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Wouldn't it be challenging to create any interesting wearable tech that would actually last 10 years? I may be an outlier here because I came to the Apple Watc

Wouldn't it be challenging to create any interesting wearable tech that would actually last 10 years? I may be an outlier here because I came to the Apple Watch from the world of higher-end watches. My usual daily wear piece before was an Omega, e.g. I started wearing the Apple Watch when I was training for a half marathon, because it worked really well for that purpose (when paired with Strava) -- and I discovered it was also so USEFUL for me that I wore it almost all the time. After about 18 months, I realized I was really only taking it off when I felt I needed to wear something that looked a bit fancier -- but I didn't want to give up the Apple functionality. Then the series 3 was introduced, with actual water-resistance and the in-built cell capability, and that was that. I sold my initial one (a Sport model) and bought the next nicer model in steel with the sapphire crystal on the Milanese loop. I swap in a composite band if I'm being active, and wear the loop if I'm going to dinner. I don't expect this watch -- about $750US -- to last 10 years, but I will be happy if I get 3 out of it before I want to upgrade. I also expect it'll still WORK at that point, and the driver for me will be new features or functions and not failure. I'm okay with that, because of the relatively modest cost vs. definitively high usability/duty cycle. If I were the sort of person who would wear a sport model all the time, it'd be an even easier choice ($359 w/o cell; $429 with).

laumars 9y ago
> Wouldn't it be challenging to create any interesting wearable tech that would actually last 10 years? Wearable tech has already been around for more than 10 years. Whether it's raincoats with speakers built into the collar, or the digital watches from the 80s. The problem isn't so much wearable tech but rather current tech trends (eg the IoT revolution). To that end, I'd wager something like Pebble (baring hardware failure) would still work in 10 years since the only dependency that has is bluetooth.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  > I'd wager something like Pebble (baring hardware failure) would still work in 10 years since the only dependency that has is bluetooth. I doubt it. The watch will still work, but the app needed to sync to the watch won’t. I’ve been really frustrated with old “utility” apps not working anymore on iOS (due to not being updated to 64bit). I’m all for upgrades and new stuff, but it sucks when a simple app that did exactly what you needed is no longer able to run.
  - laumars 9y ago
    The Pebble community have created their own services to combat that (though I've not tried it yet myself as the regular Pebble app still works fine on my phone)
bunderbunder 9y ago
All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years. AFAICT, this didn't stop being the case until it became common for every single piece of electronics to run an operating system, at which point tech got caught up in large software companies' compulsion to constantly rearrange things. I think it's really about the cloud. I kept my last iPhone way past a typical phone's lifespan, and got to experience watching it slowly revert back to being a dumbphone. In the same way that smart home devices have a nasty tendency to stop working as soon as the vendor decides to stop maintaining some critical server the product needs to be able to ping just to turn on properly, apps eventually stop working with the latest OS your phone can run, and pretty shortly after that some service running in the cloud will stop being able to talk to whatever version of the app you're stuck on. In the case of Apple's or AT&T's apps, this happened almost immediately after the first version of iOS I couldn't upgrade to came down the pipe. In the case of others, it was 6 months or a year later. The web browser died in its own special way, choked to death by more JavaScript than it could handle. I get the economics behind why companies do this, but it's sad, all the same. A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand.
- ubermonkey 9y ago
  "All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years." I think you have odd perspective here, because you're talking about tech lasting for a decade, but you're also explicitly omitting anything with a computer in it ("run an operating system"). "A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand." The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. Durability wasn't the issue; the rapidly increasing capability of newer and more capable computing platforms was. We're at a point now where Moore's Law & related phenomena seem to have slowed a bit. Ten or fifteen years ago I always upgraded my laptop every 3 years. Now I can go longer, and typically only upgrade when there's a compelling reason (higher RAM ceiling, e.g., or external factors like the economics of extended service plans). Phones are the same; in the earlier years of the cell phone era, I got a new phone nearly every year because that meant smaller and more powerful and therefore more useful. In the Smartphone era, two years became the norm, and nowadays it's routine to see folks with 3 or even 4 year old phones. The tl;dr is that there's no conspiracy or malignant intent here; it's just that shit gets better, and so the upgrade makes sense for most people. I mean, maybe you can get a 35-year-old Commodore running as a novelty, but I sure wouldn't want to try to do my job with one.

laumars 9y ago

> Wouldn't it be challenging to create any interesting wearable tech that would actually last 10 years? Wearable tech has already been around for more than 10 years. Whether it's raincoats with speakers built into the collar, or the digital watches from the 80s. The problem isn't so much wearable tech but rather current tech trends (eg the IoT revolution). To that end, I'd wager something like Pebble (baring hardware failure) would still work in 10 years since the only dependency that has is bluetooth.

jsjohnst 9y ago
> I'd wager something like Pebble (baring hardware failure) would still work in 10 years since the only dependency that has is bluetooth. I doubt it. The watch will still work, but the app needed to sync to the watch won’t. I’ve been really frustrated with old “utility” apps not working anymore on iOS (due to not being updated to 64bit). I’m all for upgrades and new stuff, but it sucks when a simple app that did exactly what you needed is no longer able to run.
- laumars 9y ago
  The Pebble community have created their own services to combat that (though I've not tried it yet myself as the regular Pebble app still works fine on my phone)

bunderbunder 9y ago

All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years. AFAICT, this didn't stop being the case until it became common for every single piece of electronics to run an operating system, at which point tech got caught up in large software companies' compulsion to constantly rearrange things. I think it's really about the cloud. I kept my last iPhone way past a typical phone's lifespan, and got to experience watching it slowly revert back to being a dumbphone. In the same way that smart home devices have a nasty tendency to stop working as soon as the vendor decides to stop maintaining some critical server the product needs to be able to ping just to turn on properly, apps eventually stop working with the latest OS your phone can run, and pretty shortly after that some service running in the cloud will stop being able to talk to whatever version of the app you're stuck on. In the case of Apple's or AT&T's apps, this happened almost immediately after the first version of iOS I couldn't upgrade to came down the pipe. In the case of others, it was 6 months or a year later. The web browser died in its own special way, choked to death by more JavaScript than it could handle. I get the economics behind why companies do this, but it's sad, all the same. A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand.

ubermonkey 9y ago
"All tech, including wearable tech, used to be expected to last at least 10 years." I think you have odd perspective here, because you're talking about tech lasting for a decade, but you're also explicitly omitting anything with a computer in it ("run an operating system"). "A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand." The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. Durability wasn't the issue; the rapidly increasing capability of newer and more capable computing platforms was. We're at a point now where Moore's Law & related phenomena seem to have slowed a bit. Ten or fifteen years ago I always upgraded my laptop every 3 years. Now I can go longer, and typically only upgrade when there's a compelling reason (higher RAM ceiling, e.g., or external factors like the economics of extended service plans). Phones are the same; in the earlier years of the cell phone era, I got a new phone nearly every year because that meant smaller and more powerful and therefore more useful. In the Smartphone era, two years became the norm, and nowadays it's routine to see folks with 3 or even 4 year old phones. The tl;dr is that there's no conspiracy or malignant intent here; it's just that shit gets better, and so the upgrade makes sense for most people. I mean, maybe you can get a 35-year-old Commodore running as a novelty, but I sure wouldn't want to try to do my job with one.