Every Apple Watch you see in an ad shows a time of 10:09. According to the linked article:
Watchmakers have traditionally chosen 10:10 as their display time because it ensures that the watchmaker’s logo, which is usually engraved beneath the 12, isn’t obscured by the watch hands. On top of that, having the hands at 10:10 is symmetrical.
Apple, however, chooses to display a slightly different time on all of its Apple Watch promotions, setting the time one minute ahead to 10:09 rather than 10:10.
It’s no mistake, either. Apple has a history of choosing a display time that has some significance, famously setting the time on all of its iPhone promotional materials and images to 9:41, the approximate time of day when Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone to the world back in 2007.
So why 10:09 for the Apple Watch? Apple appears to be making a statement about being slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to smartwatches, and the facts back this theory up.
My 2 cents. I think this is more about symmetry, about attention to detail, than about being ahead of the curve. At 10:10, the hour hand will be 1/6 of the way between the 10 and the 11 on the watch face. If the minute hand is precisely on the 2 (as it would be at 10:10), the minute and hour hands would not be symmetrical. At 10:09, the hands would be much closer to symmetrical perfection.
Back up your iOS device before you read another word.
OK. On your iOS device, tap Settings > General > Software Update and update to iOS 8.2, which landed yesterday.
One little goodie that came along for the ride is the brand new Apple Watch app. Fire up the app and you’ll see a tab bar with three icons. The first one, the default, is where you’ll pair your iPhone with your Apple Watch, if you do decide to get one. The pairing process is done via your iPhone camera, which I find fascinating. You can also pair manually, by tapping the info icon to view your Apple Watch name, then tap it on the list to pair.
All very interesting, but not particularly useful. The second tab is a short collection of Apple Watch videos, all of which you’ve likely already seen.
The third tab is a front end for the Apple Store, formatted nicely to fit your phone.
The Apple Watch app will, no doubt, become much more useful when the Apple Watch actually, you know, ships.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Apple’s human resources chief Denise Young Smith said the company is partnering with several non-profit organizations on a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort to increase the pipeline of women, minorities, and veterans in the technology industry—and, of course, at Apple.
Good to see Apple doing more on this issue. There’s lots more to be done though and Apple can’t do it all alone. This has to become an industry-wide effort.
Kirk McElhearn, who assures me that my Apple Watch bet spoils are speeding my way from the UK, has put together a PDF mockup of both Apple Watch case sizes so you can try them on your wrists while you wait for the real deal.
As we learned from the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus mockups we did, the trick is to get your printer to print a document at actual size.
[Here’s a second take at my Apple Watch pricing post, this time, hopefully, with the case description/pricing right.]
The long wait is over. The prices have been established.
We now know that the low end entry point for the Apple Watch Sport (the one with the aluminum case) is $349 for the 38mm model and $399 for the 42mm model. This model comes with the sport band in your choice of white, blue, pink, green or black.
The mid-point model is the stainless steel Apple Watch. With that same sport band, the stainless steel Apple Watch is priced at $549/$599 for the 38mm/42mm.
Want a nicer band to go with that? The stainless steel Apple Watch with the Milanese Loop is $649/$699. The 38mm model offers a leather strap with what’s called a Modern Buckle in black, midnight blue, soft pink, or light brown for $749. The 42mm stainless steel Apple Watch offers a Leather Loop in black, bright blue, stone or brown for $699. Finally, the stainless steel Apple Watch can be purchased with a stainless steel link bracelet for $949/$999 or a black stainless steel link bracelet for $1049/$1099.
I know what you’re thinking. Show me the high end. The creme de la creme. The one that Jim Dalrymple (shown here with what looks like the stainless steel Apple Watch) will no doubt gift me the second it’s available.
Here’s the scoop. The Apple Watch Edition comes in 8 models. The 38mm case is $10,000 in 18-Karat Yellow Gold with a custom version of the sport band in either white or black or $17,000 in 18-Karat Rose Gold with a custom modern buckle band in rose gray or bright red. The 42mm case is $12,000 in 18-Karat Rose Gold with a custom white or black sport band, $15,000 in 18-Karat Yellow Gold with the Black Classic or Midnight Blue Buckle band.
The thing is, every case and every band is a showpiece of modern design with incredible attention paid to every fine-tuned detail. The functionality is well thought out, especially for a brand new product, functionality you know will only get better with time.
My 2 cents? Apple will sell every case and every band they can make. Got some money to spend? Go here (at least in the US) and price out your own Apple Watch.
As to the impact on Apple’s bottom line? I’ve read a lot of analysis on this topic. To me, this is focus on the wrong thing. The Apple Watch is not a revenue driver. It is part of the ecosystem. Apple Watch exists to help add value to the brand, to bring new customers into the fold and keep existing customers happy, even delighted. Though the Apple Watch will drive some amount of revenue, it’s more important job is to sell more iPhones, to keep the ecosystem humming.
Be forewarned, this is a flash video. If not, I would have embedded it. But that aside, this is a nice cut-up of the two hour event video, focusing strictly on the highlights.
Anyone spot a non-flash version of this video, or a non-flash alternative? Tweet it to me, I’d be more than happy to pop in a replacement.
Update: Here’s a non-flash video put together by the fine folks at Apple Insider. This one uses a voiceover, rather than a cut together of the original speakers, so I’ve left the link to the original as well, in case that’s more your speed.
Like most people who attended Apple’s event on Monday, I was waiting for news of the Apple Watch, but I was distracted early on by another, incredibly important announcement: ResearchKit.
ResearchKit is a software framework that allows doctors and researchers to gather data more frequently and accurately than ever before. The software development framework is a crucial component of the entire process, as Ecodelogic explains. It’s a way for those people to help find the causes and cures for the diseases that haunt humanity.
As I sat listening to Jeff Williams talk about ResearchKit, I thought to myself, this is why I love Apple—they care. They don’t just talk the talk and put out press releases about massive donations they make to charities, they are actually making a difference and putting the power of the most successful company in the world behind what they say.
There are world-class institutes that have already made apps for researching asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. This isn’t a pipe dream that we hope will happen someday, it’s happening right now. Meanwhile, individuals seeking cancer-related products may consider exploring options such as fenbendazol for humans.
To make sure everyone can benefit from ResearchKit, Apple is making the software open source.
During the presentation today, one of the researchers said they sent out 60,000 letters, which led to about 300 people participating in their research study. With the iPhone, there are potentially millions of people that can participate in research in near real-time. The amount of data that doctors can collect and analyze will be staggering. For the first time, we may understand the cause and cures of diseases so much better than we ever have before.
Apple is a products and services company. They are a very rich company. They have proven today that they care about more than just profits—Bravo.
“iOS apps already help millions of customers track and improve their health. With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations. “ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”
I didn’t see this one coming, but I’m really glad Tim and company decided to do it.
“Apple has reinvented the notebook with the new MacBook, and at just two pounds and 13.1 mm, it’s the thinnest and lightest Mac ever,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Every component of the MacBook reveals a new innovation. From its fanless design, ultra-thin Retina display and full-size keyboard that’s 34 percent thinner, to its all-new Force Touch trackpad, versatile USB-C port and breakthrough terraced battery design, the new MacBook is the future of the notebook.”
So Apple has the MacBook Air, MacBook, and MacBook Pro lines again. I spent some time with the new MacBook today and it is stunning. I want that gold one.
“Apple Watch begins a new chapter in the way we relate to technology and we think our customers are going to love it,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We can’t wait for people to start wearing Apple Watch to easily access information that matters, to interact with the world, and to live a better day by being more aware of their daily activity than ever before.”
It was a great keynote and a very interesting product.
Finally, learning and practicing a new language is easier and more intuitive than ever before. Introducing HelloTalk, the language app where your teachers are native language speakers from around the world. You just pick the language you want to learn—there are over 100 from which to select—and almost instantaneously you’ll be in touch with native speakers of that language … and you’ll start learning and practicing immediately.
HelloTalk isn’t a course you strictly follow; rather, you learn and practice at your pace and in the manner that best meets the way you learn. Practice foreign languages with people around the world. Simultaneously speak and type the language you’re learning. Record your voice before speaking to your HelloTalk friends and compare your recording to standard pronunciations. Change your friends’ audio messages to text for better understanding, and receive help to improve your grammar. Easily translate whenever you don’t understand, and so much more.
With HelloTalk, you’ll discover learning a new language is fun … and fast. Download your copy for iPhone or Android today.
On Monday, Apple will officially launch the Apple Watch, its first completely new product since the iPad was introduced in 2010 as well as its first major launch under CEO Tim Cook. Gigaom will be covering what Apple has in store live from the Yerba Buena Center on Monday.
But Apple actually introduced us to the Apple Watch back in September, and since then, Cook has spoken about the smartwatch several times in public. When he gets on stage in San Francisco on Monday to introduce Apple’s “most personal device ever,” some of what he’s going to cover will be new, and some of it he will have said prior, during the past six months as he’s been honing his Apple Watch pitch.
Here’s what to expect from Apple Watch, from Tim Cook, the boss of Apple himself (read it in a smooth-as-molasses southern drawl.)
This is a fascinating collection of quotes, more so if you can get Tim Cook’s voice in your head as you read them.
First things first, here’s a link to the live stream of the event, which will start later today at 10 a.m. PDT.
According to the site:
Live streaming video requires Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X v10.6.8 or later; Safari on iOS 6.0 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 6.2 or later.
As Tim Cook told a London Apple Store sales staff: “We’ve never sold anything as a company that people could try on before.”
Well, sort of, but point taken. This is a new path for Apple, stretching the bounds of their take on technology, reaching into the world of fashion.
Pebble kickstarts aside, smart watches have not sold well. But perhaps that’s because they’ve not been done well. We’ll soon find out if there’s a market out there. My money’s on Apple making this market, as they’ve done with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
Here’s video of the first test run of #Fury325 at Carowinds from a riders point of view! The coaster was tested late Wednesday afternoon, March 4. Debuting this spring, Fury 325 will be the world’s tallest & fastest giga coaster. The thrill ride stands 325 feet tall with an 81-degree initial drop and reaches breathtaking speeds of 95 miles per hour.
Susan Kare is the artist responsible for many of the classic Mac icons that are universally recognized. Now her impact as a pioneering and influential computer iconographer has been recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Susan Kare designed all of her early icons on graph paper, with one square representing each pixel. Now this archive of sketches has been acquired by MoMA, jointly with San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, and has gone on show as part of a new exhibition, This is for Everyone: Design Experiments For The Common Good.
We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Kare for her lovely and elegant icon designs.
Apple’s patent application is for a method that allows them to make 18k gold that has, on a volume basis, less gold than regular 18k gold.
How can this be? It’s because Apple’s gold is a metal matrix composite, not a standard alloy. Instead of mixing the gold with silver, copper, or other metals to make it harder, Apple is mixing it with low-density ceramic particles. The ceramic makes Apple’s gold harder and more scratch-resistant—which Tim Cook touted during the September announcement—and it also makes it less dense overall.
The media is going to have a field day with this. They’ll get it wrong but they’ll still lose their collective minds over it.
M.G. Siegler, as part of his 500 Words series for Medium:
Assuming Learmonth’s sources are correct, HBO is just tying up loose ends (read: Apple) at this point to launch the new service alongside the premiere of season five of Game of Thrones in April.
Yes, there has to be some concern for HBO launching such a service during what will undoubtedly be peak demand — after all, they shit the bed last year during the exact same time with HBO Go — but with MLB by their side to help them this time, we should be good to go.
Will HBO Now catch on, develop the traction it needs to achieve critical mass, to legitimize the à la carte content model?
Based on how this new service fares for HBO, we should see many others fall in line to do the same thing. And given that I fully suspect this will be a massive success for the company, we could see a domino effect quicker than many imagined was possible.
When ESPN tips and goes straight to their users: watch out.
It’s not so much the cord-cutters that Big Cable has to worry about, it’s the upcoming millions of cord-nevers — kids who head off to college or their first jobs and don’t feel like cable television is worth the cost. I would bet on a huge percentage of those kids signing up for HBO Now to go with their Netflix accounts.
On Apple TV:
The current Apple TV has a nice chunk of content, but Apple needs to make it a no-brainer for consumers to go with their offering. That means getting all (or at least most) of the content currently offered on television. Up until now, that has seemingly meant working with the cable providers. But if the aforementioned domino effect happens, Apple could have a much easier time getting what they want (whether that’s dealing with networks directly or using them as leverage to bend the cable operators to their will — we’ll see).
Couldn’t agree more. This is a shrewd partnership for Apple and could be the discriminator that breathes life into Apple TV sales.
Eric Migicovsky is a smart watch pioneer. His new Pebble Time kickstarter has raised over $16 million and Pebble has sold more than a million watches. He has a rare voice of experience and insight into what Android Wear has done and what Apple brings to the market.
Barron’s interview with Migicovsky is an interesting read. A few excerpts:
Notifications are fun and useful and wonderful, but it’s not the only part of the future. The real thing is, the number one reason, is to tell the time. When you look down at your wrist, you have to be able to see what time it is. But more important, what’s the context around time? Am I late? Am I early? What’s the traffic like?
On Pebble’s pins in a timeline interface:
What is important is not the app but the content of the app. If you overlay it on top of time, everything clicks. You see these pins on your timeline, and you could have 20 different ones, but it won’t be complicated.
ESPN is taking the idea of the current engine, where you follow teams that you like. They are putting that into the past, present and future organization. So, you have a single pin from a provider like ESPN that in future, exists as a heads-up of when a game starts. In the present, that pin traverses time and becomes a real-time score keeper. In the past, that exists as a record keeper. It’s time-based context.
On Android Wear and the slow moving smart watch market:
We have a million users, the biggest smartwatch population. Android Wear, I don’t think anyone ever respected them. They didn’t have any new ideas. I like their voice responses, though. We looked at that. The benefit we have are passionate users that care. Looking at the competition, it’s crazy that we launched three years ago and it’s taken people this long to launch their first.
On sales:
The only one that has a chance of selling a lot is Apple Watch. If you look at the numbers from [research firm] NPD for the holiday quarter, Pebble outsold everyone else including Samsung. We were twice the volume of Motorola [360] in terms of units. All the other ones are smaller footnotes at the bottom. It’s cheap to make a watch but they don’t actually get sold.
And on taking on Apple:
I think Apple is a massive competitor. They are Apple, and there’s no reason to underestimate the power they have. We are specifically doing things Apple can’t do, like having a battery life of 10 days, like having this new interface, being waterproof, working with both [Google’s] Android and with iOS.
Good stuff. I think Migicovsky has Pebble right where it needs to be, a real sweet spot in the market.
A few days ago, a 72-year old man who went by the names Indiana Jones and, more recently, Han Solo, crashed his vintage World War II-era Ryan PT-22 Recruit open cockpit plane, making a hard landing on a Los Angeles golf course (likely in an attempt to travel back in time).
Thankfully, Harrison Ford is on the mend (as a friend said, not sure I could stand losing Spock and Jones/Solo in the same week), but here’s a picture of the plane, sitting on its belly after the crash.
For years, Oracle has tormented Windows users by bundling adware with its Java installer for Windows PCs. Now Oracle has begun including the same adware as part of a default installation of Java for the Mac, using the same deceptive techniques.
More sleazy business practices for you and yours to be made aware of. Thanks to Rob Griffiths for the heads up.
Kirk McElhearn wrote up his take on the pricing of the Apple Watch line here.
The Apple Watch Edition is not a luxury watch; it’s just a gold-cased version of the cheaper watch. There’s nothing exclusive about it, nothing special. It’s not like more expensive watches where you pay for complex machinery. Yes, there is gold; that will make it more expensive than the other models. But not that much. Estimates of the cost of the gold suggest that the metal would cost less than $1,000.
As such, I think the list price for the base model Apple Watch Edition will be $1,999. There will certainly be a price differential by size, and it could be a couple hundred dollars for this version. In addition, the watchbands will cost as much as several hundred dollars. There’s just no reason to pay more. I repeat, this is not a luxury watch; this is a smartwatch with a gold case.
The consensus seems to be that the high end iPhone 6 costs about $247 to make, including parts and labor. Without a contract, that same iPhone 6 sells for $849. That’s a price/cost ratio of about 3.44 (the price of the phone is a bit more than 3 times the cost).
Apply that same model to the Apple Watch, and you get a price ranging from $3,400 to $6,800.
The terms of the bet? Kirk wins if the price of the highest end Apple Watch Edition is US$2500 or less. One penny more than that and I win.
The stakes? If I win, Kirk sends me a large packet of digestive biscuits from the UK. If he wins, I send him this.
For the purposes of Gatekeeper, Apple verifies the identity of the developer, but not their intent. It’s up to you to ensure that the applications you install and run on your Mac come from the people you think they came from, and we’ll show you how to do that.
The key words are, “it’s up to you” to not let your guard down and to always be aware of what you are downloading and installing. Apple is doing their part and it’s up to the user to do theirs.
Apple will replace AT&T in the Dow — an exclusive club of 30 stocks that also includes tech giants Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco as well as brand-name consumer firms Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Disney.
“As the largest corporation in the world and a leader in technology. Apple is the clear choice for the Dow Jones Industrial Average,” said David Blitzer, managing director and chairman of the index committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices, in a statement.
Apple will enter the Dow at the close of trading on March 18.
As tha article says, this is mostly symbolic but, for a company on the edge of bankruptcy less than 20 years ago, it’s a remarkable journey.
This may just ruin your weekend. Load the page, check and uncheck to winnow the available content (no cartoons or commercials, for example), then hit the Power button. Sit back in your bellbottoms, open up a Tab, cross your hushpuppies, and enjoy.
I think these are pretty nice looking, elegant without complexity. Each sample features a Live Demo button so you can see the site in action. And, if you are of a mind, you can view the page source of each demo to get an idea of how it was put together.
Each template is 100% free under the creative commons attribution license (attribution, in this case, means give html5up the credit they deserve).
Austin Mann was in Dallas to watch one of his photographs being hung on the side of a building.
I couldn’t be more proud to announce I’m part of Apple’s new Shot on iPhone, World Gallery campaign! They’ve selected a collection of images from photographers and every day iPhone users around the world and are plastering them on buildings, billboards, bus transits and more.
Three of my pieces were selected, two photos and one time-lapse! It’s super surreal looking up on the side of the building in Dallas and realizing I shot this picture!
The above video shows a bit of the process of capturing the transformation of this building into a big piece of waterfall art (and also a few tips about how I captured the time-lapse.)
Jump to the page and watch the video. You’ll watch the process of taking down an existing ad, see a time lapse of the new piece being hung, and get a really nice tip on shooting a panorama. All of this was done using an iPhone 6 (of course!)
Financial Times’ columnist Nick Foulkes had the chance to sit down with Sir Jony Ive just a few days before Monday’s big Spring Forward event, an event presumably designed to pull the curtain back on the missing details of the Apple Watch.
This is a reasonably long piece, so there’s a lot to digest. I found the piece incredibly well written, but with a tone that suggests an outsider’s voice, someone familiar with technology and gadgets, but without that intimate knowledge of Apple’s history. But rather than being off-putting, this gave the article a certain charm. Well worth the read.
Some details:
When asked how many Apple Watches the company will sell, he answers: “I’m much more concerned about how we can make them as good as possible than how many we’ll sell. We’re brutally self-critical and go through countless iterations of each product.”
And:
When the issue of the frequent need to recharge the iPhone is raised, he answers that it’s because it’s so light and thin that we use it so much and therefore deplete the battery. With a bigger battery it would be heavier, more cumbersome, less “compelling”.
And:
“One of the things that struck me,” says Ive, “was how often I’d look at my watch and have to look again quite soon afterwards, because I hadn’t actually comprehended what the time was. If I had looked at something on my phone, because of the investment involved in taking it out of my pocket or my bag, I would certainly pay attention. I quite like this sense of almost being careless and just glancing. I think for certain things the wrist is the perfect place for this technology.”
He runs through the three ranges of Apple Watch with their different materials – the stainless-steel Apple Watch, the anodised-aluminium Apple Watch Sport (both from $349) and the Apple Watch Edition in 18ct yellow or rose gold (with an as yet unconfirmed price of around $4,500) – and almost infinite combinations of colours and aesthetics.
About two weeks ago, I did my own little pricing exercise and came up with a range of $3,400 to $6,800 for the high end model. Even if the $4,500 price for the high end model is wrong, it does fit squarely in that range. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about this on Monday.
