Apple TV prompt requires another Apple device
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I encountered the same message when iOS 16 had just released and wasn't available on my iPad yet. It wasn't a blocking message, pressing "OK" was enough to make it go away, and when iPadOS 16 finally came out I was able to clear it.
It's bad UX but the Apple TV can still be used as before.
Turns out, in my case at least, the warning was a little misleading.
It required me to log into their apple / icloud account and accept some terms, I did this with a normal browser (again non-apple) and the warning went away.
May be different in your case as I was setting up a new account for them.
Which I feel weird about because I don't want to flag the story or the tweet or the comments... it's just the title specifically. So I kind of wish there were a way to flag a title. Hopefully it gets dang's attention and he'll handle it.
That attention is easy to get with an email. As to the story, it just becomes a story about an irritating periodic modal which is not very interesting once the title misunderstanding is gone.
I'm with you that it's hard to understood at a glance or without context...which is to me a perfect encapsulation of the whole situation, and what makes the discussion so interesting.
What I'm guessing has happened is that that there's probably no standardized dialog in the tvOS SDK that is suited to a scrolling ToS/EULA screen and in the interest of pushing a release out the door faster an engineer was told to shove this message in an alert and call it a day.
It's bad and should be fixed either way.
Apple TV definitely is not intended to require that you own another Apple device. Even the Apple TV+ subscription service is supported on other platforms like Roku (https://www.roku.com/blog/apple-tv).
Apple has never required that you run the latest iOS to use iCloud (see minimum requirements on https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204230). Also, you can definitely accept the iCloud T&C with a Mac, which the error message omits.
It's clearly just a very dumb bug and an inaccurate message, one that will likely be fixed in a few days. Not really worth the #1 slot on HN with 190+ comments.
Edit: If you are responding to the part about accepting T&C on a Mac, I meant in the iCloud system settings panel, and not through the browser. (Though I would also expect that to work. The fact that it doesn't just underscores that this is a dumb bug.)
It's also an annoyance rather than what the title says:
I have a second Apple ID and had to take an iPad and sign out (1st), sign in (2nd), accept, sign out (2nd), sign back in (1st).
(I should note that clicking on the remote causes the annoying message to disappear, then repeat once, then goes away for...a day? Long enough to watch whatever I wanted to watch, anyway.)
That's actually your choice if it's your choice whether/which apps they can install.
Had this happen to us, my partners kids. Its a subtle attempt to destabilize and subvert her authority as parent figure even though old mate isn't even around, hasn't been for years and still is an abusive S*t. We got forced to buy a iphone in order to put parent restrictions on. Its shits as. I hate apple. Company does bulk crap that enables abusers and does piss all to prevent it or be like hey...maybe this is a ethically shit thing to implement. Maybe its gonna cause a whole host of people grief. Don't even get me started on apple air tags.
But, IDK, maybe they got rid of that feature. Definitely used to be able to do that.
I've put in numerous bug reports on parental controls to Apple, I'm 0/9 on fixes.
"If your phone has bad reception, it's because you're holding it wrong. Why would you hold it like that?"
Especially if the children are young enough that you need to use parental controls.
People have said you can manage it on the kids' device directly by logging in with your AppleId, but that doesn't help me if my kid is out and messages me asking me to allow an app or give her an extra half hour of screentime or something.
Parent mentions Google family link, whih can be setup and managed from litteraly everywhere. There's an iOS app and a fully functional website, so you can have no other android device than your kids, and still control everything.
Your kid can be visiting their grand parents and ask you to authorize some purchase or extra screen time, you'll be able to do it from your Windows computer.
That's the standard iOS' parental control is compared to.
Parenting controls still have a long way to go on Apple devices, but still it's miles ahead of other stuff (looking at you Netflix/Disney Plus).
If you could administer it from the phone, it could be used to partially lock you out of your own device if done by a 3rd party (loan to a friend, and you get it back and you can't use any of the other things on it).
If you could administer it from the web, someone else on the web could use it to lock your out of your own device.
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Having one device owned by the parent managing another device owned by the child ensures that only the parent is managing the child's device and furthermore that only a set of devices that have been set up under the same Apple ID family can be administered.
For another phone, yes - that would work... but it needs to be one that holds the private keys for the apple account.
Those keys are held by a part of the apple hardware that prevents them from accidentally leaking outside. Because of how "find my device" works, leaking those keys would allow a 3rd party to track you (or access your stored secrets associated with your account) - and so Apple has been very careful with the hardware and software securing those keys.
From Apple's perspective, the ability to administer the family plan from a web UI is inherently risky and possibly privacy violating - neither are things they want to let go of. Part of the brand value is that it isn't risky to use their devices and that they make the privacy of the people them something that those people trust.
And so, consider, that you're asking Apple to allow someone to log into a website and use a password (possibly compromised) to restrict the functionality that a given device has without being able to verify back (send apple verify codes to devices held by that same account) that the person making the changes is one who should be able to do it.
You can use an MDM solution. JumpCloud Free is free, and Apple Business Essentials is $3/mo.
Its shitty behavior, but sadly unsurprising.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/5/22711557/apple-lost-airpo...
I’ve used AirPods with my Sony PS Vita (made before AirPods) and my Nintendo switch (once they added Bluetooth headset support recently)
Consider Beats if you want better cross-platform support while maintaining the same audio characteristics.
It is through the iPhone that the AirPods are bound to the Apple ID and thus able to properly encrypt the "here I am" packets.
From the Wired article:
> In a background phone call with WIRED following its keynote, Apple broke down that privacy element, explaining how its "encrypted and anonymous" system avoids leaking your location data willy nilly, even as your devices broadcast a Bluetooth signal explicitly designed to let you track your device. The solution to that paradox, it turns out, is a trick that requires you to own at least two Apple devices. Each one emits a constantly changing key that nearby Apple devices use to encrypt and upload your geolocation data, such that only the other Apple device you own possesses the key to decrypt those locations.
> ...
> When you first set up Find My on your Apple devices—and Apple confirmed you do need at least two devices for this feature to work—it generates an unguessable private key that's shared on all those devices via end-to-end encrypted communication, so that only those machines possess the key.
And from https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/find-my-wired/
> The stronger privacy comes via end-to-end encryption, but rather than simply having a key that can be stolen, “Find My” requires a second Apple device to hold the decryption key. Owners who only have a single Apple device in their possession will have to settle for the older and less secure methods of verification.
It is possible that AirPods don't support the older encryption method.
With Apple devices and the Secure Enclave ( https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec5... ), even Apple doesn't have the back doors to open it up and retrieve the keys from an arbitrary device.
If you had a third party android device that made it, if those eyes were compromised you would have passive tracking of that individual. Consider that for a dissident in an authoritarian country.
It's not a "can Apple design a protocol that does that?" but rather "if the device was compromised what would be the implications?"
If a user trusts Google with their phone (and likely their location history and other such data) then I don't see why Apple's customers would care if Google would be able to track them. The American government already asks Google for all devices in the vicinity of a crime, it's not like someone's headphones won't be found another way.
Any hardware token storage can be compromised, pretending Apple's chips made in China are any different from Qualcom's chips made in China in that regard is useless.
I don't believe for a second that nation state spying is even remotely related to Apple deciding to cripple their products if you use them together with something they didn't make.
You need to have a Mac with the appropriate Secure Enclave hardware and running the latest OS.
> After you set up your AirPods with one Apple device (like your iPhone), your AirPods connect automatically to your other Apple devices where you’re signed in with the same Apple ID.
Note the use of "like" - not exclusively.
Pair AirPods with Mac
Before you begin, make sure your Mac has the latest version of macOS installed.
Open the case with your AirPods inside, then hold it next to your Mac.
Press and hold the setup button on the back of the AirPods case for about five seconds, or until the status light flashes white.
On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Bluetooth.
In the list of devices, select your AirPods, then click Connect
Just absurd behavior from Apple.
Edit: I should add -the IPhone does mount. For instance, it lets me view my Firefox Downloads folder or VLC folder to which you could move media in and out of the device. However, access to my personal photos is a step too far.
In any case, I think there are apps around that make the iPhone serve a web interface to your files on your local network. Would that work? No cloud intermediary involved.
For photos I ended up scheduling a nightly SMB push to my NAS via a third-party app named PhotoSync.
For anyone following along, I am on PopOS. Installed the package (apt install ifuse), rebooted, and now it mounts like every other USB storage device on the planet.
The worst case is someone from IT uses their own iphone to set it up, then leaves the company. I'm not sure you can even reset to factory settings without talking to the device.
Perhaps logging in on a browser could setup an Apple TV or Apple Watch?
I think that the Apple Watch is the most exciting Apple product ever, including the serial number 71 Apple II I got in the late 1970s.
As many other people here have said, Apple needs to fix this problem.
Is there something an Apple TV device would do for me? I'm not seeing it.
My personal setup is a 2018 Sony TV with an Apple TV 4K. The smarts on the TV aren't the worst, but the Apple TV handily beats it in fluidity, so the TV has never been connected to the internet and never will be.
Seamless integration with Apple pay and your Apple account, if you have that.
You can use your iPhone (or iPad?) as an input device for the Apple TV. Very handy for typing in passwords or whatever. Would not apply to you obviously. Can also pair a BT keyboard with the AppleTV for the same purposes, FWIW.
IIRC Apple TVs don't collect the insane amounts of information that smart TVs collect.
Apple TVs might have better interfaces as well, though that's obviously subjective. All the smart TV interfaces I've used have been pretty trash. But maybe they're better now, I dunno.
Also, some people have Plex/Kodi setups with a NAS. Not fun to try to play UHD Bluray remuxes on a TV directly.
If your LG interface is not irritating you and has all the software support you need, then no.
Just depends on your usage.
So even if you have an iPhone SE 1st gen (released 2016) or an iPad mini 4 (released 2015), you still won't be able to accept the new T&Cs.
Apple removed youtube from my appletv one day just out of the blue.
So done with them!
Youtube? That's not an Apple product. I don't recall the YouTube app ever being removed. What are you referring to?
Here's an article about Apple dropping support for youtube playback. Part of the reason I bought the AppleTV was because it had support for youtube playback. Then they announced it was going away, and then they yanked the support, and then they announced I could buy a new AppleTV to get back what I used to have.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22311881/apple-tv-2012-you...
No, Apple did not drop support for YouTube playback. Google/YouTube stopped developing the app for the older versions. This was 100% on Google, not Apple. Not sure why you claimed that Apple did this when that is factually incorrect.
Cheers!
What model of airport do you have? I assume it's a newer one than mine. Here is evidence of their blase attitude toward obsoleting working equipment. They deliver a an implicit threat by saying:
"If your router is 6-7 years old or older, it is probably time to consider replacing the product, especially if you are interested in up to date security."
Very disappointed in apple.
P.s. I use an Android phone.
Our best option now is to avoid funding the terrorist economy when possible.
- the "just buy an iPhone" and "you've brought it on you, what did you expect" camp
- the "Apple fix this" camp
At the point I'm reading this, the first camp represents the vast majority of the responses.
That's interesting regarding Apple's ongoing lawsuits and regulaory pressure. For most people Apple domination and dictating the rules is basically a fact of life I guess.
Will that change when Apple's forced to open its ecosystem and bring more complaints that were kept silent, or will they be booing as their champion is getting "bullied" into compliance ?
The fact that they were able to use their Apple TV before this TOS prompt seems like this blocking TOS prompt was a miss on Apple’s part and they should fix it.
There was no technical reason for this requirement, as Fitness+ is just videos, and even if you had an Apple Watch, you did not need to be wearing it to watch the videos.
For example, I have an iPad + Apple Watch, I can use it with Fitness+. My wife however, with her own Apple Watch, cannot use MY iPad for Fitness+. Instead, she needs a whole other iPad set up as her, or it cannot "see" her Apple Watch/has no concept of her.
Family Sharing is under-baked. Fitness+ is also under-baked. The fact they have zero interactive fitness games on Fitness+ is frankly embarrassing, I had fitness equipment 20 years ago which had interactive games tied to your workouts, and Apple with the best programmers in the world, 100x more powerful hardware, and better development toolkits has developed nothing beyond video-recordings of studio workouts.
Actually the fitness-gaming ecosystem is frankly is a terrible state. Currently, Nintendo or Meta are the leaders in spite of them doing little to try.
Alternatively they could could offer a complementary macbook to go with every Apple developer account.
They shouldn't be, but that's the reality whether we like it or not. We all know by now, or should if we haven't been living under a rock, how Apple operates and how hostile it is to people who don't want to be fully in the Apple ecosystem. So it's the user's responsibility to make better choices and avoid Apple products altogether if they don't want to be fully in the Apple ecosystem.
It's just like many other bad things in life. We can wish all we want that things were different, talk about how it shouldn't be this way, how people shouldn't become serial murderers, etc., but bad things happen and some people (and companies) are just evil, so we have to deal with that instead of wishing it was different.
You might as well be right, but I'm not sure it paints Apple in a better light.
(I've worked at Apple and have witnessed this sort of myopia firsthand.)
Why should we cut slack to a multi-billion dollar company, do they have no staff that can check basic assumptions?
Should we apply the same logic if they forget poor people exisy and their ML labels them as dirt? Or that black people exist?
Anyway, this is a QA fuckup I would guess. Someone should have asked the simple question, what if they don't have access to any such devices?
My Google TV has no ads as far as I can see.
And on the plus side, it allows you to install YouTube clients that blocks ads :)
What should be shown instead?
The list of apps that I select to be shown.
Definitely not ads for horror movies in a household with young kids.
I might be the weird one, but a device you stick to your TV to watch contents doesn't feel like an accessory to me.
The market competitors are roku, fire TV, Google TV(is it still called that ?), and plex boxes. Playstation and XBox would be a stretch, but there's overlap. None of them will force you to get ropped into an ecosystem outside of creating an account and paying for the content.
I think Apple made an effort to have apps on other platforms, but there will also be content providers that are only in the TV AppStore. Also, Amazon will have its content everywhere, and I don't remember any Google exclusives.
All in all, I wouldn't be surprised if TV buffs chose the Apple TV as their gateway to exclusive content, even if they have no other devices in the ecosystem.
There are other annoyances too - Apple really pushes you to add a payment method when creating a new iCloud account for some reason and when using an iPhone without a sim you get a "notification" badge on Settings.app that won't go away. There's also now countless "Set Up Later" prods in the first time boot up flow of iOS. No, I don't want to enable Siri. Not now, not later, not ever.
You know what? They don’t! I couldn’t find it.
If Apple wants to do this, fine. Mark it as a requirement. If they want anyone to be able to use it, they need to fix this.
Seems like they’ve got a foot in each side right now.
That's because despite it having gone from a niche company in the early 2000s to one of the biggest and most powerful in the entire world, it's still a cult in many aspects. Apple is blatantly anti-consumer on so many fronts but gets away with it all the time, and often times their own customers are the biggest bolsters to their behavior. People defend the 30% Apple tax, or the inability to install other OSes, or the screwing of Android users on SMS, etc...all the time. Things other companies simply don't get away with.
As far as the 30% “tax” it’s the same one that Google has.
I don't really care what they do, and none of it surprises me it's just Apple doing what everyone already expects them to do, but they are influential enough that I want there to be some regulation, so their way of doing things doesn't take over.
I can almost guarantee this won't happen. Apple will do everything possible to stick to the wording of any laws and regulations, while making the actual process as complex as possible. "I'm afraid to pair with an android phone, you need to take your Apple TV into an Apple Store, where they can generate a pairing code, which will then be valid until the next update before requiring re-pairing, which must again be done at an Apple Store"
> (From Wikipedia) Success on a tying claim typically requires proof of four elements:
(1) two separate products or services are involved; (AppleTV and other Apple phone/iPad, as demanded by the tied product in question)
(2) the purchase of the tying product is conditioned on the additional purchase of the tied product; (Yes, and forced only after using said hardware for its claimed fitness of playing shows)
(3) the seller has sufficient market power in the market for the tying product; (QED)
(4) a not insubstantial amount of interstate commerce in the tied product market is affected. (again, QED)
Apple TV market share is below 3%?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171132/global-connected...
You could even argue that "power" in this context is actually framed around an idea of latent market share - the amount of market share that can be achieved outside of normal competitive means.
But yes, in general this would underscore the criticism of US competition policy that it's designed to close the gate after the horse already bolted.
About the original problem? Not a single word.
At least they are sending a clear message...
https://twitter.com/DanCUnderwood/status/1614943132340068353
For a while I thought I'd go all-watch if they ever released a standalone watch, but paying more attention to how I use my phone, there's just no way. I'd just have to buy a separate camera, then I'd have two things to carry, plus it'd be much worse (since it's not like standalone cameras tend to have e.g. built-in text recognition). I think that's likely true for most people.
By the early 20-teens, though, all that was just normal and everyone was doing it.
AR glasses have issues with UI, comfort, style, and durability even if you fix the more core issues of weight, battery life, etc.
> The Apple Watch could be the next big thing that replaces the smartphone
I simply don't think is true.
I can take calls, play music (wirelessly through my airpods), crudely reply to messages (it's only a little awkward, surprisingly usable) and pay for things without my phone.
For web-browsing, I don't need to do that all the time.
I use my camera a sum total of twice a month.
I don't think I'm special.
- 99% of my messaging is through text, the other 1% is video calling - Most of my causal web browsing is on my phone - I've taken thousands of pictures on my phone in the last year.
Most of my friends are like this as well.
most of the use of my phone is mobile web-browsing.
I can honestly live without that sometimes, especially as phones are getting large enough that you might as well have a tablet that you lug around sometimes.
Part of the reason this number's so high is that if a phone feature is really important to you, you're liable to get a standalone VoIP line and a headset to go with whatever handset you have rather than using a smartphone.
But I would also hold that phones generally suck, but that’s opinion.
Technically compared to e.g. internet-native voice communication, or you just think that remote voice communication is bad?
I don’t know about anything at the scale of Apple.
But my simplified imagination of any product is: focus on core customer/demo, once you’ve captured a significant portion, expand.
But I also wonder if at apples level, if the customer is “everyone” which I always think of as folly for most business.
Example (which may partially disprove this): I know some people in developing countries, who consider an iPad an essential device. (They have a cheap android phone) and for them, it’s much more valuable than a computer.
(Though, the people I am thinking of are “high” earners in their country, making 20-40k a year. Even if an iPad is almost double the cost.)
I seldom, if ever, carry my iPhone outside my house. My Apple Watch with cellular is enough for internet connectivity when away from home.
In my perfect world, I could provision my Apple Watch as a standalone device, and I could get a MacBook with an eSIM.
Many business people use mac and would love this. Really weired
Though I do like the idea that this is why tethering to my iPhone is so flaky. It isn’t due to bugs, it is because Apple cares about my mobile data bill!
This is such an extreme outlier behavior, nobody is designing products around it. Pretty much everyone who owns a smartphone carries it around everywhere, because why not.
I couldn't understand this for the longest time until I asked my sister, who kept handing her phone to me to hold on to while on a family trip, about this one day. Apparently, a lot of women's clothing doesn't have "usable" pockets (they're tiny or fake...)! And with the size of modern phones, it's actually often quite a nuisance to carry around a phone.
While this may not be OP's situation, I would guess this might be one reason for the proliferation of cellular-enabled smart watches...
And I didn’t mention the fact the iPhone has cameras and it’s not physically attached to you.
And that represents a vanishingly small market.
Look at what people do on their phones all day. Most of that makes no sense on a watch screen.
But using watch for everything is not about screen size. It's about eliminating circumstances that perpetuate bad habits. Like yoga and meditation and other self-care this is only on an upwards trend, there is a huge unexplored market where people could literally do all things they used to have multiple devices for just with their watch without being tempted to get dopamine rush in toxic social media everywhere they go, and handling the productive stuff on their tablet or laptop. The only reason it's not explored is bc Apple wants to sell more devices with screens.
I am yet to meet a single person with a max-size iPhone
The overwhelming preference is not "the biggest screen possible" but is clearly "the biggest screen you can reasonably fit into a pants pocket."
Like yoga and meditation and other self-care this is
only on an upwards trend
To me a smartwatch is way more intrusive than a smartphone. It's something that's always on my wrist, always on my body. Versus a smartphone which I can mute and leave in my pocket where it doesn't really tempt me.
But, I must stress, I realize this is personal and others might find the opposite to be true. Above all else I am glad that folks are considering what's best for their mental health.
You can mute the phone but you still know you have a (toxic social media) dopamine dose and whole portable office in your pocket. I type this on a phone during breakfast again, if I didn't have a phone I wouldn't be doing it.
Good habits are as much about putting yourself into situations where you are not tempted as they are about willpower
There is absolutely no reason to impose such a limit. I don't understand it. However, I will never buy or recommend another Apple product ever again.
> somehow thought any up-to-date iOS device would work. [...] Got the newest iPad?
iOS 12 was the last version of iOS where that name applied to iPad as well as iPhone. Starting with version 13, the version of the operating system for iPhone had been the only one called iOS, with the iPad OS called iPadOS.
So, yes, I suspect that any up to date iOS device does work, through the magic of terminology peculiarities, unless currently supported Apple Watches don't support all currently supported iPhones (I haven't checked if that is the case).
As for the operating system for Apple Watch, that has always been called watchOS.
The above doesn't constitute support for Apple's policies.
If Apple wants to sit there and say "Welp, buy the latest iPhone" they're free to do that - but the fact that there is user confusion is completely on them for making their products so inter-incompatible.
"Well, ACKCHTUALLY, on the iPad, it's called iPadOS. Checkmate, all your points are therefore invalid, Apple can do no wrong"
regardless, I'm pretty sure that somewhere within Apple, they think it makes them more money this way, for the immediate term at least.
This has started to change with “set up for family” watches (which is mostly so you can give a kid a watch and no phone) but there are still lots of weird edge cases there.
I do personally wish they were standalone. If they were I would have gifted one to my father in law this Christmas. Instead he got a Garmin.
But it's buried in a giant page of fine print that you'd have to know to go looking for. Of course if you know to look for it, then you probably don't need the information.
Anyways, I agree that it sucks to have such a limit to JUST an iPhone. It would be nice if it worked with an iPad as well (which is really you're only other option). But the watch, watch app and others make implicit assumptions. For example your iPhone app, which is separate from the iPad app, also has the support for the watch built in (aka the watch specific apps). The iPad apps would currently not have this, because that isn't how it works. Could that change? Sure. But I would guess there are a lot of other implicit assumptions made that we're not aware of.
Lets be honest... Apple would be happy to sell you a watch AND an iPad. You'd be very likely to eventually get the Phone as well. But realistically that's not the direction most people go. They get a Phone first, then maybe they get the watch or iPad.
Serious question: On this business topic, how does it matter that you were a software engineer (according to your HN bio) at Apple?
Remember, iPods required a Mac at first. Then a Mac or a PC. Then neither.
I don’t think this has anything do with trying to force Apple TV users to have an iPhone. It’s a buggy and annoying user interaction even if you do have an iPhone. For one thing, it seems to require every user on your Apple Family Sharing plan to accept the terms, which means it will show me the modal for my wife’s account when she’s not around. She has an iPhone, but this is still an absurd experience. Also, it’s just clearly buggy and inconsistent. Sometimes I’ll be watching something for an hour and when I go to the home screen it will show three identical modals one after the other.
It would be nice if Apple would make the watch accessible to people without iPhones. I would certainly believe their rhetoric about the importance of health tech if they did that.
How much of that is limited by the API that Google is surfacing? Watches simply cannot compete with an Apple Watch because Apple doesn't surface the same functionality for any other device.
Why does less competition make you less concerned about anti-competitive behavior? Such behavior is never good, but it's self-correcting in a market with lots of choice, and not so in a market where there's only one great option (a judgment for which I have to take your word—a Casio F-91W is the right level of watch technology for me).
My point is, nobody seems to be fighting for this market except Apple. I could just be naive here, but it doesn't seem like anyone else cares enough for Apple to be anti-competitive.
You're right; I used the term "anti-competitive behavior", but that was the wrong word for what I was trying to say. I meant rather the lazy behavior of an established giant that doesn't have to compete, and so is content to let standards slip since they can be reasonably confident that it won't lose them any, or many, customers.
This isn’t unique to Apple. Not to defend them specifically, but a company willing to focus on long term is the exception.
Most companies have leaders that are given goals that constrain them to short term gains. It drives truly suboptimal long-term decision making, but it also usually aligns with their incentives.
Changing that view takes (1) an existential threat, (2) a lot of data, and (3) a team that can execute quickly and reliably once a window opens.
Earlier PDAs like the Sharp Wizard and the Casio BOSS tried to do too much. They wanted you to be able to fully maintain your calendar and contacts and todo lists and notes on them. But with their little keyboards, slow processors, and limited displays they weren't very good at doing a lot of data entry or editing related to those tasks.
Palm viewed the PDA not as the place all that stuff would live. In their view all that stuff lived on your computer. The PDA was for taking your data along when you were away from the computer. You might take notes on the PDA but then when back home you'd use the computer if you needed to do much editing of them. You might add or delete a todo item here or there, but if you were going to extensively reorganize your todo list, you'd do it on the computer.
I think Apple is, correctly, thinking that the Apple Watch will do best if it is like the Palm Pilot. It is a peripheral for your iPhone and doesn't try to shoehorn into the inherently limited interface support for doing things that can be easily done on the iPhone it is paired with.
If they tried to make it standalone without greatly reducing the functionality they would just end up with something very complicate to use.
What they could do, without making it too complicated, is make it so you can pair it with things other than iPhone. iPad and Mac at the least. Maybe Android phones/tablets and Windows PCs too. But it would still be primarily a peripheral for those devices, not a standalone device.
You can set up a watch for a family member who doesn't have a phone, but you do have to do that from your iphone.
Not that I have any thoughts on where Apple might go with this; this is just FYI.
A very common reason Apple fans give for why they buy Apple is that all their devices work so well together. And I tend to agree with them. This is their market, they don't want to make efforts to accommodate others.
And why would they? They already have the best market, loyal customers with a lot of money to spend. They don't want to bring in cheap people, offer them a subpar experience because they won't enjoy the benefits of a tightly integrated ecosystem, just to have them complain and never buy again.
Competitors will arrive, and Apple will gladly let them feed on the bottom, but Apple is still safe in its market. And I can't really see the Apple TV serve as a "gateway drug" to the Apple ecosystem like the iPhone can. As for the Apple Watch, like any smartwatch, it is simply too small to stand alone. It is hard to find phones less than 6 inch now, because people want bigger phones for a variety of reasons: bigger screen, better camera, bigger battery, etc... You definitely won't replace it with a 2 inch watch.
I feel like this is a technological limitation of sorts.
https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/2998456
"Download the Google Home app on your Chromecast-supported Android device."
They completely gutted Chromecast support in Chrome quite a while ago, you can't even adjust the playback volume from your computer any more.
At least it's better than Apple TV, which requires you to own a device from the exact same brand, but it's still a shitty requirement. They managed to implement setup from a PC before, what's stopping them from doing it again?
I suppose you could use any of the many Android emulators out there to get around this restriction but it shouldn't be necessary. This is just user hostile design.