Apple: March 9th 'Spring Forward' Event
apple.com
apple.com
The picture in the background here is very beautiful. Someone who makes that kind of thing, how do they do it? How do they chose colours, and how would they go about making the shapes actually appear on a screen?
Or Photoshop.
(And from the fact that the gradients form a complete hue continuum. Look at the small triangles in the middle to see the destination colors, and see how they match the source colors of their neighbours.)
[1] http://www.icreatemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Pr...
Then place a rectangle background with a gradient on it that transitions from purple to green like in the graphic.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/caldwell-edition
Really, if they will get away with that, the world has surely gone crazy.
"Considered separately, the active use app, clock, and fitness numbers sound very low, but the reality is that people will passively wear the Apple Watch for most of the day, actively interacting with it only for short periods of time."
Essentially they're saying, "People will buy an expensive watch that does all this extra fancy stuff, but really they won't bother much with the extra fancy stuff - because who actually wants to fiddle around with something on their wrist for any protracted length of time?"
I think Apple has enough die-hard fans, who will buy almost anything they make, for it to be hard for them to do something that will register as a genuine complete flop... but I think the Apple Watch really could struggle to get much traction amongst the masses, and I don't just mean the expensive gold model.
Generally, 1st generation new devices have low benefit to cost ratios, are trying to enter a market with the absolute minimum requirements, and the successive generations will include some kind of hardware bit that makes the device much more useful.
Is that essentially saying people bought an expensive phone that does all this fancy stuff but don't bother with it because they don't want to fiddle with something in their hand for any length of time?
Try flooring the accelerator on your car and see how long the tank of gas lasts. Compare it to idling away a full tank. Do people shy away from hot-rodding their engines just because they don't want to fiddle with the throttle, or because doing the speed limit and accelerating slowly tends to suit their needs just fine?
While it's easy to say "it's more compelling to do stuff on a phone than it is to do it on a watch, so you'll naturally use the phone more", that rather makes me wonder why I would bother buying the watch, especially when you actually need the phone as well.
Time will tell how people use these devices and whether the battery really holds up to a reasonable person's usage. And, of course, it seems likely (though not certain) that later generations will have improved battery life.
I use my PC for eight hours a day straight. I use my phone for maybe 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, maybe an hour long call once or twice a day. Is there anything wrong with that? Should I be using my phone more? I mean, why would I spend all the money on having a powerful phone when I'm only using it occasionally?
That's the logic you seem to be putting towards this watch. I'm not going to defend the battery life, it's totally crap. I'm just arguing against the logic. You seem to be saying if you're not using the device constantly, it's not worth having. I don't use my car constantly. I don't use my phone constantly. I don't use my Pebble constantly. But they're nice to have for their own reasons. The point of the watch is not to use it 100%, all the time. It's to use it when it makes sense to use it. Heavy application use isn't what it's designed for.
Still, I agree the battery makes it useless even for the intended functionality.
I really don't know, perhaps Joe Public will see it very differently to me; certainly those of my friends who don't work in tech, but overwhelmingly do own iPhones, I have spoken to about the Apple Watch seem fairly uncertain as to its general usefulness.
While this is true, no body is browsing the web or watching a video on their watch. People are doing quick checks of stocks, the weather, firing off a text message on their watches. The use cases overlap significantly but smart watches fill the niche of "I don't want to pull my phone out to check the time/if I have texts."
Despite "smartwatch" sounding like "smartphone", there's really nothing you'd want to do with its UX that could last an hour.
Remember Windows SideShow[1]? It was a technology to allow OEMs to do things like putting an extra display on the lid of a laptop, that would indicate things when the laptop was closed and mostly asleep. That's what the watch is for: indicating things when your phone is closed and mostly asleep. If it indicates something interesting, you don't continue interacting with it; you take out your phone.
I'm not saying this to defend Apple's product in particular; it's probably far too expensive to get the right adoption in its market, and is more like an initial market-testing experiment in the same way Google Glass was.
But passive/reactive UX is a great idea, generally. The constant complaints about being stuck in a cubicle staring at a screen, or teenagers staring at their phones all day, are precisely because that's where our alerts are, and we don't want to miss them... but it's also where a bunch of engaging+distracting stuff is, so in the process of trying to stay on top of our alerts, we get constantly pulled back into engaging with the engaging stuff.
Imagine if, to check your email, you had to log into World of Warcraft or Second Life and wander over to your virtual mailbox on your virtual driveway. Lots of potential for distraction during that, right? But waking up your phone or your laptop, with its manifold social apps and games and media to consume, is nearly as bad.
Technologies with passive or reactive UXes allow us to treat technology as something poking its head into your door and asking a question, rather than something you need to "submerge into" like some sort of virtual reality.
I look forward to the day when every $5 Swatch watch gives you your phone's alerts. At that point, the glowing rectangle will become only a productivity device: something for creation, live collaboration, or media consumption; something you intentionally engage with for defined periods. But not something you need to context-switch back to every three minutes to see if you got an email, and end up reading HN while you've got it open.
And how stupid will these 'luxury' watches look in a few years, when Apple (or their competitors, anyway) will eventually bring battery life into more sane range? That's what I was trying to say: I find the abysmal battery life kinda-accepted in this class of products, so far, to be inadequate, but even more so - I think it's completely preposterous there to be 'luxury' editions of the product. Later, when technology will mature and provide it with more usability and when incremental changes each year will diminish - sure, but right now - aren't Apple seeing that they are going to just make fools of themselves?
If I'm wrong - well, then I'm seriously not understanding something in life.
This non-empty set of people have no qualms about upgrading every few years to a new, more exclusive model. Nothing is worst than having something "old" or out of fashion.
This non-empty set of people, will pay $10k, $15k, $20k+ for something just because they can.
Example: http://financesonline.com/top-10-most-expensive-champagne-bo...
Fashion, watches, etc is even more extravagant because the element of "freshness" and being "in style" plays into a constant need to invest in the latest.
Usually the 15-18% refurb discount jumps to around 25-30% if those models are going to get discontinued. Not seeing that on the store (yet).
Hint: If your system depends on local time, it isn't going to be robust.