Apple announced the details on its Apple Watch, which some will call a revolution and others (including me) will yawn at. It’s the first truly new product from Apple in about five years, the latest darling of the wearable technology niche, loved by Apple fans for sure. The question is whether it will really amount to anything other than a status symbol. It’s a valid question because Apple Watch isn’t the ideal wearable no matter what your Apple fan status might be.
For many, the form factor alone is going to be hard to accept. There are two sizes, 38mm and 42mm, which equate to roughly an inch and a half or an inch and two-thirds. A good-sized chronograph roughly equals the former, but the square face looks bigger. It’s certainly something to be noticed, which to Apple fans may be a good thing. Conspicuousness probably won’t sell a lot of watches, though. There has to be utility, and that may be harder to come by, because obviously for many tasks a watch face presents a pretty minimalist GUI. Yes, you could wave a watch at a pay terminal and buy something (if Apple Pay gets cleaned up). Yes, you could read the time and perhaps some SMS or an email notice. The thing is, you can do that with your phone. Some will pay a minimum of three hundred fifty bucks to wave a watch instead of a phone, but I don’t think that will start a revolution.
All wearable technology is essentially an extension of mobile broadband. While it might work standalone, it’s really designed to work with a mobile phone (probably) or tablet (possibly), which means you have to value it based on what it can “input” into the mobile/behavioral ecosystem or what it can output from it. The Watch can be a tickler to tell you to get your phone out, and it can let you do some basic things without taking out your phone.
Probably the most interesting application for Apple Watch is biometric monitoring, which could be used to track fitness goals and monitor yourself during exercise. Even here, though, it’s possible to do that stuff in other ways. Judging from what I see on the street, there aren’t too many people in gyms or exercising anyway. I took a two-and-a-half mile walk yesterday and didn’t see anyone who wasn’t in a car. More intense health care apps are for the future only, and then only if issues with FDA approval can be dodged.
Why then is Apple doing this? It’s most likely a matter of niche marketing. Apple fans value social interaction, cool-ness, leading-edge stuff. You can sell them stuff that most of the population won’t buy. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, except perhaps that you believe some of the heady numbers. Five hundred million units by 2020 is one estimate I saw, and a Street guy who’s a bull on Apple thinks a couple billion in that timeframe is reasonable. Milking your base with add-on products is Marketing 101, but you have to be wary of expectations. Total smartwatch sales so far have been less than two million units, and many of the things you can do with Apple Watch can be done with earlier releases from other vendors, at lower cost.
Competition there is. Questions on the value proposition are there too. But Apple’s big risk isn’t competitors in the smartwatch space, or even lack of interest in smartwatches. It’s the possibility that Google might still do something with Glass.
The most powerful of all our senses is sight, and in my view that means that the logical way to supplement any mobile device is through augmented-reality glasses. Yes, I know that’s what Google Glass was/is supposed to be and yes, I know that the story is that Glass is gas, so to speak. The truth, I think, is that Glass got away from Google and they simply were not ready to capitalize on what happened when it came out. That doesn’t mean it’s not the best approach.
Google says that Glass is only exiting one phase and preparing for a new one. A number of news stories have made that same point in more detail, claiming that the current Glass strategy was only a proof of concept, a kind of field trial. It’s hard not to see this as an opportunity for Google, though. What better way to kick sand in Apple’s face than to launch a really useful wearable, and I think even the hardest-core Apple aficionado would agree that the king of the wearable concept is still augmented reality glasses.
But will Google really push Glass? Google has a habit of trying to launch a revolution on the cheap, hoping partners will do the heavy lifting and take the risks. Remember Google Wave? It was another skunk-works project that had great potential, but Google never really invested in it. Some now believe that Android may belong in that same category, a concept that Google should have productized and pushed rather than simply launched and blew kisses at. It’s hard to see how Glass could succeed without support from Android devices, so would that mean Google would have to get more serious about Android?
The Google MVNO rumor might be an interesting data point. If Google wanted to stay with its advertising roots, though, it’s hard to see how a Glass/Android pairing could promote advertising effectively if the associated Android phone wasn’t on an MVNO service that could then be partially ad-sponsored. The thing is, before the story took hold, Google seemed to be trying more to control expectations than to promote the concept. That doesn’t sound like it’s prepping a new Glass.
They should, because augmented reality could be great for ads. You can picture a Glass wearer walking down the street and viewing the ads of stores along the route. It’s hard to get that same effect by looking at a watch. Selling ad space on a billboard an inch and a half square is definitely an uphill battle. Augmented reality is also great for travelers, for gamers, for a host of large markets that cut across current vendor/technology boundaries. It seems to me those would be better places to go.
The potentially positive thing with Apple Watch is that it could extend the concept of personalization and it could help further integrate mobile broadband into day-to-day behavior. The biggest impact of mobile broadband on traffic is video viewing, but the biggest impact overall is on behavior. We are remaking ourselves through the agency of our gadgets, and Watch might boost that. Here, Apple is surely hoping that developers will innovate around the basics to develop something useful.
Useful but not compelling. The thing I’m not clear on is why Apple would do something like that, which I think would magnify the value of the cloud by creating in-cloud agents, when they seem unwilling to take a lead in the cloud itself. Without Apple leadership, the cloud is unlikely to be a place where developers elect to go, and as long as Apple stays in the background, cloud-wise, they are at risk to being preempted by Google, Glass or no. In the end, broadband devices are appliances to help us live, and the watch can be only a subordinate appliance. The master intelligence has to be in the cloud, and if they want Watch to succeed, so does Apple.