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.
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
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.)
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.
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 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.
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...
Serious question: On this business topic, how does it matter that you were a software engineer (according to your HN bio) at Apple?
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.
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.
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.
Remember, iPods required a Mac at first. Then a Mac or a PC. Then neither.
I feel like this is a technological limitation of sorts.