a design Marc Newson first used at Ikepod — is brilliant. Up until now, it struck me as odd that the $10,000 Edition models came with the same bands4 as the entry-model $349/399 Sport watches. Having worn it, it now strikes me the other way around — that the $349/399 Sport watches are equipped with straps that can genuinely be described as luxurious, fluoroelastomer or not.
When the Watch was first revealed in September, I misinterpreted the Sport model as the ‘cheap’ variant. As time has gone on though, I realised I was wrong. Cue and Cook wear the Apple Watch Sport, with sport bands. The Sport is a first-class piece of hardware. I jumped to conclusions and originally modelled the Apple Watch Sport as the iPhone 5c equivalent of the iPhone 5s, a pale imitation of the real deal.
Now, I see it more like the Sport being the main model — at least for this generation, the model I am recommending people buy. The steel and gold casings should be seen as luxury options, available for those that can appreciate the materials and higher-quality jewellery finishes.
If you want to stretch an analogy, you could position the Apple Watch Sport and the Apple Watch as the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the phone lineup, respectively. The iPhone 6 is the primary ‘new’ hardware that most people ought to buy. The Plus is the ‘added extras’ model.
The Edition doesn’t translate to the current iPhone range at all (although I don’t think you should rule out Apple making an ‘iPhone Edition’ in future). It is truly in the space of unnecessarily exuberant wealth, a field that Apple has not approached with any of its other products to date.
Yet what Dye seems most fascinated by is one of the Apple Watch’s faces, called Motion, which you can set to show a flower blooming. Each time you raise your wrist, you’ll see a different color, a different flower. This is not CGI. It’s photography.
“We shot all this stuff,” Dye says, “the butterflies and the jellyfish and the flowers for the motion face, it’s all in-camera. And so the flowers were shot blooming over time. I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots.”
The minutiae incorporated into this product is incredible. Ultimate flamboyance. If you have ten Apple Watches in the same room with the Mickey face, the Mickey’s on every Watch will tap their feet together. Everything is synchronised.
These details have nothing to do with whether the product is good or not but it is damn cool. Whimsical nuances have been lacking in recent releases of OS X and iOS, but the Watch is full of them.
As the testing went on, it became evident that the key to making the Watch work was speed. An interaction could last only five seconds, 10 at most. They simplified some features and took others out entirely because they just couldn’t be done quickly enough. Lynch and team had to reengineer the Watch’s software twice before it was sufficiently fast. An early version of the software served you information in a timeline, flowing chronologically from top to bottom.
WIRED’s interview is decent with some interesting background, like the experimentation with a timeline interface a la Pebble Time. The real gem in this story is that Apple gave WIRED a gallery of Apple Watch UI assets. I’m fascinated by the intricacies of the Watch’s software design. It is cool to see Apple publicise this aspect of the device in similar regard to how they present their custom alloys of aluminium, steel and gold in marketing. It shows they care about it.
@eli_schiff Also the Activity app design is identical to 8-yr-old PolarClock screensaver, equally hideous colors
I don’t care that a cool calendar visualisation from 2007 bears a resemblance to Apple’s fitness tracking visualisation from 2014. Design is as much about how it works as how it looks. These two pieces of software behave very differently.
Unlike Polar Clock, the rings in the Watch’s Activity app can go round the circle more than once, to indicate more than 100% percent completion. It’s not clear from static screenshots but the Activity app is actually three-dimensional. The more intense shadow denotes that a particular ring is ‘stacked up’ on itself, like a coil.
The Polar Clock is a very different metaphor. The rings fill to 100 and then reset to 0 on a two dimensional plane. The labels are inscribed into the rings. In contrast, the Apple Watch labels statically float at the top centre of the screen and animate outwards, leaving small symbols that are also fixed in place.
My aim is not to ‘defend’ Apple or vilipend Dane Baker’s criticism, whether you believe Apple ripped off Polar Clock or not is immaterial. On pure aesthetics, I think the Activity app colour choices are poor and very generic. That’s beside the point, though.
I’m just trying to convey a sense of the things that makeup application design which are not represented by motionless screenshots. It’s not a simple matter of aesthetics and functionality. I call it ‘behaviour’ but that’s not an encompassing term. A better word eludes me.
Apps can look good, have many features but behave poorly. iOS 7 is an example of the opposite; something that behaves well but looks ugly in many places.
If a customer wants to try out the Apple Watch without going through the try-on and sales process, they will be able to use a new demo unit connected to an iPad mini. Additionally, customers who already know which Apple Watch they would like to purchase can buy one via a dedicated purchase station.
Gurman’s story has a lot of new details about the store sales process, but this stands out. The ‘watches-under-glass’ approach Apple has spoken about before felt lacking to me. The appeal of the Apple Store is that you can walk in off the street and immediately touch iPhones and iPads.
Interacting with Apple’s products is a huge part of clinching the sale. Regardless of how pretty Apple’s jewellery tables are, they do not offer the same customer experience opportunities as Apple’s other products which are not locked behind glass.
I would be concerned if Apple’s only answer to this problem was to make an appointment. I’m really happy to see that Apple will also put these ‘placards’ on show for anyone to try out the Watch impromptu. The text on the iPad mini in the photo confirms that the Watch unit is responsive to user input, rather than just looping a demo video.
Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, says that he worried about Tevanian leaving, and urged Steve in 2004 to figure out another challenge to keep the brilliant software engineer at Apple. “Steve looked at me,” Cook remembers, “and goes, ‘I agree he’s really smart. But he’s decided he doesn’t want to work. I’ve never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.’”
I highlighted very few things in my reading of Becoming Steve Jobs, but I highlighted this. Tim Cook pushed Jobs to find Tevanian a new ‘challenge’ to keep him at Apple. This has direct parallels to recent stories about Jony Ive who has apparently considered leaving his role at Apple in the last decade. True or false, some see the Apple Watch as a way to keep Ive interested in staying at Apple. This anecdote shows that the executive team would at least consider projects of this nature.
I’ve always felt that the flattening of Apple’s user interface that began in iOS 7 was as much a strategic move as an aesthetic one. Our first reaction was to realize that an unadorned interface makes it easier to focus on content.
But with this new display technology, it’s clear that interfaces with fewer pixels have another advantage. A richly detailed button from iOS 6 would need more of that precious juice strapped to our wrists. Never underestimate the long-term benefits of simplification.
I really don’t believe that the aesthetics introduced in iOS 7 was a tactical manoeuvre. Ive’s flat design was not ‘strategic’. I think you can say iOS 7 was triggered by company politics because I think the actual reason iOS changed appearance so radically is easily traced in time.
Between iOS 6 and iOS 7 Forstall left and Ive took charge. Ive liked the flatter aesthetic which meant that iOS became flatter. The cause and effect isn’t hidden here. Forstall may have wanted to move away from skeuomorphism eventually but he wasn’t planning on it for 2013: new features like iTunes Radio had already been built out with iOS 6 aesthetics by the time Forstall left in November 2012.
If Forstall was still in power, do I think the Watch would feature Corinthian leather and glossy textures? There’s a chance. The square iPod nano shipped with exactly that. The more likely outcome is that it would be toned down to suit a 1.5 inch display because the design of iOS and Watch OS are on different tracks.
I think this approaches my bigger point. Watch OS and iOS are not mirror images of each other. They are different. A skeuomorphic iOS and a flat Watch OS could definitely coexist. A ‘strategic’ master plan to have both devices on the same design path is unnecessary. There are bits of Watch OS that will never come back to iOS and there are bits of Watch OS that should come back to iOS. But, if there really was a long play to synthesise both OS’s then they should already be the same. Arguably, iOS should already feature dark black UI’s. It doesn’t though — proof by contradiction that they are independent products with independent user interfaces.
I hear the same revisionist perspective on iOS 8 extensions. ‘Extensions would have never worked without a redesign like iOS 7 due to the clash of design elements’. This is not true either. With iOS 7, Apple overlays extension UI with little adornment. However, in a iOS 6 design world, Apple would have just shoved massive drop-shadows between the pieces of UI to make them distinct units. It seems like the obvious progression today but I think people forget what tricks were used before.
It is thoroughly documented, almost more than anything of recent Apple journalism, how iOS design became dictated by Ive and Apple rushed to engineer the new direction under his leadership. I don’t see why people find it necessary to conjure up other reasoning for the change.
Several months ago, we began reviewing apps before they are published on Google Play to better protect the community and improve the app catalog. This new process involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle. We value the rapid innovation and iteration that is unique to Google Play, and will continue to help developers get their products to market within a matter of hours after submission, rather than days or weeks. In fact, there has been no noticeable change for developers during the rollout.
It’s worth noting that Google’s human-based review process is measured in hours, not days. You could argue that Google’s review process is not as extensive as Apple’s, but even taking that as given, Apple’s turnaround times look ridiculous. Doubling the amount of time it took Google to investigate each submission would still represent a much shorter period that the rate at which the iTunes team processes submissions. Apple could definitely improve turnaround times.
Apple Watch won’t save us from shitty behavior but it will limit our distractions. Think of the Watch as a seive through which only the most relevant information lands on your wrist. Your interaction with that information is also whittled to nearly a few contact points: read, respond, or reachout.
The overwhelming attitude I’ve seen in the past few days is that the tech community treat notifications as a social bad, that people hate consistent alerts and buzzes. As Clayton describes it, for this group of people, the Watch can act as a ‘sieve’ to help prioritise and sort what’s important.
That’s fine. In addition, however, I think there’s another group of people who have been overlooked in commentary about smartwatches. These people love notifications and lap up new ways of staying ‘tuned in’ to their friends and the world. From secondary school through to university, I have never seen someone get annoyed at the number of times their phone is buzzing for attention. These people want to be able to respond even faster than they already can. For these people — I would guess people of this class are typically of the younger generations — getting notifications isn’t a frustration but an addiction.
What’s genius about the Watch is that it can serve both groups of people well. For people like Clayton Morris, it can be an intermediary filter to let only significant things through. For others, it can be used as a second screen, a medium that can keep them even more connected.
I’ve decided I am buying an Apple Watch Sport in Space Grey. I don’t want to splash out an steel casing with a product I still have many questions and reservations about. By the second-generation, I’ll be able to make a better assessment about how much I want to spend on a smartwatch. I can’t really dilly-dally in deciding this value proposition either: I’m concerned that the Sport will sell out through preorders.
Regarding colour, I like black things. They fit in best for me. If I was going to buy a steel, I’d probably end up with a space black one of those too. Moreover, the only way to get a black band (without buying a band separately) is to get a Space Grey Sport. If Apple offered silver aluminium with black band in their preset collections, maybe I would have bought that instead.
On size, as much as I want to have the larger display to have the higher resolution display, my wrists are so small that the 42 mm will look ridiculous. Using the ‘Actual size’ comparison in the Apple Store app confirmed this. From my perspective as a developer, I think using a 38 mm as a daily driver is beneficial because I believe that’s the screen size that most normal people will buy as well. Having the same hardware as my app’s users is definitely a factor for me. Therefore, albeit mostly driven by the constraints of my physical anatomy, I’m buying the 38 mm Watch for $349.
