My SO is fabulous. She gave me some insights on the Apple Watch that I’d not thought of.
- Women will not be happy with one-size fits all. Not happy at all. While I have a Pebble sitting in a drawer out of charge, she has eleven watches including a series of six Michael Kors in Yellow Gold plate, Rose gold plate, White Surround, Stainless steel, Stainless Steel with Pink Face, Stainless Steel with Square Face. I’m sure there are men who feel the same way, I’m not one of them.
- Part of the utility of the watch is when it’s within a community of Watch wearers. If there’s no uptake, especially not with your SO, then you can’t use any of the sentimental features.
- Film stars won’t wear them unless they’re being paid to. And that’s going to be on Phil Schiller to dig deep.
- Exercise watches have issues with condensation and sweat. Garmin and others have tried (and in some cases failed) to do this with screens misting up. The Watch isn’t water-resistant to any great degree.
- Apple doesn’t mind statement but they shy away from vulgarity (referring to @Grubers predictions on price). She reckons even the Gold will be probably £1200 (admittedly that’s nearly $1800). A $10,000 watch is just a physical version of the “I AM RICH” app.
- Still no real confirmation on whether the Edition is solid gold or gold plated which makes a huge difference to the price.
The bit I’m most excited about is the communication features. I feel a resurgence in morse code coming along and it’s certainly going to be a way to surreptitiously send messages to people while being otherwise engaged. Everything from teens tapping “The Coast Is Clear” to warnings and alerts. It’s got great potential as a low bandwidth, non-verbal communications medium.
I find too many times that my communications are blocked by the structure of buildings and that again reduces the utility of new comms media.
If the Watch has access to Multipeer Connectivity Framework (MCF) (Wired Article) then it opens up a whole new way of communicating. I just hope the design team has already thought of it.