Dan Frommer, writing for Quartz:
Notifications, one of the early big-idea purposes of a smartwatch, are pretty reliable and, with some attention to their frequency, very useful. One night at a restaurant, when a handful of things I’d put up for sale on eBay were closing around the same time, the sensation of an arm buzz every few seconds as a new bid rolled in was an amusing delight. (Another round, garçon!)
And
I reply to a large portion of text messages from the watch, using customized quick responses. Tracking my exercise has helped me lose 10 pounds.
And then this:
But that’s about it. And they are pretty much the same ways I used the watch when I first got it.
I love my Apple Watch. I look at Dan’s list and think, those are all great things. If my Apple Watch only did those things, it’d be worth every penny and I’d wear it every day, just for that. But I also get turn-by-turn directions on my wrist and, if need be, I can get them without having to look at my screen.
I can get a phone call on my watch, and I can even transfer that call to my phone. I can get all sorts of notifications, including texts, email, calendar events. The latest software release, which gave developers the opportunity to build 3rd party complications, made the Apple Watch face even more valuable to me.
I don’t think of the Apple Watch as a potential replacement for my phone, I don’t feel limited that it requires a connection to my iPhone to deliver much of its functionality. The Apple Watch does plenty. It makes my iPhone better.
I do think Dan’s writeup is smart, worth reading. I just think that calling the platform “stalled” is a bit “glass half empty”. I think the Apple Watch is an amazing achievement, one that helps me every single day.
He makes some compelling arguments but … prematurely?
But one thing is clear – expectations of Apple are rising. Another thing is emerging – As few products as Apple has and as resourceful (in terms of money and smarts) as they are, they have shown themselves incapable of maintaining operational smoothness on every platform. With iCloud running smoothly (albeit not as useful as other cloud platforms), Mac App Store is a mess. Apple Music is a question mark. Apple Maps remains lightyears behind Google Maps.
Apple’s core strengths in hardware design and OS design remain. Their ability to support an ever increasing number of platforms and to provide cloud-based services is not best of class.
“Mac App Store is a mess.”
Now that one is not fair at all. “Mac App Store is missing features developers want”? Sure. “Mac App Store went down for a day, and that’s unacceptable”? Sure. But a mess? No friggin’ way. 🙂
Also: Still enjoying Apple Maps here. Still MUCH more accurate than Google Maps, and faster to boot.
Given recent news you could add “Mac App Store is missing developers.” I think the biggest mess with the Mac App Store is that Apple doesn’t seem interested in cleaning it up.
Apple in some areas acts like the kid that starts a million things and then loses all interest. Aperture, iWork, Fotos, Remote.app, App Stores… Once the initial idealism is gone, there is really nothing. Really glad that Logic and Final Cut do still get some love, it would be MS and Adobe hell everywhere without them.
The single thing holding Apple’s cloud offerings back has a name: Cue. He never got the cloud, and the Apple Music disaster should be nothing anybody executes and keeps his job.
It’s not rally half a year, though. It’s 3 months. The releaser of watchOS 2 is, for me, the start of the clock since it’s the first time devs could run apps directly on the Watch.
I’ve always thought that we’ll have a better bead on what Watch could be a year after watchOS 2, when developers have had some times to think about what apps would be cool, to design and code those apps and for the apps to get recognized. It will obviously also help to have new generation of the Watch itself.
The thing is, articles like Frommer’s are simply premature. Remember the iPhone? No SDK for the first year… and this is the device that game rise to the cliché “There’s an app for that….” Now, look at it.
Yes, the use cases need to broaden – but Apple won’t be the one to do most of that, independent developers will be.
“articles like Frommer’s are simply premature.” Absolutely. I’m surprised that an industry vet like Frommer would even write the piece from that angle.
Color me skeptical but it stinks of yet another blogger wanting to grab eyeballs by saying something controversial about Apple. With another 4M units shipped last quarter it’s out sold the entire rest of the smart watch sector over and over and over.
I actually agree with Dan’s article. When the watch came out, it seemed like it was going to get so much better with software updates, native app support, etc.
However, after Watch OS 2.0, I no longer feel that way.
I was hopeful about 3rd party complications, native apps, etc., but have yet to find any that are useful to me.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t love my watch. I use the fitness aspect every day, and since I got my watch, I have lost 20lbs and am now running about 40 miles a week.
I also love getting notifications on my watch.
However, personally I am still frustrated by most things that require me to interact with the watch. Even native apps are still so slow that it is far faster to get out my phone and use it. I can send the canned text messages without problems, but trying to use dictation is also VERY slow for me, and I have no way of correcting the inevitable mistakes. I’ve also sent out messages only to have the watch tell me a half hour later that it was unable to send it.
I don’t see how any of my major frustrations are going to be fixed without a new version of the watch with new hardware.
I’m surprised Dan didn’t mention Apple Pay, which is a heck of a lot easier to use from the watch than the phone. As for apps on this “stalled” platform, I think it all comes down to use cases; they’ll be different for everyone. I regularly use Authy on my wrist (which is a real game changer when you regularly see someone fiddling with and trying to read the non-backlit LCD screen on the 2FA token they carry around on their keychain), but not everyone wants 2FA. On a recent trip to NYC, I relied heavily on the brilliant Take Me There, which I populated with useful addresses before leaving home.
The watch still isn’t for everyone, and not every app is useful to all owners. But neither are blanket statements.
“I was hopeful about 3rd party complications, native apps, etc., but have yet to find any that are useful to me.”
I agree but see above. It’s only been 3-4 months since watchOS 2 and it takes time to think of an idea, design and code it, etc. If we’re still in this place in a year, then I’ll be disappointed. Sometimes tech people forget that a few months really isn’t a long time.
“I don’t see how any of my major frustrations are going to be fixed without a new version of the watch with new hardware.”
Some things will absolutely need new hardware. Again, people in tech need to temper expectations a bit – the first iPhone was downright primitive compared to the 6S or even the 4. But you don’t get a 4 or a 6S without the first iteration.
maps light years behind Google? nonsense. even the major tech sites have been publishing articles putting them about the same. that trope is expired.
yeah except iWork has undergone under a major change, has a wonderful online component, and is being actively developed.
what music disaster? it works fine for me. I pay ten bucks and discover new stuff. all my music synced across devices.
agree on the sluggishness of even native apps, and Siri (for me).
Generally, I’m one to pick apart criticisms of Apple. But I do think the Mac App Store criticism is fair, and would be unwise to ignore. The bottom line is, the trend line for the Mac App Store is pointing down, not up. Sure, one prized developer leaving ship is not much of a concern, but when its an increasing trend, then alarm bells should be ringing. There was an article not long ago about how an app that managed to become the #1 paid app for a short time, had sales number that should be SHOCKING for the number 1 app on the entire store.
So yea, I think the trend line has been sloping further and further down, without any indication from Apple that they are concerned and committed to making it the best place on the Mac to discover and download software. It just sort of appeared several years ago, and thats about it.
One thing that clears up the view of the Apple Watch is to recognize that it is not a standalone product. The actual product is really “iPhone 6S + Apple Watch.” Which you could also call “iPad nano with secondary wrist display.” Never mind the money, that is a really, really, really tech nerd product. That doesn’t strike me as the product for everybody at all.
When I look at iPhone 6S + Apple Watch, I just think I would rather have an iPhone 6 mini with the display from the iPhone 5 and as thin as an iPod touch. That is a much simpler solution for me. If a notification is not important enough for me to take a phone out of my pocket for it, then I already turned it off years ago. I have 2 iPads and a Mac — I really find that these days, my iPhone is just a phone now. It literally is doing 70% iMessage texts and 20% FaceTime calls and 5% camera and 5% calendar notifications, same as my phone was doing in 2005, except the calls had no video. Anything other than that, I get it done on my Mac or 2 iPads. I’m surrounded by computing all the time.
So I am suspicious of the idea that it’s really better for most people to walk into an Apple Store with an iPhone 4S and walk out with an iPad nano with secondary remote wrist display, featuring 19 kinds of Force Touches and 2 kinds of battery chargers and 2 strikingly different user interfaces.
So if Apple Watch has not sold to every iPhone user, or even a really significant percentage, then I am not surprised at all.
I have a friend who put his credit cards into Apple Pay in his new iPhone 6, then put the iPhone 6 into a nice case, and the iPhone 6 was about twice the size of his wallet. And he was like, “I always thought of the digital wallet as being smaller.”
Give me an iPhone the size of a credit card. That makes much more sense to me for Apple Pay.
Maybe that is what Apple will do this year. Now that they sold giant phones to everyone who wanted one, maybe they will have an iPhone mini and then after that maybe they can get to a standalone Apple Watch. If they can do a standalone Apple Watch that does iMessage and FaceTime then maybe I would trade my tiny iPhone for that. But wouldn’t I still need a camera?
It would be kind of weird if 10 years from now, everyone has a watch where they are doing calls and texts and nobody has a camera anymore? Or maybe you have a drone following you around shooting video of you 24/7.
The smartphone (tele + PC + SLR + camcorder + watch + ….) is only 7 years old. And now people are beginning to question cost, size, convenience, complexity, etc….
Controlling this “bloat” are the vertically integrated mobile networks exerting oligopoly control.
Why don’t they ratify LTE-D in its fullest form, which would be device to device mesh without regard for carrier? It would dramatically increase performance as well as the range of possible solutions, while driving unit costs down.
But no; they like being the gatekeeper of this very inefficient all things to all people model.
What if, instead, we reduced the “phone” down to a chewing gum pack size radio/storage/battery dongle that lasted for a week or more between charges, cost less than $30 to produce and was easily replaced if lost.
This “hub” would access multiple wide area RF networks and interface with “n” devices in the users LAN/PAN as they traverse an infinite number of sensor and other networks.
Someone should model this for the regulators and capital markets. Then we’d see real competition in access.
When we think about all the diversity of demand and where we are headed with wearables, IoT and embedded devices everywhere, it seems to be overkill (and completely inefficient) to have all in one solutions. Sort of like what we think about personal transportation today. Mind-numbingly inefficient.
Instead everyone can have their own flavor of mobile processing and I/O.
We’re hung up on the 5-6 inch screen and watch today. But what happens when “Glass” can be in any sort of eyewear and not resemble today’s borg-like look? And what happens when voice and gesture and air-typing really work well? And what happens when screens can be rolled up or folded up.
Within 10 years, all of this will be reality.
Only we need far more open horizontal control layers and settlement systems (price signals and incentives) for all the potential layer and boundary interworkings to occur efficiently for the app community and vertical integrators (marketers) to make this reality.
Today there are silos everywhere (core and at the edge) that dictate the feature/function/form of the smartphone. Hopefully 10 years out the model has begun to change.