Less than Stellar Member
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If it's not red and showing substantial musculature, you're wearing it wrong. |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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The more I look at it, the more I think Apple sat down and said "A watch is a personal, intimate thing, even more so than the phone. How can we make it feel like an extension of your personality? What can we do to make it an engaging experience that people will actually want to use?"
When you look at the features page, one of the very first things is customizability. All those finishes and bands, plus all those watch faces, plus the "complications", which I am pleased to learn is a term from traditional watchmaking, that allow you to put your choice of widget things into the corners of your watch face. Next is "more immediate ways to connect." They put a dedicated button on the thing for contacts, and contacts are shown with little head shots. You silence incoming phone calls by covering it with your hand. What could be more natural? There's that person to person walkie-talkie thing. Those weird little person to person doodle things, or "sharing" heartbeats. There's the "taptics" notifications, that keep things entirely between you and your watch without the irritating buzzing or dinging. The new pressure and velocity aware touch, which I predict will rapidly become second nature to anyone using this, and open up a whole new world of access to functionality. Is some of it gimmicky? Maybe, but there sure seems to have been a lot of thought around how a device like this could feel warm. Not some techno whiz bang digital life unit, but fun. Human. Genuinely personal. Add in the sensors that allow health and exercise tracking, the ability to do the Pay trick, and maybe, just maybe, Apple is figuring out why you would want a smart watch. Not because of features or specs, but because you like it. It feels right. It feels good. After a while, you wonder how you ever got along without it. That's the Apple X-factor, isn't it? We see some hardware and some demos and it's easy to go "yeah, I guess, but why?" And then it turns out all the little things, all the little choices and details and the way it all works together, that's the innovation. That's the product. And you don't know what that really is until you use one. So of course that all might be the worst kind of fan boy rationalization. This could be a bit of a miss for Apple, especially at the announced price points. But if there's a huge new category defining hit here for Apple, its appeal is going to be in the coolness of the experience, and the way that coolness connects to something more than just the gadget hound in you, not in the specs or hardware design or even any given "feature." Just like always. That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated |
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Less than Stellar Member
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Interesting. I wonder if there will be some way to keep something like a Beats playlist offline for when you're not connected to the device. Sounds like Beats will be getting into the bluetooth headphones business ASAP.
If it's not red and showing substantial musculature, you're wearing it wrong. |
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Mr. Vieira
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
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You get a arm/bicep case for your iPhone, you put the watch on your wrist, and then you clip an iPod shuffle to your shirt (or ear), have the Beats headphones connected to the nano in your pocket (for the FM radio). Simple...what's the problem?
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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Yeah, you'd have to assume that Apple isn't putting a huge amount of storage on this thing, so I'm guessing the music on the go part is largely a matter of selecting playlists before hand.
Still, they've mentioned that the watch can use the new Continuity feature, so I imagine it will be super easy to move seamlessly from iPhone or Mac to Watch. That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated |
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Thunderbolt, fuck yeah!
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Denmark
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To take another page from Inspector Gadget, Penny always wore her watch, but when she needed to some something more fancy she brought along her bigger computer book for such purposes. Sort of like having an Apple Watch for the usual things to do and then an iPad for the tasks that do require a big screen. Having in-between devices are just wasteful clutter. Now that is so not the Apple way! |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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For the foreseeable future, watches can't do any of that. Not do it somewhat less well so you can weigh the tradeoff, but can't. At all. No one in their right mind is going to try to browse the web on a 1.7" screen. Or watch a movie. Or watch streaming video. Or try to read anything more than a few lines of text. So sure, at some point there might be some kind of virtual screen technology that isn't repellent to the average person like Google Glass, but if the question is "why bother with two devices when you can just have one" the answer is "because you can't." Not now and not anytime soon. By the time magic brain implant (literally) heads up displays happen, we can see what Apple does with it, but for this watch and these phones, and what people want to do with phones, today, there's no such thing as a wrist sized replacement. That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated |
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Less than Stellar Member
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I Iiked this overview of the watch. I think the author nailed what seems to be my internal debate about the watch. I have a watch I absolutely love and I have a hard time seeing myself displacing it for the apple watch. But considering I am a complete tech geek, I will probably end up buying one.
That said, I hope that someone comes out with some retro watch games. I loved those things when I was younger. |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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His only concerns seem to be entirely centered around the Watch's cache as a watch-- that compared to the highly desirable analog timepieces that watch people covet, it just can't evoke that sense of old world quality. I think that's a given, but given that "watch" is just one of dozens of jobs one would hire this device to do, I don't think it's a huge stumbling block for success. That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated |
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Less than Stellar Member
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If you've ever had to resize a standard bracelet or god forbid a mesh bracelet, you'd understand the reason for the praise. Those things are abominations of creation.
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
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Yeah, that Benjamin Clymer piece is good. (Thanks for pointing it out, torifile.) He clearly articulates what I’ve vaguely felt all along.
Although there will always be people who appreciate fine mechanical watches, the risk is that the Apple Watch will prove so alluring and ultimately useful that it will squeeze everything else off the wrists of WISs across the world. And at that point, collecting watches becomes merely collecting them. Since a great part of the appeal of watch collecting is in fact wearing them and enjoying their functionality, this will indubitably reduce the number of mechanical watches sold – if it happens. Maybe Switzerland is, after all, effed. Although it must be remembered that similar predictions were made when Quartz watches hit the scene. It will be much easier to analyse the true threat to Swiss watch brands with hindsight. For now, the more important question is whether the Apple Watch will sell to people who don’t have fine Swiss watches, which is of course the vast majority of us. Apple does have a remarkable advantage in trying to get this adopted: its smartphone market share is disproportionately high among people who have fine watches, care about nice things generally, care about fashion, or just have more money than average. … engrossed in such factional acts as dreaming different dreams. |
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Right Honourable Member
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Regarding Apple Watch and Apple Pay
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careful with axes
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
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The difficulty in removing a link from a standard metal watch band is the extra step of buying the tools for the job, otherwise it's actually quite a simple process that anybody can do in a couple of minutes.
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Less than Stellar Member
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Unless the pin system is a pin and collar where you have to keep track of the pins and collars. Or you're between link sizes. It's not complicated but it isn't trivial especially if you've never done it before and don't want to damage your fancy watch or strap.
If it's not red and showing substantial musculature, you're wearing it wrong. |
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Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472 Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
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Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.” Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it. |
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Sneaky Punk
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Thunderbolt, fuck yeah!
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Denmark
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As of now there are really only two major hurdles, though, they are formidable: 1) Finding a substitute for the phone sized touch screen UI and 2) developing a suitably energy dense battery to drive watch. If you take away the chassis, screen and battery from an iPhone the remaining components don’t take up very much space and they could already today be crammed into a watch sized device. The way I see it there are essentially three models: 1) A smart phone centric model where the phone is the central hub and the watch is an extension like headphones and such. This is what we have today. 2) A smart watch centric model where the watch assumes the role of the phone and phone perhaps is just a tethered screen that you carry around. This is probably unrealistic, as some/most people will still prefer smart phones over watches. 3) An equal model where both phones and watches are independent devices that either work alone or together. There was a writer at Infoworld.com who was very excited about Apples Hand off tech and thought that “liquid computing” was the future of computing. Briefly put, your data is synced over all your devices and it doesn’t matter which one you pick up or leave at home. As I said, I would prefer a high low mix whit one device that I can always carry on me and do most tasks on and then a higher end device that can do the heavy lifting and isn’t constrained by the size of my pockets. Presently a smart phone can easily fill the low role, but a smart watch would be even more mobile and if I started wearing one anyway and it could do most of a phones tasks, then why bother with the phone? Even if it won’t be able to do all the things a smart phone can do, it’s kinda the same argument as with the laptops and tablets: People were dismissing the iPad because it couldn’t do the same things as the laptop, but it turned out that as long as you could do most of the things and offer a more mobile package to off set the lack of features, then people were willing to buy into it. And look, today you can even get MS Office for the iPad. I accept that some/most people might prefer to just stay with smart phones, maybe even just model no. 1, but I’m convinced independent working smart watches also will show up inside the next three to four years. Quote:
Ars also has an article about how Microsoft once tried with smart watches (and apparently coffeemakers): http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/...-smartwatches/ Well, at least they weren’t trying as hard as with tablets. |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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The reenter PIN when you take off your watch and/or die is a great solution. It suggests that Apple is really putting some thought and effort into how something intimate as a watch can function as a digital interface to the activities in your life.
I wonder if at some point the biometric reads will be sophisticated enough to take a snapshot of your vitals such that they are unique as a fingerprint, and serve as a completely secure way of verifying your identity at all times, without any intervention from the user. That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated |
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Apple Historian
Join Date: May 2004
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Apple Historian
Join Date: May 2004
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Does anyone wonder if the pricing is sort of deceiving? The $349 price might only refer to the price of the watch without a band. It also might only refer to the price of the smaller of the two options. I'm guessing an Apple Watch with a band at the full size will be $450 as the least expensive option for the larger size face/screen.
"We are reviewing some 9,000 recent UNHCR referrals from Syria. We are receiving roughly a thousand new ones each month, and we expect admissions from Syria to surge in 2015 and beyond." - Anne C. Richard, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration |
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Right Honourable Member
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I don't think they'll make the larger one more expensive. It's a valid assumption that most of the smaller ones will be bought by women and the larger ones by men - it'd amount to some kind of gender tax.
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Mr. Vieira
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
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I can't wait to hear what they crazy gold one is going to go for.
On those bands, I see that they slide in from the side (and that many - all? - of the clasps are magnetic). Do either of those seem like iffy, "less than" approaches? Granted, we don't know so much. But all I've been able to think is "what would keep that face from wanting to slide or scoot around over time (or with any strong movement/force)"? Does it lock or snap into place, or is it just held there via friction, being so exquisitely-crafted and engineered? What keeps it in that slot, once you slide a band into the face housing? And the magnet thing, vs. a locked-in buckle or cinched type of closure...if you ran your wrist across a railing a certain way, or if you're engaging in some horseplay or whatever, would it be easy to undo and fall off? Hope they're very strong magnets, because we don't need some sort of ugly backlash/scandal brewing. Quote:
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Veteran Member
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Unknown
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I think grabbing 1 set of white and 1 set of black bands, then mixing them on the watch could be fun. Have one half of the watch face be black on white and the other white on black. Then attach the contrasting band to each side. Or have a face with that yin/yang swirl, paired with the black/white band combo.
But mostly, I want that Milanese-chain mail armor band, and one of the classic link bands. These things may come out smack in the middle of tax-return season! Do you know where children get all of their energy? - They suck it right out of their parents! |
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Mr. Vieira
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
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I didn't think about that. You could mix and match the bands, assuming the connection was the same? But different colors or whatever.
Everyone's got $349 in mind (that's all I thought/heard on Tuesday), but that's just the starting price. It could get up there pretty quick. I'd have to believe, referring to Messiah's question above, that you buy a watch and it'll come with a basic band that pairs nicely with that style (maybe just black). But if you want something special or funky, that's where the extra money comes in? Because it would be a gazillion times easier for Apple to just ship all these things out with a black (or silver, depending) band for each of the three styles. But the accessory rack at the Apple Store, Target, Best Buy, etc. is where you'd see all the various bands for sale. I can't imagine the logistics and hassle of shipping these many sport ones, with this many green, that many blue, then the gold one with various combinations, etc. They're better off just providing a barebones, but nice, one...and then raking in all the money from everyone looking to customize. I imagine there will be users who may own multiple bands for different looks or moods (assuming they're reasonably priced). What about third parties? Will Apple Watch bands be the iPhone cases of 2015 and beyond? As long as you can make connector that slides into that groove on the watch, I assume third-party bands are possible? There are no electronics or sensors in the bands themselves, as far as I know. Imagine that industry, should these things truly take off. Apple could always stay one step ahead of it all by slightly tweaking the connection specs with each revision (a third-party band from 2015 wouldn't fit the 2016 Rev. B iWatch because Apple changed the size and shape of how the band connects to the watch, etc. |
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Apple Historian
Join Date: May 2004
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I think many people who do buy one will go for a sports-oriented band for sports and casual wear and one for more formal settings like work or going out. If I was seeing it properly, it looked like the bands kind of snap into the underside of the watch body, and it looks pretty secure. It seems that it would require a concerted effort to disconnect the band.
Also, the logistics of this thing are serious: 3 separate lines with two finishes in each, and then numerous bands. Cook is the master of supply-chain, so i'm sure it'll be worked out but it looks as nuts as any iPod mini lineup they've ever had and then some. "We are reviewing some 9,000 recent UNHCR referrals from Syria. We are receiving roughly a thousand new ones each month, and we expect admissions from Syria to surge in 2015 and beyond." - Anne C. Richard, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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My guess is that each model will come with a "base" band (baseband, ha) that's the least expensive option that works with the finish and you can upgrade from there. Maybe the Watch Sport will be the $349 model and be available off the shelf in a variety of band colors, like iPods have been. The Watch will come with, maybe, the link bracelet? And cost, what, another $50? Or would it be $100? Then the Watch Edition would come with a poor person to carry your watch and tell you what it says.
That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated |
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Formerly Roboman, still
awesome Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
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The only way I could make the price make sense to me was assuming that the larger model would be $50 more. That works out nicely—it puts their likely volume sellers at $399 and (assuming a $100 bump for the stainless steel/sapphire "main" model) $499. I think Apple really wanted to get that particular model at the magic $499 point. And a gender tax? If ladies make 70 cents on the dollar compared to men, a $50 discount is the least Apple can do. And note that they never call them women's and men's sizes. I might get the 38mm, just because I have small wrists. Quote:
I think it definitely says something that this middle Apple Watch is just called Apple Watch. I think Apple views it as their volume seller, at least at first. The Apple Watch with white sport band is the most commonly pictured watch on Apple's site, and it's the one in the front page. I'd bet my ass that exact model is going to be $499 (and $449 for the small one), and then go up as you move to leather or metal bands. and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong |
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: Dec 2005
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Everything I have seen from Apple has it Apple Watch -> Apple Watch Sport -> Apple Watch Edition I suspect the Apple Watch Sport will be more expensive than the Apple Watch. |
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Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
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I see that they're ordered that way on the product page, but the Watch is stainless steel and sapphire glass with stainless steel and leather bands, whereas the sport is aluminum, "ion strengthened" glass, and "fluoroelastomer" (which means brightly colored plastic?) bands. From a bill of materials standpoint, I can't see how the Sport would be the more expensive model.
That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated |
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