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Apple's recent obsession with health monitoring is weird from a branding standpoint. Losing appeal with young people is the nightmare of any technology company,

by aedron 9y ago

Apple's recent obsession with health monitoring is weird from a branding standpoint. Losing appeal with young people is the nightmare of any technology company, becoming known as that gadget for geriatrics is another level of dejection. I read that this focus is particularly driven by Tim Cook's fascination with the space. It sort of confirms my idea of him as not a very image conscious CEO, especially in contrast with Jobs who was a legend at imbuing Apple with coolness and desirability.

proyb2 9y ago
I don't think you could say for the general young generation. Google, Apple and Samsung have been vie for these feature in 2014. It is not uncommon to focus on health space when the technology is mature, we can't live and worry about our health. What is the point if you have the greatest smartphone watch and still lead unhealthy lifestyle?
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  Generally speaking, if you're leading an unhealthy lifestyle, buying a new gadget will not change that. I'm sure there's plenty of anecdata to counter this, though.
  - swsieber 9y ago
    If I had a device that let me know the health impact (from an insulin sensitivity standpoint) of a food I ate without invasive stuff, I'd use it in a heartbeat, and I'd listen (except for cheese - if it said cheese would bad, I'd ignore that bit).
    - GordonS 9y ago
      The good news is that almost all cheeses have not effect on blood glucose levels!
  - proyb2 9y ago
    I disagree, most people tend to unknowing overwork or having excessive intake. There are situations when someone tried to add artificial sweetness, the gadget are there to inform you in time rather than months. Hostpitals has been participating in health research because they want to make these accessible for you 24 hours.
_eht 9y ago
I think it could be Apple moving with it's current market demographic. I started out an apple fan boy in highschool. I waited in line for iPhones religiously and insisted all my and my family's laptops were MacBooks. Now I'm old (31) and hitting the range where my doctor starts mentioning baseline cardiac physicals and other regimated health tests that just come with age (I'm healthy, BTW). If the idea is to cater to the shifting age if it's fanboys it may be a great play. The young generation moves from obsession with Emojis and Instagram to having diabetes and heart disease pretty quick. Why not cater to the shift when you already have the customer. 3M isn't making glucose testing sexy like only Apple can.
pimeys 9y ago
I think this is just the right move. It's the only good reason to own an Apple or Android Watch, to monitor your health. The current solutions require quite a many devices to get the information to your watch. If Apple nails it with their product for us Type 1 diabetics, I'm ready to switch from Android.
cs2818 9y ago
I don't have any data on hand to back this up, but I don't think younger people are necessarily averse to monitoring their own health. I think personal health monitoring devices fit well with the devices the younger generation already uses to help maintain their identity and concept of self. I agree if it's poorly implemented or marketed it won't be adopted, but Apple probably has a shot at getting it right.
- dominotw 9y ago
  I agree. I've only seen middle aged office workers wear stuff like Fitbit, posture correction, sleep tracking type of things. Young people don't have to worry about 'sitting is new smoking' .
  - mahyarm 9y ago
    There is a nerdy segment that loves tracking all of this health data forever and ever. There is also the segment that just wants to lose weight, and that can apply at all ages. A continuous glucose monitor is also a great way to monitor keto diets or similar. Keep yourself under a certain glucose level continuously and your body will be forced to use fat sources!
intoverflow2 9y ago
If Apple doesn't make this someone else will. If Apple doesn't make decent laptops and desktops then who else can? This is what bothers be about Tim Cooks priorities in health and celebrities next to his apathy towards computers. (I don't consider the iPad a computer I consider it a device)
- kgin 9y ago
  The business problem is that the world has increasing apathy towards computers. “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at [the] D8 conference in 2010. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”
  - intoverflow2 9y ago
    Yeah can't really argue against that logic, just arguing for someone to fulfil my needs to do my job. Maybe it's time for a new "truck" company that focuses on the needs of the few and Apple can ditch computers and focus on the needs of the many.
dude01 9y ago
What if Tim Cook is a strategy genius? The health care market is gigantic, and if in the long-run, Apple can get a piece of that market, they'd be set for a long time...
swsieber 9y ago
Except reading the article says the team behind this was initially kicked of by Jobs... And personally, I don't think it's all that weird. I think it fits perfectly with branding, but maybe I'm less aware of it.
npunt 9y ago
Athletes are the branding antidote to these concerns - they're extreme users in their own right and love to track all the things. One step down from the halo-effect of athletes is the 'Athleisure' segment of the fashion market (think Lululemon and the like), which shows broad interest in healthy living in desirable/cool demographics that have high correlation with Apple purchasers. On the contrary, going into health will reinforce the brand, not dilute it. Apple has always been an aspirational lifestyle brand. Given the growing scope of computing in our lives - work, social, leisure, health - the lifestyle that Apple sells is only going to get more complete and compelling. There's also a growing trend of QS and tracking health data points, and increasingly not just among geeks. You can see it in the nutrition space as well, where people are optimizing food, getting bloodwork, etc. These fields are ascendant and glucose tracking matters there too.
shas3 9y ago
I am deeply skeptical that anything other than R&D and patents will come out of this move by Apple. I am bearish on the prospects of using technology in healthcare. Primarily for these reasons: 1. Regulation: it is very hard to innovate at the pace of the consumer-electronics industry while satisfying FDA regulations. 2. For general purpose applications, signals and measurements are highly noisy and sensors are still deeply in the academic realm, working only in very special use-cases, as opposed to 'in the wild'. It is a different matter for special applications such as Type-I diabetes or other diseases because devices are critically important and patients are willing to tolerate discomfort (of wearing probes, pumps, etc.) 3. In general, predictive power of algorithms tends to be lower for non-genomic health care applications because of variability across individuals, errors in installing devices, rarity of certain types of data for training and validation, etc. 4. Some of the key benefits are hard to grasp for users because of the slow time scales over which things like weight loss occur, and also due to the multi-factorial/multi-component nature of human well-being.

by aedron 9y ago

proyb2 9y ago

I don't think you could say for the general young generation. Google, Apple and Samsung have been vie for these feature in 2014. It is not uncommon to focus on health space when the technology is mature, we can't live and worry about our health. What is the point if you have the greatest smartphone watch and still lead unhealthy lifestyle?

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Generally speaking, if you're leading an unhealthy lifestyle, buying a new gadget will not change that. I'm sure there's plenty of anecdata to counter this, though.
- swsieber 9y ago
  If I had a device that let me know the health impact (from an insulin sensitivity standpoint) of a food I ate without invasive stuff, I'd use it in a heartbeat, and I'd listen (except for cheese - if it said cheese would bad, I'd ignore that bit).
  - GordonS 9y ago
    The good news is that almost all cheeses have not effect on blood glucose levels!
- proyb2 9y ago
  I disagree, most people tend to unknowing overwork or having excessive intake. There are situations when someone tried to add artificial sweetness, the gadget are there to inform you in time rather than months. Hostpitals has been participating in health research because they want to make these accessible for you 24 hours.

_eht 9y ago

I think it could be Apple moving with it's current market demographic. I started out an apple fan boy in highschool. I waited in line for iPhones religiously and insisted all my and my family's laptops were MacBooks. Now I'm old (31) and hitting the range where my doctor starts mentioning baseline cardiac physicals and other regimated health tests that just come with age (I'm healthy, BTW). If the idea is to cater to the shifting age if it's fanboys it may be a great play. The young generation moves from obsession with Emojis and Instagram to having diabetes and heart disease pretty quick. Why not cater to the shift when you already have the customer. 3M isn't making glucose testing sexy like only Apple can.

pimeys 9y ago

I think this is just the right move. It's the only good reason to own an Apple or Android Watch, to monitor your health. The current solutions require quite a many devices to get the information to your watch. If Apple nails it with their product for us Type 1 diabetics, I'm ready to switch from Android.

cs2818 9y ago

I don't have any data on hand to back this up, but I don't think younger people are necessarily averse to monitoring their own health. I think personal health monitoring devices fit well with the devices the younger generation already uses to help maintain their identity and concept of self. I agree if it's poorly implemented or marketed it won't be adopted, but Apple probably has a shot at getting it right.

dominotw 9y ago
I agree. I've only seen middle aged office workers wear stuff like Fitbit, posture correction, sleep tracking type of things. Young people don't have to worry about 'sitting is new smoking' .
- mahyarm 9y ago
  There is a nerdy segment that loves tracking all of this health data forever and ever. There is also the segment that just wants to lose weight, and that can apply at all ages. A continuous glucose monitor is also a great way to monitor keto diets or similar. Keep yourself under a certain glucose level continuously and your body will be forced to use fat sources!

intoverflow2 9y ago

If Apple doesn't make this someone else will. If Apple doesn't make decent laptops and desktops then who else can? This is what bothers be about Tim Cooks priorities in health and celebrities next to his apathy towards computers. (I don't consider the iPad a computer I consider it a device)

kgin 9y ago
The business problem is that the world has increasing apathy towards computers. “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at [the] D8 conference in 2010. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  Yeah can't really argue against that logic, just arguing for someone to fulfil my needs to do my job. Maybe it's time for a new "truck" company that focuses on the needs of the few and Apple can ditch computers and focus on the needs of the many.

dude01 9y ago

What if Tim Cook is a strategy genius? The health care market is gigantic, and if in the long-run, Apple can get a piece of that market, they'd be set for a long time...

swsieber 9y ago

Except reading the article says the team behind this was initially kicked of by Jobs... And personally, I don't think it's all that weird. I think it fits perfectly with branding, but maybe I'm less aware of it.

npunt 9y ago

Athletes are the branding antidote to these concerns - they're extreme users in their own right and love to track all the things. One step down from the halo-effect of athletes is the 'Athleisure' segment of the fashion market (think Lululemon and the like), which shows broad interest in healthy living in desirable/cool demographics that have high correlation with Apple purchasers. On the contrary, going into health will reinforce the brand, not dilute it. Apple has always been an aspirational lifestyle brand. Given the growing scope of computing in our lives - work, social, leisure, health - the lifestyle that Apple sells is only going to get more complete and compelling. There's also a growing trend of QS and tracking health data points, and increasingly not just among geeks. You can see it in the nutrition space as well, where people are optimizing food, getting bloodwork, etc. These fields are ascendant and glucose tracking matters there too.

shas3 9y ago

I am deeply skeptical that anything other than R&D and patents will come out of this move by Apple. I am bearish on the prospects of using technology in healthcare. Primarily for these reasons: 1. Regulation: it is very hard to innovate at the pace of the consumer-electronics industry while satisfying FDA regulations. 2. For general purpose applications, signals and measurements are highly noisy and sensors are still deeply in the academic realm, working only in very special use-cases, as opposed to 'in the wild'. It is a different matter for special applications such as Type-I diabetes or other diseases because devices are critically important and patients are willing to tolerate discomfort (of wearing probes, pumps, etc.) 3. In general, predictive power of algorithms tends to be lower for non-genomic health care applications because of variability across individuals, errors in installing devices, rarity of certain types of data for training and validation, etc. 4. Some of the key benefits are hard to grasp for users because of the slow time scales over which things like weight loss occur, and also due to the multi-factorial/multi-component nature of human well-being.