Day: 11 March 2015

Beginning the Conversation ⇥ blog.jimray.co

Jim Ray:

Today, though, I can’t figure where this fits in my life, and I’m someone who’s owned the first-gen of every product Apple has released this century (I waited in line an hour for the first iSight camera). Maybe it’s because I’m a dad now with income that’s hardly disposable. Maybe it’s because I own several mechanical watches that I never wear because they don’t quite match my personal style and not a single Apple watch is something I’d consider a complement. Maybe because I’ve become increasingly wary and weary of the surge of notifications and the drain on my own cognition and mindfulness and I’m skeptical that another device is going to help solve that.

This is the way I’m feeling too, but I’m also intrigued to try it and see how real people are using it in real life. There could be something to turning off all notifications on your phone, and just getting a handful of important ones passed through to your watch. We shall see.

Ray, continued:

The Edition watch is hardly Apple at its best. If anything, the Edition feels like a manifestation of the kind of empty criticism Apple has endured for decades: that they hermetically seal commoditized components in a veneer of design, packaged with slick marketing and a powerful brand. I hope the Edition becomes truly limited and is dropped in future generations.

Scathing, but Ray isn’t wrong. Imagine if Rolex made watches that ranged from $350 to $17,000 with the exact same internals. Do you think the buyers of the priciest watches wouldn’t feel slightly cheated? Do you think that people spotting on the street a $17,000 version of their $350 watch wouldn’t feel like that person is just showing off?

I don’t know if the pricing of the Edition is right or wrong; I’m clearly not part of the target market for them. Apple probably doesn’t know for sure, either. There are people out there who might lap these things up, and that’s fine. But it feels so conspicuous, ostentatious, vulgar, and — most importantly — so unlike Apple. They don’t really do expensive for expensive’s sake.

But even though this is clearly something completely new for Apple, they don’t jump into markets without conducting some research first. I’m intrigued to see how it pans out.

The Mandatory Apple Watch App in iOS 8.2 ⇥ arstechnica.com

Ars Technica’s Sam Machkovech (via Michael Tsai):

During Monday’s Apple press conference in San Francisco, Tim Cook announced that iOS 8.2 would immediately begin rolling out to compatible iDevices—as in, any device that could already run the original version of iOS 8. Along with expected bug fixes, the update’s biggest addition was support for the upcoming Apple Watch. It’s a fact that users are now being bonked over the head with thanks to the creation of a dedicated, mandatory app.

Machkovech also notes that owners of Android Wear or Samsung Galaxy Gear devices download an optional app to manage the device. This is pretty callous of Apple. It’s yet another app that you can’t uninstall, so it — like Tips, Newsstand, Compass, Game Centre, and perhaps Health and Podcasts — is likely to end up in a user’s junk apps folder. This seems like an awfully hard sell for a product that Apple is aiming to take a soft sell retail strategy with. It doesn’t even have a very pretty icon, either.

At least I’m running the 8.3 beta, so I don’t have to deal with it. Yet.

Assorted Additional Thoughts on Monday’s “Spring Forward” Event

As with practically every Apple event, Monday’s produced a lot to think about. Despite my longer, more focused missive, I have not exhausted my opinion bank. Aren’t you lucky, reader?

Apple TV

The price drop on the Apple TV combined with language that Tyler Poage noticed makes me think that a more significant Apple TV update is imminent.

MacBook

The new MacBook does everything — including charging — with the sole USB-C connector aboard, but I know a lot of people who will want to charge their iPhone from their MacBook. There is no Lightning-to-USB-C cable, for perplexing reasons. I’m surprised that Apple’s solution to this is for the user to also purchase and lug around a $19 adapter, especially when the power brick could have an additional USB-A port on it for power only. I get that it’s not particularly ideal; it would be more convenient and safer if your phone were connected to your laptop instead of both to the wall. But it’s a feature that would be desperately appreciated in a pinch.

Watch

Tim Cook’s awkward interview with Christy Turlington Burns brought global attention to a great charity, albeit looking a little tone-deaf when placed in the same segment of the presentation as the unveiling of a solid gold watch. But this was significant for another reason: it might be the first time a woman has been onstage at an Apple event since Microsoft’s Roz Ho back in 2007, as far I can recall. It’s both a positive development, and a comment on the anemic state of Apple’s recognition of the role of women in their company.

According to Jony Ive’s profile in the New Yorker, the Watch will require significant changes to Apple’s retail stores:

The table previously covered with a flat cloth was now uncovered: it was a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap, like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane. Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign—as yet unannounced—of the Apple Stores. These new spaces will surely become a more natural setting for vitrines filled with gold (and perhaps less welcoming, at least in some corners, to tourists and truants). Apple had not, overnight, become an élite-oriented company—and it would sell seventy-five million iPhones in the final quarter of 2014, many of them in China—but I wondered how rational, and pure of purpose, one can make the design of a V.I.P. area. Ive later told me that he had overheard someone saying, “I’m not going to buy a watch if I can’t stand on carpet.”

According to Asymco’s Horace Dediu, the display cabinets that Apple has been using for Watch promo events will be very similar to the cabinets installed in retail stores. This retail update was not acknowledged and only barely previewed at the “Spring Forward” event, which makes me question just how much of a makeover the stores will be getting. Is it just an additional table and a safe for the Edition models? What about that “carpet” comment in the quote above? Why not invite Angela Ahrendts onstage to preview those changes?

Also, Apple will apparently be selling it through third-party retailers, but it so far seems as though the third-party retailers will be limited to department stores and boutiques, at least at first. It’s likely that a display setup similar to that of the ones at Apple retail stores will be used. I wonder when and how such a setup will come to existing Apple retail partners, like Best Buy. Will they even be allowed to sell the Edition model? I wager not; nobody goes into a Best Buy looking to drop ten grand on a watch.

Also, the Watch marks the return of the black tax. The stainless steel model starts at $549, but you have to go all the way up to a $1,049 link bracelet model to get a “Space Black” stainless steel model. It’s even $100 more expensive than a standard link bracelet stainless steel model. But — damn — does it ever look good.

It’s All Broken ⇥ thenextweb.com

If it’s an Apple online service, it’s probably been down for much of today. The App Store? Down. iTunes Store? Down. The dev portal? Down. Apple’s in-store credit card processing? You bet that’s down. Why? A DNS mis-configuration. What a mess.

A Hard Case to Make ⇥ theverge.com

And I’m not talking about the physical case of the Apple Watch. Josh Dzieza, the Verge:

But how do you get up on stage and say that the best thing about this new gadget is that it lets people use this other gadget, the one you spent the last eight years turning into a fetish object, less frequently? Of course you still need an iPhone for the Apple Watch, so it’s not like the watch threatens to replace the phone — but rhetorically it’s a tricky argument to make. You’d have to acknowledge that people can have fraught relationships with their phones, and that their attachment to them is deeply ambivalent. True, I feel relief when I check my phone and anxious when its battery dies, but that’s a very different type of obsession than the sort Apple encourages in its lavish videos of cold-forged steel watch cases. It’s much more compulsive and dependent. Making the best pitch for the watch would mean acknowledging that devices can be burdens, not just tools for empowerment.

Brilliantly said. This is what Apple failed to articulate clearly at Monday’s event. It’s not that they don’t know what the use case is, but if they can’t find a way to communicate this, it becomes a little like Twitter, insomuch as it’s impossible to explain it in a nutshell, but quickly becomes indispensable. Maybe word of mouth from real-world use will be what it takes.