[SunnyD]

Originally Posted by Lmw160

First and foremost, the Apple is not a watch. It's simply a trendy, wrist worn reminder.

Seriously? How do you define watch? Something that's on your wrist and tells you the time? Then yes, it is a watch.

[Obioban]

Originally Posted by SunnyD

Seriously? How do you define watch? Something that's on your wrist and tells you the time? Then yes, it is a watch.

I don't know, it might not be a watch because of how much more it can do than a watch.

As in, is a smart phone really a "phone" anymore?

more like "pocket computer with data plan, that happens to include a 'phone' app by default."

"phone" doesn't really describe what the modern smart phone does.

I suppose the Apple Watch (and similar) are as much a "watch" as the iPhone (and similar) are "phones".

[justinnum1]

For my friend who mentioned the watch has poor resolution
http://www.displaymate.com/Apple_Watch_ShootOut_1.htm

[chris82]

Originally Posted by tony20009

I think the Apple Watch (AW) and other smart watches have the potential to depress the high end watch market. In their day, carriage and equestrian enthusiasts didn't think the train would replace the horse and carriage. Even as recently as the early 1900s, plenty of high-end pocket watch owners were certain that the wrist watch would have no impact on the pocket watch.

Even today there are companies that still make pocket watches and horse drawn carriages. Nonetheless there's no denying that both items have suffered a great contraction in their presence in the marketplace. It is only because of that shrinking to a very few suppliers that the prices for the best examples of such things remain high. Stationary is another item that has suffered great declines in revenue.

Take Crane & Co., for example. I'm all but certain that if they didn't have the government contract for producing the paper used to make U.S. paper currency, they would now be a footnote in the history of paper making. Prior to the computer and home printers connected to them, and email, I can remember Mother looking at letter she receive to see if they were written on Crane paper. She and Dad spent at least one day a week (over the course of a week) writing letters to friends and family. (They don't do so any longer because they've outlived them all, but they do still write.) I recall that for our wedding invitations and announcements, Mother made a big deal with my fiance about the fact that the invitations had to be engraved and on Crane stock. Ditto the "thank you" notes.

Now I can't speak for Mother and who's left among her clan of social doyennes, but I can count on my hands and toes the number of hand written letters I receive each year and that arrive on Crane paper (or any other cotton paper). If I told Mother that, I fear she'd be incredulous and suffer apoplexy upon finding it to be so. The computer hasn't made communication any less effective, but it has drastically reduced people's need for paper on which to write their correspondence.

No, I don't think HEWs will disappear completely, but I'm not ready to deny that smart watches, the AW, has the potential to drastically shrink their availability in the marketplace. At the start of the contraction of the industry, prices will absolutely fall for the vast majority of makes. Once the dust settle and the few that are going to survive solidify their place and ongoing existence, the price for those specific makes of watch will rise again, albeit at a slower pace than they have over the past twenty years. The prices for watches that will no longer be made will also stay high, but the demand for them will be significantly lower than it is today. They'll be very much like a Newman Daytona is today; it's super expensive, but only a handful of folks actively want one, although lots of folks would be happy to have one if it fell from the sky and into their laps.

The AW isn't "it," but what it evolves into could well be:
A few days ago, I read about a U-Werk watch. The watch is their Titan model. It's not a watch I'd have predicted I'd be keen on, but for some reason, I think it's pretty cool. (Maye I won't feel that way if I see it in person???) For this discussion, however, the U-Werk Titan is mostly irrelevant; nonetheless, what struck me upon seeing it was that it could very well be a watch that could signal the end of the mechanical watch's supremacy in the fight for wrist real estate.







Now the watch itself, and it's maker, are among the leaders in innovative, mechanical watch design and engineering. But why do I think it holds "promise" as the beginning of the end for mechanical watches?

The size of the watch is why. Look at the last pic. The watch is clearly larger than anything one'd today wear outside of casual situations, but seeing what a "cuff watch" looks like on the wrist in that pic, I can easily see a far thinner version, filled with integrated circuits, the case and arm- attachment mode dressed up as needed, and with the watch case and screen curved, as are AMOLED televisions, to conform to one's wrist/arm. With the form factor I described, that would make the watch essentially a cuff-style smartphone, it'd be thin enough to fit under a shirt sleeve and large enough to be function-independent of a separate device, and it'd be large enough to read pretty much the same stuff folks are willing to read on their smartphones.

Think about it....forget what the U-Werk looks like on the face for the face of what I'm writing about would look like any smartphone screen. The case profile, particularly were it thinner, would not look bad at all. As I've often written on WUS, smartwatches, wearables, will most certainly evolve from what they are now. What I've proposed above -- the "iCuff" -- seems like a very viable evolutionary step from what we see today as a smartwatch.

I want to reiterate that the only things about the Titan that resonated with me re: the AW were:

• As a form-factor, it didn't look anywhere near as bad as I thought, prior to seeing the wrist pic, such a large device would, and
• As a form-factor, I could envision how were "some device" of similar size, but thinner and curved (but rigid, not flexible) could conceivably overcome the "tethering" that is the biggest shortcoming inherent in the Apple Watch, which, AFAIK, is the best selling smartwatch yet.

I looked at the Titan and thought about what impact the "not so bad as I thought it'd be" form factor might have were it improved upon to make it more compatible with how people want to wear wrist borne devices, that is, fitting nicely under a shirt sleeve. At that point, one need only have it tethered to an earpiece, and quite frankly, the form factor design of the earpiece should be similar to that of the discrete ones singers use, rather than the ones offered for phones right now.

As far as the Titan itself goes, I don't at all care for the watch itself. The price and mechanical reality of the Titan are also irrelevant to the topic at hand.

So after having shared the thoughts above, someone commented:



My response:
TY for sharing some thoughtful input. Along with recognizing things that need to happen to make something like an iCuff come to fruition, your comments allude to the fact that what it'd take to make it happen is careful thought and hard work. I like the positivity of your post.

There's no question in my mind that making such a thing happen could require a variety of usability and change management tactics. Will that cost a lot of money? Well, of course it will. But the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, or any number of other electronics giants have the resources to make that sort of thing happen. I certainly am not naive enough to think developing such a thing would require but a $500 budget and happen in a handful of weekends in my basement. LOL

Few things that were paradigm shifts in the way people interact with their world and other people materialized with the snap of the finger. My mere proposition of a plausible form factor is but the first step. Had I not seen the Titan and the AW, it wouldn't have crossed my mind that taking ideas from both devices could lead to a new device that could be better than both, as well as being a better functional device than are conventional wristwatches.

The days of the mechanical watch as a commonly purchased consumer good are numbered:
One thing that's clear to me, however, is that the mechanical wristwatch has been taken about as far as it's going to go. What's left to do with one? Make it more accurate? Thinner? More waterproof? More esoteric complications? Incrementally more efficient resulting in longer gaps between required servicing and longer power reserves? Sure, one can do all those things, but in doing so one must also accept that the point of diminishing returns as goes mechanical wristwatch design and fabrication has already been reached.

There's a reality that must be faced when considering the lifespan of a technology: the more primitive it is, the longer its term of usefulness and presence in the daily lives of mainstream consumers. Take the hammer, for example. It's going to be very long time yet before a hammer is replaced by something else. Look next at climate control systems, however, and we see that things such as wall tapestries/quilts/animal skins, devices that endured and were needed for thousands of years, have become nothing other than collectable art objects and decorative accessories. IMO, the day when the mechanical watch, even the conventional quartz watch, is no different isn't that far away in the future.

Does anyone really, for example, need a mechanical watch that is more accurate than +/- a few seconds per day? Boosting the accuracy and other functional abilities of a mechanical watch is nice to see as a collector, but paying what it costs to have a +/- two seconds at the most per day watch just isn't what most consumers cotton to. Collectors may get a kick out of that sort of thing, but we collectors have to realize that our obsession is economically sufficient to sustain only the smallest of watch companies, those that produce fewer than ~10,000 pieces per year, and that charge huge sums for that kind of performance.

The economic viability of producing ever greater watches that perform at extreme limits is not dissimilar from what one sees in the auto industry, both with new and vintage cars. One can sell a $4M vintage car because one only needs to find one person who will buy it out of some 7B people on the planet. Ferrari can sell all the cars it produces because there are are enough "super rich" folks on the planet and they aren't seeking a car that's a daily driver; it's a "fun" purchase, not a functional one, even though, yes, a Ferrari will transport one from point A to point B.

Shifting back to watches, now, we must recognize the only thing that lets Rolex, for example, sell ~1M watches a year is that they cost less than a Ferrari, or even a Honda Civic or Ford Focus. Consider the "Ferrari" watches, that is, watches that "have it all" -- first rate performance, first rate craft, first rate design, etc. -- and ask yourself how many of them are bought each year. I don't know the quantity sold, but I know that even if you sum the sales of all of the makers of such watches, I won't arrive at 1M pieces per year. Yet, "having it all" is about the only place for the mainstream mechanical wristwatch to go in terms of becoming "better."

What's going to replace the conventional wristwatch?
Within the next score of years, it's almost certainly going to be something akin to a smartwatch or smart glasses. It's pretty clear to me that the best we've yet seen from producers of smartwatches is probably the AW. But the AW has its drawbacks as many folks on WUS have noted: tethering to a smartphone, short battery life, small screen size, and so on.

As I look at the situation, however, the only one of the drawbacks that can't be readily overcome is the battery life, and the ways I know of given existing and near term power source technology are (1) larger batteries, and (2) supplementing the battery with solar power, either to obviate the need to run on battery power when light is present, or by using light sources to recharge the battery. The other obstacles can be immediately resolved directly or indirectly by altering the form factor of the smartwatch.

All the best.

[tony20009]

Originally Posted by BMW F22

The only way I can see how a smart watch could threaten the mechanical watches would be for the smart watch to also have a mechanical, automatic movement. In other words, it would have the movement for time and the digital portion for everything else that a smart watch is suppose to have/do.

That's been tried: http://smartwatches.org/learn/top-hy...ping-features/ .

Tag is also working on a hybrid:

• http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/tag-heu...-new-smartwatc
• http://www.computerworld.com/article...gle-intel.html

All the best.

[tony20009]

FWIW, it seems the cuff style evolution of the smartwatch has already been introduced. I guess I wasn't the only one to see that coming.













From what I quickly could find, it seems Rufus still is bound to the idea of their Cuff as a satellite for a larger phone/tablet like device which would act as a hub. I think that won't be necessary because circuits are continually getting smaller. It shouldn't be long before the size and thickness of devices will be contingent on the size of the battery inside and the display screen that users require. That said, I still think the Rufus Cuff is a step in the right direction for smartwatches.

All the best.

[1MOREMOD]

looks a little star trek to me. asthetically would have to come long way.

[ASAP]

I was just wondering about everyones opinions on this device. I demod one at the store and I can find absolutely zero value in it. I have many apple devices, essentially the entire ecosystem but the apple watch appears to be nothing but a piece of jewelry.


All of its phone, texting and email capabilities are near useless. To talk, you have to have a headset or speak a few inches away from it... what is the value in that? To text, same thing or reply on your phone... what am I missing here?

[RandomHero]

http://www.e90post.com/forums/showth...8#post17826538

[ASAP]

Originally Posted by RandomHero

http://www.e90post.com/forums/showth...8#post17826538

And yet not a single person in that thread has used it or played with it... :

[P1]

Let's leave this one in the watches section, right?

[BMW269]

You what I think of AppleWatch? It is a piece of crap sold for the price of a piece of gold. Smartwatches, all of them, are probably the dumbest "smart" thing to hit the market.

Rule of thumb: Who wears a smartwatch is dumb. Doesn't mean who doesn't, isn't.

[sterile stork]

I sold both of mine within hours of receiving them and extensively touring the unit my sister received. Not my cup of tea.

[sterile stork]

Originally Posted by ASAP

And yet not a single person in that thread has used it or played with it... :

Yes, many have in that thread--please read.

[P1]

That looks almost as idiotic as the Google glasses. No, it actually is: it's as dumb as the Google glasses.

[MightyMouseTech]

Originally Posted by P1et

That looks almost as idiotic as the Google glasses. No, it actually is: it's as dumb as the Google glasses.

[AIRPOWER]

Originally Posted by tony20009

Its like a nerd with horn rimmed glasses, a pocket protector and a slide rule came back to the future.

[tony20009]

Originally Posted by 1MOREMOD

looks a little star trek to me. aesthetically would have to come long way.

I had essentially the same thought upon seeing it pictured. Nonetheless, I think as a direction the technology and form factor will have to head for smartwatches to displace traditional wristwatches, it's directionally correct. Need it be thinner, less angular, less "clunky" looking? I think, "yes," but those are minor challenges and nowhere near insurmountable.

I think once the form factor and some data input/device interaction enhancements happen, the cuff style device has legitimate potential to overtake wristwatches. It provides space comparable to smartphones and to the extent that it's as equally usable as a smartphone, it could well be a considerably more compelling use of one's wrist "real estate" than is a conventional watch.

All the best.

[tony20009]

Originally Posted by AIRPOWER

Its like a nerd with horn rimmed glasses, a pocket protector and a slide rule came back to the future.

Well, truth be told, I'm not nuts about the specific appearance of the Rufus Cuff. What's significant about it IMO is the general concept.

All the best.

[NickyC]

Cook came out Monday and said demand for the watch is greater than supply.

True, but the supply is low because they just admitted they have a shortage of watches due to defective parts. I'm sure it's all just a coincidence of course.

Typical these days: make an estimate, see you're not going to meet the estimate, revise the initial estimate lower, beat the lower estimate, claim you're crushing and beat estimates.

BUY

[Obioban]

This seemed like an interesting and fair take on the Apple Watch to me.

WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG AND YOUR HEART WAS AN OPEN BOOK

Regular readers of this column are well aware of my affinity for the James Bond movies. I’ve been a fan for as long as I can remember. As a kid growing up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I was a staunch Roger Moore fan. I loved the Connery films too, but they felt old, and as a kid, “old” is not cool. That perspective applied even to their watches. Roger Moore wore digital watches; Sean Connery wore mechanicals. Digital watches were cool; analog watches were old-fashioned.

Today, I’ve come to my senses, and I know that Connery was and always will be the definitive James Bond, and his Rolex Submariner — reference 6538 — the definitive Bond watch. The coolest of the cool. But Moore’s Bond’s digital watches were cool, too. Connery drove the most memorable Bond car, but Moore’s watches are the ones that most people think of when they think of a James Bond watch — the ones that were laden with secret gadgets. Connery’s Rolex was just a Rolex.

Look at this Pulsar from Moore’s first Bond movie, 1973’s Live and Let Die. It had a red LED display that, to preserve battery life, only turned on to display the time when you pressed a button. (Hold that thought.) And then there’s this gem — a Seiko DK001 from 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, which could receive secure text messages from MI6. I mean look at it:



The idea of a digital watch that can receive secure text messages was remarkably prescient. The idea that the messages would print out on ticker tape was remarkably silly. How could a device that size include a label printer? How many messages could it receive before running out of tape? Why would a spy want secret messages from headquarters printed out?1 The proper design, in hindsight, is obvious: the messages should have been displayed on screen — which is exactly how Bond’s Seiko worked in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only. And look at the design. Even the style of Apple’s link bracelet is reminiscent of that ’70s Seiko.

This is what Apple Watch is: an ambitious modern take on the digital watch.

YOU KNOW YOU DID, YOU KNOW YOU DID, YOU KNOW YOU DID

I’ve worn analog watches since sometime in college, and in recent years I’ve fallen hard for purely mechanical automatics. But I’ve always had, and always will have, a soft spot for digital watches. I’ve always thought watches were cool. I’ve always thought computers and electronic gadgets were cool. Digital watches exist at the intersection of these interests.

My watches as a teenager were digitals made by Casio, pretty much like this one that you can still buy today for $10: black plastic watch, resin strap, two buttons on each side. The interfaces were complex, inscrutable at first. I always knew the interfaces were bad, but I accepted them because I wanted the features. I liked having a stopwatch and countdown timer. And of course the interface was complicated: all these features were packed into a tiny little watch.

During the past four weeks, I’m surprised how much I’ve been reminded of those Casios. In the way it felt cool in 1987 to have all those features on my wrist, it feels cool today to have these features on my wrist. This is the watch my teenage 1987 self would have expected my 2015 self to own. Apple Watch’s interaction model is complicated. That doesn’t mean it’s too complicated — and I don’t think it is. There’s simply no way to avoid complexity with the number of features — which, borrowing from the terminology of the horological world, Apple is calling “complications” — Apple Watch encompasses.

Do not expect to strap on Apple Watch for the first time and feel entirely at home. It’s different, new, and surprisingly expansive. Apple Watch demands exploration. Those old Casios were arbitrary.2 Apple Watch has a logic behind its interaction design — but it needs to be used to be fully understood. The basics are obvious — initial setup and pairing with your iPhone remarkably so — but not everything. It’s a tool you have to learn to use. It is not an iPhone on your wrist.

But here’s the thing. Much of the criticism of Apple Watch is being driven by the question “Do you need an Apple Watch?” And that is simply the wrong question. It’s not useful for evaluating the watch as a product or platform, and it’s not useful to answering the question as to whether you or anyone else should buy one.

Apple Watch is not hard to understand fundamentally. It’s just a digital watch, reimagined for today’s world, where wireless networking is nearly ubiquitous, and a fully functional computer that runs all day long can be fitted in a 38mm watch case. That’s it. “Just a watch” doesn’t mean “just a timepiece”. A watch is a gadget of which timekeeping is just one possible feature. Digital watches, in particular, have always been about more than just the time and date, and Apple Watch takes this and runs with it.

It needs to justify its existence no more than any other watch — mechanical or electronic — ever made. Of course you don’t need it. No one, not one person on the face of the earth, needs any $400 watch, Apple Watch or otherwise.3

The right question is simply “Do you want one?”

It’s about desire, not necessity. Convenience, fun, and style are not needs. They’re wants. And people will gladly pay for what they want. The iPad faced similar misguided criticism. How many times did you hear or read someone say of the iPad, “Why would anyone who already has a phone and a laptop need an iPad?” That was the wrong question, because almost no one needed an iPad. The right question was “Why would someone who has a phone and laptop also want an iPad?”

In my initial review of the Apple Watch three weeks ago, I wrote:

Asked about wearable devices two years ago at All Things D, Tim Cook said, “The wrist is interesting. The wrist is natural.” That Apple would make a watch, if not necessarily this watch, is the natural, dare I say inevitable result of these two factors: the wrist is a natural place for a wearable gadget, and Apple can now make a full computer with acceptable battery life4 the size of a watch.

Half the fun of the gadgets like Roger Moore’s Bond’s watches was imagining that we — regular folks in the real world — would have them in the future, alongside jetpacks and flying cars. Phone calls on our wrists. Asking our watch, verbally, what time tonight’s Yankees game starts and getting the correct answer a few moments later. But importantly: packaged not as a clumsy, homely device, but in the casing of, well, a nice, stylish watch.

If you don’t see the joy in that having come to fruition — both sides of it, the function and the style, the engineering and the design — then of course you’re not going to see the point of all the hoopla surrounding Apple Watch. And if you do see the joy in it, if you do think it’s cool that it even exists, then don’t overthink it. It’s a cool watch that does cool things.

[*]1. In theory, Bond’s watch could have printed “secure” messages by using some sort of self-destructing ticker tape material, but everyone knows self-destructing messages from HQ are a Mission Impossible thing. ↩︎︎
[*]2. Here’s a user manual I found for a vintage Seiko digital watch. Not quite the same model as the one from the Bond films, but close. Download it and see how un-obvious just about everything was — from setting the time to using the stopwatch. This four-button interface is more or less how every digital watch from my youth worked. (So much so that it makes me wonder whether Casio and the rest of the industry’s digital watches were in fact rather shameless lower-priced rip-offs of Seiko’s groundbreaking designs.) ↩︎︎
[*]3. I can imagine future scenarios, where Apple Watch functions as a true medical monitoring device (blood sugar, for example), which could justify it as a true need for many. ↩︎︎
[*]4. A study in contrasts across the computer-y gadget/gadget-y computer inflection point: these Casio Databank watches get up to 10 years of battery life. ↩︎︎

[Haywood]

Can't wait to come back to this thread in a year and just laugh when Apple stock is over $300 and they've sold 12 million+ watches.