New York Times blogger Brian X. Chen asked Tim Cook about the Apple Watch and battery life. Tim’s reply:
“I don’t think we skipped over it. I addressed it in the presentation myself. We think that based on our experience of wearing these that the usage of them will be really significant throughout the day. So we think you’ll want to charge them every night, similar to what a lot of people do with their phone.”
Charging is done via induction and requires a special cable. If life between charges is long enough (say, at least 24 hours), that shouldn’t be an issue. No doubt, someone will create a brick capable of charging both your phone and watch about the size of existing iPhone/iPad charging bricks. Keep one in your backpack or your pocket and you’ll always have a charging solution.
Charging at night seems about right. I don’t think it is reasonable to have the same expectation for Apple Watch battery life as I do for my wristwatch. This is a new type of device, more functionally aligned with my phone than with my simple watch.
Charging my Watch at night is no different to me than charging my computer or my iPhone. There is the added strain on the power grid that this brings, but that’s a different story altogether.
This past June, as part of his WWDC keynote, Apple VP Craig Federighi introduced HealthKit. Last week, Apple put out this press release, announcing that iOS 8, which includes HealthKit, would officially be available on September 17th. From the release:
The new Health app gathers the information you choose from your various health apps and fitness devices, and provides you with a clear and current overview in one place. HealthKit APIs offer developers the ability for health and fitness apps to communicate with each other. With your permission, each app can use specific information from other apps to provide a more comprehensive way to manage your health and fitness. Users will be able to gather and monitor their own fitness metrics using apps such as MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper and Strava. Healthcare providers can now monitor the data their patients choose to share through apps such as Mayo Clinic or Epic’s MyChart app that will be used by Duke Medicine and Stanford Children’s Health/Stanford Medicine, among others.
Details are now starting to emerge on the Duke and Stanford efforts. From the linked article:
Stanford Children’s Chief Medical Information Officer Christopher Longhurst told Reuters that Stanford and Duke were among the furthest along.
Longhurst said that in the first Stanford trial, young patients with Type 1 diabetes will be sent home with an iPod touch to monitor blood sugar levels between doctor’s visits.
HealthKit makes a critical link between measuring devices, including those used at home by patients, and medical information services relied on by doctors, such as Epic Systems Corp, a partner already announced by Apple.
Medical device makers are taking part in the Stanford and Duke trials.
DexCom Inc (DXCM.O), which makes blood sugar monitoring equipment, is in talks with Apple, Stanford, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about integrating with HealthKit, said company Chief Technical Officer Jorge Valdes.
DexCom’s device measures glucose levels through a tiny sensor inserted under the skin of the abdomen. That data is transmitted every five minutes to a hand-held receiver, which works with a blood glucose meter. The glucose measuring system then sends the information to DexCom’s mobile app, on an iPhone, for instance.
Under the new system, HealthKit can scoop up the data from DexCom, as well as other app and device makers.
Data can be uploaded from HealthKit into Epic’s “MyChart” application, where it can be viewed by clinicians in Epic’s electronic health record.
This is a fun read. In today’s Monday note, Jean-Louis Gassée explores the creation of and reaction to the Apple Watch. Most interesting to me was the discussion of the potential role that Apple’s newly hired designer Marc Newson, a longtime pal of Jony Ive, played in the design of the Apple Watch.
The video embedded below is a few years old and has been making the rounds since word of Newson’s hire by Apple got out. It shows Newson lovingly, even wistfully, paging through his watch design portfolio. If you have not yet seen this, take a few minutes to watch. You’ll get to know a bit more about Marc Newson and, I think, you’ll be struck by how much the Apple Watch inherited from these designs.
Apple’s market cap pushed back over the $600 billion mark. Second place is Exxon Mobil Corp at $412 billion, then Google at $397 billion and Microsoft at $386 billion.
A few days ago, fresh from the iPhone 6, Apple Watch, Apple Pay launch, Tim Cook appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. The show edited and released the first half of that interview Friday night. The complete video is embedded below, courtesy of Hulu. A clip from the segment even made the rounds in regional tech circles, after كازينو اون لاين مصر reposted a snippet alongside a commentary on digital payment ecosystems in emerging markets.
I love Charlie Rose’s interview technique. He’s laid back, draws his subjects in, let’s them unburden themselves. He has a collection of issues he wants to explore, but does so so softly, you might not realize he’s even steering.
There’s a lot to enjoy here. Charlie gets hands on with the new iPhones and a look at the Apple Watch on Tim’s wrist. Interestingly, Tim wore his watch, but controlled it himself, saying “I may have some things on here that you shouldn’t see just yet.”
Charlie talks IBM partnership, Beats acquisition, product design philosophy and a lot more.
Tim talks about Steve Jobs with great reverence. He tells the story of Steve telling him he was going to be Apple’s new CEO, getting the sense that Steve was not going to bounce back.
Ordering a new iPhone? Got one to sell or trade in? If so, take a look at the linked article. Apple Insider takes a look at nearly a dozen big-name buyback services and retailers and gives a sense of the going trade-in rate and the trade-in process.
If you watched Apple’s event on Tuesday, you no doubt heard that Tim Cook gave away U2’s newest album to about 500 million iTunes users. Three days after the release, Interscope Records said the release is “the biggest album launch ever.”
Of course that makes sense with so many people getting the album for free. However, older albums have also seen significant sales, as well.
“After delivering the new album for free to over half a billion iTunes customers, U2 also saw an unprecedented number of its previous releases enter the iTunes US album chart,” according to Interscope. “As of Thursday afternoon, 24 of the bands titles had charted on the top 200 of the chart, and the U218 Singles Collection had reached top 10 in 46 countries.”
It was a good day for Apple, but it looks like it turned out okay for U2 as well.
JPMorgan Chase’s chief financial officer, Marianne Lake, took the stage at a financial conference on Tuesday under strict orders not to mention her company’s involvement in Apple’s new payment system.
But when Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, at a news conference in California at the same time, finally brought up Apple Pay, one of Ms. Lake’s deputies in New York took a green apple out of her bag and put it on a table on the stage, signaling that Ms. Lake was free to discuss the service.
“So we are very excited about Apple Pay, and Chase customers will be able to participate in that,” Ms. Lake said, noting the appearance of the apple with a nod of her head.
The elaborate measures that Ms. Lake took to keep Apple Pay under wraps until the chosen time underscore the degree of preparation — and investment — that went into a partnership that has the potential to transform one of the banking industry’s most fundamental business lines.
I love these insider stories about how Apple cajoles, forces, convinces and beguiles companies into doing the things Apple wants to do in the ways Apple wants to do it.
Near Field Communications (NFC)—the technology behind those swipe-free terminals and now Apple Pay—is nothing new. The technology has existed since the late 1990s and appears in many forms, including key fobs, payment cards, and even (on certain phones) Google Wallet. It isn’t necessarily the most widely deployed payment technology, but it certainly isn’t new.
Which begs the question: Why all the hype about Apple Pay? Is it merely the Reality Distortion Field hyping something that’s actually ho-hum? Or is there something deeper here?
Rich Mogull is my go to guy when it comes to Apple security and issues surrounding it. As usual, he writes well and simply about a complicated topic.
I admit that seeing my colleagues leave has been a bit like having everyone around you suddenly raptured while you stand gawking with a ham sandwich shoved halfway in your mouth.
But I’m not here to feed Internet tittle-tattle. Rather, as someone who’s been with Macworld (and MacUser before it) for a very long time, I’d like to provide potential employers (and those who are simply interested in their favorite writers) some details about my departed colleagues.
Chris Breen is the only “big name” left at Macworld and his tribute to his former fellow employees is touching. And, having known personally many of the people he writes about, I’d say his assessments are 100% correct.
Many thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. PDFpen Scan+ offers scanning and OCR from your iPhone and iPad. Scan directly from your iPhone or iPad camera. Batch scanning is quick with post-process image editing. Scan cropping is fast and precise. With the new PDFpen Scan+ 1.4, you can automatically upload scans to Dropbox or PDFpen’s iCloud storage. After OCR, preview the results, then copy the text for use elsewhere. Share your scanned PDF, with embedded OCR text, by email or to your favorite cloud service. PDFpen Scan+ works on both your iPhone and your iPad, and it’s available on the App Store.
A whimsical post with a valid message at its core. One value of the Apple Watch becomes evident when you receive a call or text and your hands/arms are busy/full:
To check that message or call all I have to do is lift my wrist and the gyro kicks in, turning the display on. Then I can simply glance at my wrist, rather than stopping the dogs to fish out the phone, to see if the message is important enough to drop what I’m doing. And I can then respond through the Watch rather than having to dig for the phone.
As the clock ticked midnight in California, Apple fans around the world made their way to the Apple Store web site and app, as well as to many telco sites, in an effort to get their hands on an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. There were problems on many fronts, as demand trumped availability.
Australian iPhone buyers crashed the websites of all three major telcos this afternoon in a rush to pre-order Apple’s two new smartphones. Pre-orders for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were due to begin at 5pm this afternoon but demand proved too great for Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and even Apple websites, many of which failed to load at all.
The fact that these outages are spread evenly across the web, telcos, Apple, and even across continents tells me this is about demand, not about poor provisioning.
If you are considering one of the new iPhones, spend a minute walking through this carrier-by-carrier list of deals. Most notably this beat all trade-ins, match all deals offer from T-Mobile:
America’s most iconoclastic carrier is promising to beat any iPhone trade-in deal offered by AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint. Find a better value for your old phone than T-Mobile is offering, and they’ll match that deal and give you a $50 credit toward your bill. Plus, switch from your old carrier to T-Mobile and they’ll also give you up to $350 per line to get you out of your old contract.
The company also just announced that certain models of its phones—including the iPhone 6—will be able to make calls and send texts over Wi-Fi. And for frequent flyers, any plane with Gogo Air Wi-Fi will give free access to T-Mobile users starting September 17th.
Note that AT&T now charges a $40 “upgrade fee” if you want to buy a new phone on an existing contract. Odd strategy, considering how easy other carriers are making it to switch and how easy Apple makes it to move from one phone (back it up) to a new one (restore from backup).
“If there was a lot of emotion in my voice today, it’s because we’ve all been waiting for this day for a long time. It felt so great,” Cook, 53, told USA TODAY. “The people at this company are doing the best work of their lives, the best work that Apple has ever done.”
“It’s an incredible opportunity for us to switch people from Android to iOS. So yes, this is epic. It is epic,” he says.
I made mention of this both on Amplified and Your Mac Life yesterday. Cook seemed genuinely excited up on stage.
Sean Bonner says, “There’s no way for a brand to “insert themselves into a conversation” about a tragedy like this without it being bad.
“Today (or whatever other tragedy this kind of thing has happened with) isn’t the time for marketing. It isn’t the time for branding or getting people to pay attention to companies. It’s a time for people to interact with each other, and the only respectful thing for brands to do is stay out of it and wait for tomorrow to get back to business.”
I see these kinds of marketing “tributes” all the time in these situations and Bonner and Monteiro are right – if you are a brand, just STFU.
Even though you have to sign-up to watch this keynote, I would recommend you do it. I was at the event yesterday and I just love Legere. He’s crazy as a bag of hammers, but he speaks bluntly and honestly about today’s carrier market. If you don’t want to watch the video, you can read the press release.
The Knowledge of London is a real-time, street-level test of memorization skills so intense that it physically alters the brains of those who pass it.
To qualify for that elusive green badge, you need to learn by heart all 320 sample runs that are listed in the Blue Book, the would-be cabbie’s bible. You will also have to commit to memory the 25,000 streets, roads, avenues, courts, lanes, crescents, places, mews, yards, hills, and alleys that lie within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.
I am severely directionally challenged and couldn’t complete The Knowledge on pain of death but reading about the process they have to go through is fascinating.
It will start with a friend. A friend who lives in San Francisco, maybe. Or who works as a venture capitalist. Or who recently had a birthday.
And then, sometime around June, you’ll get an unexpected infusion of cash — a security deposit you forgot you’d paid, or a few hundred dollars from your tax return. And you’ll find yourself on Apple.com late at night, admiring the watch, wondering if the $349 you’d spend would ever really be worth it.
What the hell, you’ll say. Add to cart.
It won’t work this way for most people but this will be a process very similar to what many have gone through in the past with Apple products and certainly will with the Apple Watch.
I love a good engineering effort. Paul Sprangers uses known numbers and some images from the Apple Watch site to build a more complete picture of the various Apple Watch dimensions. Be sure to read the comments, too.
Apple is facing a potential setback in China, one of its biggest and fastest-growing markets, after the much-anticipated introductions here of the new iPhone models were delayed.
On Wednesday, Apple told China’s three big state-owned mobile service providers that it would not release the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in mainland China on Sept. 19, when sales start elsewhere. The carriers had already booked advertising campaigns for the phones.
Last year, Apple released both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c in China on the same day it was released in the US. It’s not clear how long the lag will be for the iPhone 6 release. The issue seems to be one of regulatory approval:
News reports in China on Wednesday said the iPhone 6 had not yet been approved by the Ministry for Industry and Information Technology, which must sign off on the technology of devices like smartphones. No approval for the iPhone 6 could be found on the regulator’s website on Wednesday.
Here are some comments on the announcement of Apple’s “newest” digital device:
“I was so hoping for something more.”
“Great just what the world needs.”
“Heres an idea Apple – rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive line up? Or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?”
“I still can’t believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares? I want something new! I want them to think differently!”
“Why oh why would they do this?! It’s so wrong! It’s so stupid!”
“Come on everyone, y’all are saying it sucks before you have even held it in your hand.”
“The reason why everyone’s dissapointed is because we had our hopes up for this incredible device.”
Pretty typical commentary.
Except, all of the above is taken from the forums at Macrumors and all of the above, and more, are referring to the launch of the original iPod.
