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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

From the bottom of the page:

Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular) requires an iPhone 6 or later with iOS 11 or later. Apple Watch and iPhone service provider must be the same. Not available with all service providers. Roaming is not available outside your carrier network coverage area. Wireless service plan required for cellular service. Contact your service provider for more details. Check apple.com/watch/cellular for participating wireless carriers and eligibility.

So, using it as a cellular device by itself would seem to be impossible.

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The phone is how you configure, update, etc. the watch. So I'm betting you need a phone for all the initial setup, and then you can leave your phone at home and go on a marathon run and take phone calls while you are out and about.

Yep! That's exactly what they said in the demo.

I have an iPad. If I get this watch why do I need an iPhone too?

your ipad doesn't have a phone number :)

Mine does!

Could you use T-Mobile's DIGITS and apply that to the watch?

why couldn't you do that with a computer or an ipad, or an older iphone? ofc you could. Just Apple being really greedy, as we are getting used to

Mobile is the new PC. Config on the dominant platform is simplest.

Only what will android people do for their bad choices in life.

Continue to not care about apple watches, probably

Based on how Apple tells us to develop the apps, you have to do anything bigger than a bread box on the phone. The obvious reason is battery life; every CPU cycle spent doing something in the watch that could be done in the phone is waste. Less waste = better battery life.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Greed is what corporations are for. Greed--and nothing else--drives businesses to provide things that their customers value.

Greed implies excess.

Who decides what's excessive?

It's a conspiracy I tell you! Or perhaps the USB plug doesn't physically fit in an iPad or older iPhone. No, it must be Apple trying to sell everyone these Windows PCs that can restore iPhones!(you never needed anything but the phone and a sim with subscription to activate it)

This seems similar to the iPhone prior to iOS 5. Prior to iOS 5 you needed a computer to activate the phone. Only with the introduction of iOS 5 could you activate an iPhone without a computer.

My guess is the ability to have an Apple Watch as a standalone device is at least another year away, possible another 2 to 3.

I wonder if they would use FaceID and Siri to configure it, given the lack of a big screen.

It wasn't until a later version of iOS that you could setup an iPhone without iTunes. The same independence should come to the Apple Watch eventually, it just might take a few more versions.

How could you log into icloud with just the watch? Does it have a virtual keyboard?

You could have it set up on the apple store, or you could use your computer, or you could (one can dream) use a phone from a different manufacturer?

watchOS has “Scribble”: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206907

Or Siri dictation.

You can also use the crown.

They could make it so that the crown is used for text entry, but I don't believe any version of watchOS ever has done so yet.

And there initially was no Windows version of iTunes. The iPod's market was at first only people who already owned Macs.

I'm still waiting for my Zune to get macOS compatibility.

You never needed a computer to set up an iPhone. You needed it for restoring and updating the software.

Can't tell 100%, but it looks as if you will still need a companion iPhone as the "master" device. So, you won't be able to use the watch as a stand-alone phone.

I wonder if there is a technical reason for that or if they aren't ready for possible cannibalisation yet.

I was really hoping it wouldn't require a phone at all.

It probably piggy backs off the SIM information from the "Master" device (which is the phone in this case).

So it has a software SIM? If so it's the first time I've heard of a device with one.

Yup. They call it an eSIM: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/the-cellular-enabled-apple...

"The eSIM has to be provisioned via the device itself, which is handy if you want to switch between T-Mobile and AT&T in a hurry, but not handy if you want to switch to a carrier not supported by Apple, or sell your device to someone on a different carrier."

During the demo they described a small chip built in that worked as a SIM so I don't think it's purely software / eSIM.

People who want a fully independent Watch will probably be disappointed, but for the use-case of "I want to leave my iPhone at home while I go out for a jog", the fact that the watch uses the same phone number as your iPhone is very good indeed -- having yet another number to manage for the relatively short duration of a jog/swim seems ugly.

I think it's technical.

Apple are fairly comfortable with their own products taking over their own products (iPod -> iphone, and pushing people from mac to iPad).

If they thought that the smart watch would cannibalise the phone market I'm fairly sure that they would make sure you didn't need to own an iPhone to use the watch.

This is just not right.

Apple didn't cannibalize iPod with iPhone: it recognized that people wanted it to build a phone and did just that.

Apple didn't cannibalize Mac for iPad: it recognized that people were buying tablets in lieu of PC's and thus invested heavily in making iPad's more user friendly.

Having spoken to many Apple engineers, the company is now as corporat-ey as any other BigCo and will NOT actively cannibalize a product unless it sees an expanding/new market.

>it recognized that people were buying tablets in lieu of PC's and thus invested heavily in making iPad's more user friendly.

Who was doing that? Before the iPad came out I saw tablets used in exactly one place, and it was a university research project on construction management and coordination between building trades.

Even after the iPad came out, the people using them as PC replacements were using them mostly for the same set of tasks like email and web browsing, and (flat iOS 7 redesign aside) the experience for those is basically the same as always.

EDIT - I suppose there have been major additions to iOS since then (like multitasking), but I'd argue it's less because they're threatened by users buying a Surface (or whatever crappy HP tablet existed at the time) instead of a Mac, and more because it's the obvious direction that iOS devices have been steadily improving in regardless of the competition. Apple's perfectly happy to eat the Mac's market with it if there are Mac users who can get by on better iPads.

Maybe some selection bias? Tablets have been in use since at least early Windows XP days. I'm not sure I'd call them common, back then, but they were hardly unique. We used them in the field when collecting data.

>Tablets have been in use since at least early Windows XP days. I'm not sure I'd call them common, back then, but they were hardly unique. We used them in the field when collecting data.

People collecting "data in the field" is not the hundreds million unit market it is post iPad.

Tablets existed for 10+ years before the iPad, Microsoft especially pushed various monstrosities -- nobody really used them though.

I did mention they weren't common, but I'm not a nobody and I really used them. They had a whole Tablet Edition, for XP. They were used in quite a few industries, by real people who were doing real work.

So, no, not common - but not nobody, either.

>but I'm not a nobody and I really used them

Yeah, "nobody used them" in casual speech just means very few people. Obviously since they were made some people bought and used them. But the numbers were not worth writing home about -- and one would be hard-pressed to see random people using them in the wild (exceptions by field workers, some kinds of researchers, etc, mostly professional/factory/etc uses).

And my response only pertained to them having only seen them in one place and how that might be selection bias. While not common, they were certainly in use outside of research labs.

Motion did pretty well with them and made great hardware.

>Apple didn't cannibalize Mac for iPad: it recognized that people were buying tablets in lieu of PC's and thus invested heavily in making iPad's more user friendly.

Nobody was "buying tablets in lieu of PCs" before the iPad.

And by nobody I obviously mean "so few the market didn't matter at all".

Pretty clear in the Jobs autobiography that Apple/Jobs thought that the if people could get 5000 songs on their phone they wouldn't want to carry an iPod around.

Nobody was buying tablets before the iPad.... So I'm not sure what your getting at.

The way I see it now is that many people who now buy iPads would have bought Macs previously, and Apple are happy for this to happen.

Its not really hard to see Apples vision that iPads are the future of computing for maybe 70/80/90% of people, and the remaining 10/20/30% can buy Macs.

Your last statement perfectly represents Apple cannibalizing the iPod with the iPhone.

iPhone was and is more expensive than an iPod. That's not cannibalization, it's upselling.

As to iPads, to the extent that buying a tablet instead of a computer was appealing, it was always going to overwhelmingly bring people from PCs to iPads more than from Macs to iPads. They did deal with a certain amount of cannibalization there, but their tolerance of that was far from a general comfort with any cannibalization possible.

I think that Apple would be uncomfortable with the idea of a $400 watch cannibalizing a $700+ phone. That said, I think that the idea that the watch would significantly cannibalize the phone is silly. Whenever we discuss the watch, it's like everyone suddenly forgets that people fucking love their phones and have consistently demanded larger and larger screens. The idea that suddenly people are going to be all, "No, it's cool, I don't want a screen larger than 1" diagonal" in any substantial quantity is silly.

I disagree that just because the phone is more expensive than the ipod it is not cannibalization. The phone literally destroyed the market for the standalone MP3 player, and the price point was doesn't change this.

If you listen to the Jobs official autobiography the iPhone resulted from Jobs / Apples concerns that the phone would become good enough for most people as an MP3 player, and thus would 'cannibalize' the iPod product, and that Job/Apple decided all the phones out at the time sucked and that they could do it better.

The technology for the capacitive screen etc was already in development but for the device that would eventually become the iPad!

Look, I've used the term "cannibalize" in deep in strategy sessions about how much marginal benefit we'll get from a higher-price sku given that a certain number of people will be getting it instead of our lower-priced sku. I'm not going to say it's completely ridiculous to describe that as cannibalization in the right context.

But from a high level, nobody in the entire world could be sad if their customers choose a higher-price, higher-margin product over a lower-price, lower-margin product. And suggesting that it's some kind of brave stance to say, "Yes, we'll introduce a higher-price, higher-margin product even though our customers may prefer it to our lower-price, lower-margin product" is absurd, and anyone who tries to sell that line with a straight face should be ashamed of themselves.

I'm really not sure what point you are trying to make.

My point is that the iPhone took the iPods market from it. Apple had to release a phone to do this, or someone else would have eventually done it.

They did not do it to 'up sell' people, ie the thought process was never, 'lets sell the iPod for 5 years then hit those suckers with the iPhone and up sell them' it was 'lets make the best music player' then 'soon every ones music will be on their phones, we better make a phone, actually the phones we currently use are terrible, we have this interesting touch screen tech from a tablet we're developing, oh shit we can make an awesome phone...'

I'm not saying Apple are brave, I'm saying they are logical, they will release a product that will take sales from another of their product lines, as if they don't someone else will, and any sale is better than no sale. I think they would do this even if the product that was doing the cannibalization was cheaper, eg the iPad is definitely eating some of the Macs potential sales, and I think Apple are very happy about this.

They explicitly said you could leave your phone at home while running errands and not worry about being out of reach. You need a phone for the cellular plan but not to use the watch as a phone.

I think some folks were hoping they could use the Watch without owning an iPhone. In other words, as a cell phone replacement. This line dashes those hopes.

My hopes are definitely dashed!

I had visions of never buying another iPhone again and just using a watch, iPad, and laptop.

Much like the iPod and iPhone were tethered to iTunes and then later gained autonomy, I’m hoping they’ll get there with the watch in just a couple iterations.

The thing is, that would be an investment that would ultimately cost Apple business (or at least has the potential to) so I don't see it happening.

They'd effectively be expending resources to make it possible for people who want a Watch to not use an iPhone. Doesn't add up in my head why they'd do that (though I'm with you, I'd much rather just have my iPad).

Same logic could be applied to the iphone vs the ipod, people who wanted an iphone but not an ipod.

The reality of the market is that either you kill your cash cow (with a hopefully bigger cash cow) or someone else will do it for you.

I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure it applies in the same way. The market demand for a Watch that acts independently of an iPhone entirely isn't even remotely close to the one that killed the iPod. Sure, I want one, but I know I'm part of a very small minority, I think the majority of owners by a huge margin who feel that way are going to get a Cellular Series 3 and be completely satisfied.

Apple has never shied away from creating a product that cannibalizes another of their products market, because they know if they don't someone else will and they will be left with nothing.

The reason probably is that it wouldn't be a good product.

The current Watch offering certainly wouldn't, as I've said elsewhere all the guidelines on how we developers build things for the Watch is a strict "anything that can be done on the phone, should be done on the phone" policy, meaning without the phone the Watch becomes pretty useless.

That could change though, it would make sense if they manage to pack in enough guts while preserving the battery to make the Watch more stand-alone, no reason it couldn't happen.

Well, as long as you have an iPhone 6, you never do, I guess.

You can already do that to a degree for the record.

I left my phone at home accidentally the other day, it wasn't until the work day was over and I tried to remote start my car that I realized, since almost every feature I use worked over WiFi (the remote start checks for the phone's presence)

Yup, the watch piggybacks on WiFi authentication from the phone. Once you store the SSID and PSK for a network on your phone, the watch can log in independently, and you can take/make phone calls and SMS. I've done this when I left the phone at home by accident.

It's not the just the watch. All my devices will connect to a new wifi if one does.

What I mean is, you won't be able to buy an Apple Watch as your one and only mobile device. You will need to own an IPhone with an active line of service, at least to provision the Apple Watch - after that, you might be able to stuff it into a drawer and only use the watch ...

Get a Samsung S3 with LTE. It doesn't sound like you need a standalone phone to use the watch as a phone.

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