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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

> They need to go back and read the Newton’s postmortem. With every new detail about this devices release - it’s becoming clearer and clearer this device just is not ready.

In fact their actions suggest they already know this. It feels like Apple felt obliged to show .. something, anything .. after so many years of work (7 years? Just a guess).

I think this limited appointment-only release is part of a cautious wait-and-see approach.

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> They need to go back and read the Newton’s postmortem. With every new detail about this devices release - it’s becoming clearer and clearer this device just is not ready.

Neither was the Mac that sold abysmally for years and Apple was propped up by the Apple // series

And neither was the iPod. They sold less than 1 million in the first two years.

Or the Apple iPhone that barely captured 1% market share tte first year (Jobs stated goal)

Or the Apple Watch which was slow, with bad battery life and a horrible SDK. It took years for Apple to have a coherent focus.

Number of unit sales isn’t the measure of success for a new paradigm. Everyone knows this. The quality of ideas and the affordances to achieve human aims is what makes a success.

> Or the Apple Watch which was slow, with bad battery life and a horrible SDK.

In Apple's defense, it is still two of those things. (No longer slow though!)

The development process from what I read is not great for Apple Watches. But at first, you couldn’t even create real apps just projections from the phone.

Thankfully the dev process has improved to ~5seconds to hit a breakpoint on a real watch - which is the only way to work with live HealthKit/HKWorkout data.

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