There are certain signals which indicate that you should back away from someone slowly, and not meet their eye. Used to be that a pocket protecter full of pens in a shirt breast pocket was such a signal. Now Apple has given us a new one.

Ace says:

Apple has two advantages in this regard:

1. The company places a very high value on aesthetics, and there's no avoiding the fact that watches are generally understood to not merely be functional, but a form of jewelry. So maybe Apple can design a fake digital watch that you wouldn't be embarrassed to wear.

2. Apple's customers are slavish idiots and will buy dog feces if Apple puts them in a unibody aluminum casing.

That used to be true when Jobs was still alive, but I'm not sure that Apple as tribe/lifestyle/personal-brand/cult is still as potent a force as it used to be. A lot of glamour died when Jobs died, and these days keynotes are "Tim Who?"

There are still people like that, of course, but I don't think there are enough to let Apple get away with releasing junk and thinking it will sell just because of a fancy case and a logo. They couldn't even when Jobs was still alive, for instance the original iMac was a flop. (Beautiful case design but underpowered electronics. Word got around fairly quickly that as a computer it was second rate.)

So now we have the Apple Watch. (No "i" in there anywhere?) And none of the pictures I've been able to find show it on anyone's arm, so that we can get some idea of how big it is. It isn't available yet, anyway, and I think all the publicity shots that do exist are all renders. I didn't see anything that looked like a real photograph.

The thing is, there's a tradeoff here: if the screen is too small, it's useless. If the device is too large, it's a nerd alert and anyway it's uncomfortable to wear. Is there a sweetspot in the middle? Apple must think there is, but I am not sure. It may be a sour spot where the unit is both too small and too heavy.

There's a women's size and a men's size. They don't call them that, but it's obvious. The women's size is 38 mm tall; the men's is 42 mm. That isn't all that big a difference, and it isn't clear what proportion of that is screen and how much you lose to the bezel.

And no matter how big it is, there is no damned way that it's going to be reasonable as a way of entering text. One shot includes receiving a text message, but how can you answer it? The only answer I can see would be Dymo-mode: you turn the rotary control until the next letter you want is showing, then click the button to move to the next position. Believe me; this is not convenient.

Also, battery life? More battery means more weight. Since it turns on every time you lift your arm (so I read) it's gonna burn a lot of power during periods when the owner isn't actually looking at it. How do you recharge it? And how often?

I confess that Apple's industrial designers have scored again. It really does look nice, at least in the rendered publicity shots. But will it look nice on someone's arm? Or will it become a nerd alert? I know which way I'm betting.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:09 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
Post contains 587 words, total size 3 kb.

1 A link at Ace's place goes to a website that had non-Apple designers come up with what they thought this thing would look like.  One of them suggested a pocketwatch, then closed his presentation with "thanks for laughing."

Which I don't get.  A pocketwatch design would be perfect for something like this!  If they were clever enough for that, I'd have to give serious consideration to such an item.

Posted by: Wonderduck at September 09, 2014 01:23 PM (eNsTS)

2 I just measured, and my wrist is all of 55mm wide at the point where a watch would sit.  Ain't no way I'm wearing an iphonewatch.  Even the "ladies" size.

As for texting, iPhones from 4S onward can take dictation for texts... so as long as you don't mind sitting around in public saying "Yeah.  Me too.  Lol." into your wristwatch, it won't be inconvenient.  (That maaaay qualify as a nerd alert, though.)

Posted by: Mikeski at September 09, 2014 02:24 PM (luDkn)

3 I was in the "SmartWatch" group 10 years ago when Microsoft tried to do this.  Why did it fail?
- Battery life - Incompetent marketing - Battery life - Phones are better at all these features - Battery life

Posted by: Douglas Oosting at September 09, 2014 02:26 PM (sdWdc)

4

No "i" in there anywhere?

Hmm, now that you mention it, I think "iWatch" would be a good name for a voyeur site...

Posted by: Siergen at September 09, 2014 03:31 PM (r3+4f)

5 Honestly, I kind of liked the communicators in Babylon 5, the way they were glued to the back of your hand. I could see that as a format for a device. But wrist watches are rather inconvenient for anything but glancing at.

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at September 09, 2014 03:55 PM (F15D0)

6 Well, we'll see. I'm as skeptical about Apple as the next guy (if not a lot more so), but the one thing they've managed better than anyone else is taking a technology that hasn't quite managed to catch on in the market and really nailing it on the consumer experience. The iPod did it for mp3 players (which existed before, but Apple made a market out of it), they did it for the smartphone (again, technologies not precisely new, but much more usable and configurable than the old Palm Pilots and Blackberries), they did it for the tablet (though this was probably inevitable given that the tablets aren't all that different from the phones). If -anyone- can make the watch work, Apple can.

I don't know that they can, because of all the reasons you list above. I think it's up there with the 4K TVs and 3D for "things that are being made because there is a company demand for a new hit product instead of because there is a consumer demand to fill". But hey, I would not be terribly disappointed to find myself wrong, either.

I dunno about the pocketwatch format, Duck. I have a big heavy thing in my pocket which I can pull out to tell the time - it's my phone! That said, there's probably a market for it...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at September 09, 2014 04:26 PM (zJsIy)

7 They called it Apple TV, too, not iTV, so they're not wedded to the i prefix.
What I'm waiting is to see the rush of breathless articles about how great the new larger screen is, considering how long Apple fanbois spent saying how large screens are horrible.  What's the reverse of sour grapes?

Posted by: RickC at September 09, 2014 05:33 PM (0a7VZ)

8

Douglas, 10 years ago there wasn't a commercially-available color display with adequate pixel density to make it work, either.

And battery technology has advanced since then, and modern electronics uses less power than ten years ago.

Which doesn't mean that everything is yet in place now to make it all work.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 09, 2014 05:43 PM (+rSRq)

9 But wrist watches are rather inconvenient for anything but glancing at.

Since it's 2014, I'll point out that when you need to see what time it is to climb the ladder out of the trench while holding a pistol in one hand and a compass or map in the other, then having the timepiece on the wrist is kinda nice.

I'll agree that it's not so nice as a data entry device, mainly due to the pistol. 

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at September 09, 2014 06:40 PM (vEp0w)

10 There have been a lot of smartwatch announcements recently, Apple is far from the only company trying this. I can see the use, especially as phones are getting bigger and bigger, the ability to have basic functionality on the wrist (time, stopwatch, read texts and emails, etc) while leaving the phone safely in your purse, backpack, briefcase (or turned off and in a Faraday cage...) would be nice.

Posted by: David at September 09, 2014 08:02 PM (U4Cer)

11 My wife said that as a FitBit users she was somewhat interested in the Apple watch since it includes sensors to measure heartbeat and steps. But it turned out that the watch only works with iPhone and that is a non-starter for her.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 10, 2014 05:33 AM (RqRa5)

12 Mark Flacy, the story I'd heard is that driving your horseless carriage down a dirt road at a thundering fifteen or even twenty miles per hour kicked up so much dust that the vehicle occupants wore tightly-closed coats. That made it difficult to extract one's pocketwatch, but it worked fine if one attached a watch where it could be seen in the gap between the coat's cuff and the glove.

Posted by: Boviate at September 10, 2014 05:12 PM (iiTgy)

13

The only Apple anything that I currently own are the iShares in my iRA, so I hope all of their new products and services are huge successes. I did own an Apple IIe back in the early 80's (dual floppies and an 80 column card), so I think I can safely say done my fair share to support the company over the years.

Posted by: Bob (aka Robert) at September 11, 2014 10:58 AM (/38s5)

14 Oh, also notice how Apple set all the watches in their marketing renders to 10:09am. That's them biting their thumb at all other high end watch makers. HEH.

Posted by: Bob (aka Robert) at September 11, 2014 02:11 PM (/38s5)

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