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Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables
- jayd16 5y agoWhat a joke. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have face wearables in the market already. In Google's case, they've had enough time to do a full, release and kill cycle. And the Quest runs Android. How is that an Apple lead?
- ska 5y ago> How is that an Apple lead? Because they have a wearable that people (and not just people in a niche) use and buy in significant numbers?
- jayd16 5y agoDoes this logic mean Casio is the AR leader? In my eyes it seems like a ludicrous leap.
- ska 5y agoDid you miss the significant numbers part? Apples watch is a mainstream consumer electronics hit. The closest other thing close to comparable I can think of is the fitbits - at least their simple ones. Nobody in AR (or face wearables) is playing in that space at all. I think "decade lead" is unsupportable. But the article is right that all of their competitors or potential competitors are well behind in some combination of capability in hardware, software, manufacturing, ecosystem. Most of them in all categories.
- jayd16 5y agoMore numbers in a completely different tech stack is meaningless. How does a watch give you any learnings on an AR headset?
- ska 5y agoI'm not sure what argument you are trying to make. That in some putative future where AR headsets become a meaningful product category for wearable Apple might not be in a strong position? True but not really germane.
- jayd16 5y agoIf the article isn't implying Apple is ahead in AR wearables I guess I don't understand why AR wearables are brought up at all.
- ska 5y agoI suppose for why you would have to take that context from the article; the argument that was in the "out there" parts of AR (e.g. glasses/goggles) nobody has shipped anything with real impact, but in the less flashy areas (e.g. assistive touch) Apple is years ahead. Plus a bit about M&A shifting apples capability in these areas. All sounds plausible. What this translates to in some potential future where more ambitious AR projects find a fit with consumers, who knows. But it terms of systems that ship today, article seems pretty accurate, and not at all deserving of your "what a joke".
- handrous 5y agoI'd hesitate to put a time estimate like that on their lead in anything. They've had a "decade-long" lead on a lot of things for over a decade. The rest of the market (unfortunately) acts like it's decided not to actually compete directly with them at all, and to chase other segments instead, putting out products that might look kind-of similar but aren't really serious alternatives to most people considering the Apple version of whatever-it-is.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoI didn't think I would like the Apple Watch as much as I do. I swear, add a camera, and I'll leave my phone at home. I know, it's not a mobile browser, not really much as a mobile messaging device — but that's fine. One one hand, I'm not your stereotypical phone user that is always engrossed in the black mirror but furthermore, the Apple Watch means I am even less inclined.
- rubicon33 5y agoI'm in the same boat. I got the LTE connected Apple watch and I absolutely LOVE it. I leave my phone AND my wallet at home pretty much everywhere I go now. If I get a phone call, or a text, I answer it with my watch. I have phone, text, apple pay, music (spotify, pandora), maps, and so much more. Probably the only thing I miss is a browser to google something. But that's pretty rare that I need that. The best part is that all of these apps work natively, without the phone nearby, entirely over LTE or WiFi. Seriously if you hate carrying around a big phone, get an LTE connected Apple watch. It's a game changer.
- intellix 5y agoFeel like I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum. I hate wearing it and don't like wearing anything any kind of jewellery either. Only really wearing it for sleep tracking and I don't even do anything with the data. I don't really use it for time and I honestly can't think of any reason to use it for anything. The health stuff doesn't tell me anything is wrong with me and the notifications drive me insane vibrating on my wrist so I just turned it off and they've been off since.
- TENACIOUSANT 5y agoAgreed on the haptics, a literal nightmare device with them enabled. But without I find it keeps me less tethered to the phone, and able to check on calls and messages during a conversation without breaking the flow
- t-writescode 5y agoTurn off all the notifications. It’s way, way better without them.
- lettergram 5y agoPebble IMO was and still is the best wearable watch. I don’t think anything worked better largely due to the long battery life and generally the e-ink design. Had they added different wrist bands with smart tech in it, it would have gone even further. I don’t really think apple has a decade lead, what they do have is minimal innovation they’re competing with. AND more importantly, a brand and ecosystem. That being said if Samsung came out with a decent watch similar to pebble and bundled it with their phones I think they’d be outselling Apple.
- flyinglizard 5y agoI don’t get why battery life is important beyond 24h. I just put the watch on its charger at night. Only downside is during traveling, one more thing to carry and possibly the watch won’t make it through excruciating international travel. So it won’t matter to me if the watch lasts a day or a week, it’s off my wrist when I sleep and goes on it’s charger.
- btowngar 5y agoI’m T1 diabetic and use my watch for monitoring my glucose levels. I wear it 100% of the time, aside from showering when it charges. Charging quickly and having a minimum of 24hrs of charge is really important to me. Apple Watch hits both of those.
- ValentineC 5y agoDo you have a separate accessory for monitoring glucose? I'm really looking forward to the Series 7 which is rumoured to have blood glucose monitoring.
- btowngar 5y agoYes, I use a Dexcom G6. If the rumors of the Series 7 having a glucose monitor and a blood pressure monitor on it are true, that would be incredible. They’re surely working on core body temperature monitoring too!
- CoolGuySteve 5y agoAround 10 years ago I wrote a Linux driver for the OCZ Nia, a super cheap EMG device. The Nia was actually a $10k medical device for paralyzed people to control computers with their face and tongue repurposed as a gaming input and sold for $120. While I'm certain the technology has advanced, what surprises me most is how basic these finger reading devices seem. They're basically some electrodes on your skin near major nerve centers and a little bit of signal processing, like barely any signal processing. It's about time this technology entered the mainstream. I was waiting for VR with occular/vagus nerve sensing for depth of field emulation but I guess hand sensors are the next best thing.
- maxerickson 5y agoThe implementation shown in the video strikes me very much as an accessibility feature (which is a fine thing). By comparison, pressing the stateful stop button on my exercise watch is quick and straightforward.
- leoc 5y agoThere was also the Myo armband by Thalmic Labs, later North, later a division of Google. Apparently it didn't work very well though.
- jpm_sd 5y agoGoogle put a ton of R&D effort into gesture sensing with short range radar (Soli) but it doesn't seem to have gone much of anywhere as yet. I don't think this type of interface is as important as the author claims. https://atap.google.com/soli/ https://atap.google.com/soli/
- valine 5y agoGoogle's gesture sensing went nowhere because it was laughably bad. It routinely failed to recognize gestures, was poorly integrated into the OS, and couldn't even be sold in several countries because of its use of radar.
- judge2020 5y agoIt was such a gimmick on the Pixel 4, probably because it required you position your hand over your phone. However, if you can just make the gesture of turning a knob regardless of your hand position (which a wearable probably could do), that seems like it'd have a use case.
- melling 5y agoApple needs a little competition. I expected the Watch to advance much quicker. 6 years ago I wrote this blog saying everyone would be wearing a smart watch within a decade. My reasons were “health and safety“ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyone-will-wear-a-smartwatch/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyo... “ There has been much discussion on the need for smart watches like the Apple Watch. People have a hard time believing that a large market exists. I can’t say with certainty that you’ll be wearing an Apple Watch a decade from now but you’ll definitely be wearing a smart watch from Apple, Google, or some new kid on the block.”
- pram 5y agoLooks like you were wrong.
- melling 5y agoYes, smart watches haven’t advanced as much as I thought they would. Apple needs competition. They wouldn’t make large screen iPhones until Android started winning, for example. Hopefully we get there. There’s a lot of promise in wearables: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/12/smartwatch-can-detect-early-signs-of-illness.html https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/12/smartwatch-ca...
- grouphugs 5y agoall that data goes straight to the police, this is beyond a dangerous warning, not celebratory
- least 5y agoI'm pretty skeptical that Apple has a decade-long lead on any of the other big players in the market. Any innovations that one company can make can be more quickly adopted than new innovations occur and there's nothing as far as software goes that Apple is uniquely positioned to create. The other factors mentioned such as silicon tech being years ahead of the competition is one that is hardly a factor for the smart watch category. On the other hand this is always the case and Apple's been the best at creating a general consumer wearable that appeals to the masses. Its integration into the apple ecosystem is a big selling point and that's probably the biggest factor that is basically impossible for competitors to replicate. On a tangential note, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the amount of work that Apple has put into its accessibility features. Assistive Touch on the apple watch will probably serve a remarkably small portion of the user base and perhaps costs more to develop than the return they'll ever see on it. Still, year after year Apple keeps advancing accessibility features in all of its products. This is definitely an area where big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft excel at.
- efields 5y agoYour last p contradicts the first. Part of what makes apple products so good is the software, the depth and complexity of things like Assistive Touch doesn’t happen in a few sprints. Their software isn’t perfect, but it’s so thorough that it allows them to do levels of polish that competitors have a hard time catching up to.
- least 5y agoOnce a feature is shown off in the real world it usually doesn't take long to replicate its functionality to an acceptable level. This give Apple a lead in that respect, but not years of a lead.
- unparagoned 5y agoI've got a Samsung watch and the the heart rate monitor has serious reliability issues. Apples is not only suppose the be better but you got blood pressure and o2 monitoring. I'm definitely going to switch over in the future
- pvm3 5y agoApple has a decade-long lead in wearables for the Apple ecosystem.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI want a watch that stands alone.
- Spivak 5y agoI mean isn’t that the Apple Watch with cellular? You can even set up with its own phone number.
- tompazourek 5y agoDo you still need an iPhone to set it up, etc.?
- krrrh 5y agoI think people underestimate how big of a factor weight is going to be when it comes to face wearables. Apple’s lead in terms of performance/watt is so massive at this point, they’re going to have a few years where no other AR solution can even compete.
- cmsj 5y agoYou make an extremely good point. One could guess that a first version of AR glasses would be not unlike the functionality of the watch - a few Complications, some Notifications, simple apps for stuff like navigation/music. They have all of that, powered by a tiny system-in-package and a little battery.
- jayd16 5y agoThey can't even make a pair of headphones under 300 grams.
- dagmx 5y ago260g https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MXJA2ZM/A/beats-studio3-wireless-over-ear-headphones-the-beats-skyline-collection-midnight-black https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MXJA2ZM/A/beats-studio...
- jayd16 5y agoFair enough but they would have to change out the Apple design language. I find it odd that we seem to assume Apple would do this for a headset and not headphones though.
- krrrh 5y agoAirPods must outsell AirPod Pros by what, 100 to 1? Each AirPod weighs only 4g.
- defaultname 5y agoI work in the AR space and it is incredible how much Apple is preparing their entire platform for a massive push into AR. For years they have been laying a very robust groundwork with their APIs (ARKit, RealityKit, SceneKit), the inclusion of LIDAR on their iPhone 12 Pro / iPad Pro, and likely the entire iPhone 13 line. These are all things that are effectively gimmicky and seem like failures with little uptake, but all of it is just prepping for the inevitable headset in the very near future. They are going to absolutely dominate the market so completely.
- paxys 5y agoThat is in general a ridiculous claim to make when talking about consumer technology. No company has a decade-long lead in anything. If there is sufficient economic motivation competitors will always catch up in a year or two. It happened for smartphones, tablets, TVs, speakers, headphones, cameras, voice assistants and just about everything else. In case of the watch specifically I actually think there isn't enough motivation to innovate considering the space hasn't blown up like everyone expected. If you take headphones out of the picture wearables as a whole is still a relatively niche device category.
- spamizbad 5y agoNokia had a decade-long lead in mobile phones.
- b-lee 5y agoSo?
- ErikVandeWater 5y agoDon't understand why this is upvoted. The math used to get to 10+ years assumes competitors address each element of the lead one-by-one: > Custom silicon / technology / sensors (a four to five-year lead over the competition, and that is being generous to the competition) > Design-led product development processes that emphasizes the user experience (adds three years to Apple’s lead) > A broader ecosystem build-out in terms of a suite of wearables and services (adds two years to Apple’s lead) Why would competitors wait to start on emphasizing user experience and broader suite of wearables until after they create "custom silicon" (whatever that means)? And the claim that user experience is superior for an Apple itself is unsubstantiated. As an Android/Windows person, I would most likely have a better experience with an Android-based wearable than an Apple-based wearable because of the integration. If the claim is that Apple has a lead against competitors for owners of Apple products, why is that interesting enough to write a blog post? I bet Apple has a lead in Lightning to 3.5mm headphone dongles too.
- shitRETARDSsay 5y agoBasically, I upvote anything Apple.
- newscracker 5y agoPertinent point, IMO: > Google I/O 2021. At its 2021 developers conference, Google showed signs of finally taking wrist wearables seriously by ditching Wear OS and partnering with Samsung on a new OS. While it is fair to be skeptical that the effort will end up being successful, the announcement was a marked change from prior Google I/Os when wearables were all but ignored. Diving a bit deeper into Google’s announcement, it’s easy to see how far behind Google truly is in wearables. Google completely dropped the ball on Wear OS. To add to this, Qualcomm’s wearable SoCs have also been lagging. Samsung is generally good at keeping pace with hardware, but has been hobbled by Tizen and a weak ecosystem. These things cannot change overnight, and Google’s stewardship track record is something that doesn’t improve drastically, regardless of any announcements it makes. For wearables as a whole, I don’t believe Apple has a decade-long lead though. We’ll have to wait and practically see what it does for AR wearables before concluding on a number.
- gnu8 5y agoThe article seems to be saying that Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables over a list of companies that don't even make wearables. That is a clever trick for giving the article a bold title, but the result is a fairly uninteresting and uninformative Apple jerk-off piece. It is akin to saying "Quaker Oats has a 150-year lead in edibles" where Apple doesn't even make food.
- snowwrestler 5y agoSo who are the most capable competitors to Apple in wearables? Among my friends and colleagues, those who don’t buy Apple Watch often buy Garmin watches instead. In the area of fitness tracking watches, Garmin seems to be serious competition. It’s missing the full app ecosystem of Apple Watch but I think you can send messages and email to some Garmin watches over 4G, for example.
- deepGem 5y agoAs a current Apple watch owner I was tempted to get a Garmin, just for the battery life. It is super annoying to remember to charge the Apple watch every 20 hours or so. I wish Apple got around to offering better battery life than adding features. I finally caved and bought an automatic. I just want a watch to show me the time accurately, last long and offer good water resistance as I wear the watch all the time.
- askafriend 5y agoWhy do you want a watch to tell you the time? The time is literally everywhere you look - from you laptop to your phone to your oven and even microwave.
- snowwrestler 5y agoPersonally, the watch I grab most these days is a good ol’ Timex Ironman. I pretty much only wear a watch when exercising and pretty much only care about the time while doing so.
- blinkingled 5y ago
- amelius 5y agoI've seen kickstarter projects with better wearables.
- farco12 5y agoDo you mind sharing some examples that have shipped?
- tengbretson 5y agoAside from some niche health-focused areas, the only value prop that wearables currently have to most people is in tech ecosystem integration. This just so happens to be an area where apple is head and shoulders above their competition.
- stephc_int13 5y agoI strongly disagree. Apple is selling a ton of watches because the brand is currently so strong that it's a no brainer for most people. Also, the product is actually not bad. But, I don't find it attractive, I think the rectangular design was an early mistake that will hinder their design for a long time. The software look good mostly because Google did a really poor job when porting Android to this form factor. This is not the end of the story, and it won't need 10 years for competitors to catch up.
- dijit 5y agoI disagree with your disagreement. Though I also disagree with the article itself, but for one particular reason: I don't think it'll be nearly 10 years to catch up. I was skittish on the idea of a watch I have to charge (nearly) every day, but it really has improved my life, in fact it's _nearly_ to the point where I don't need a phone.. since I can pay, take calls, respond to messages, play music (though, not browse the web or take photos) without having my phone anywhere near me.. I've trialled entire days with no phone and it's worked pretty well honestly. There's nothing coming close to this anywhere else. But, I think people catch up easier than they lead. A decade lead is absolutely unthinkable- if google/samsung wants to do wearables seriously I think it'll be 2 years at most -- especially as they're almost certainly working on it already, and they can use the product that's already on the market as a meter to measure against for anything they're building.
- hinkley 5y agoMost days I can put it on the charger when I get in the shower, and put it back on when I grab my keys and wallet. It’s not like you have to charge it over night. Half hour will last you quite a while.
- dijit 5y agoDepends a lot on the model and usage; I did that too (after recommendations from my friend) but ended up with low power warnings fairly often. And now of course the battery has significantly lower capacity than new, or the OS is much heavier. The watch was charged while I took a shower after the gym this afternoon. Was fully charged this morning. It’s currently on 37% at 19:51. (for context, my watch is a 44mm (or, large) series 4)
- shados 5y agoI know it's not quite the same and is a lot more complicated, but... What was Microsoft (PocketPC) and Palm's lead in hand held computing back in the days, right before Apple shit over everything they did in one announcement? Wearable as currently imagined kind of suck. Making them better while keeping the same concept is just gonna make something that sucks faster/lighter. Someone needs to come in and take the world by storm with something we didn't think of yet. Maybe that will STILL be Apple, but it could be someone else.
- pjmlp 5y agoIn what concerns Microsoft, if they had doubled down on WP7 model (Silverlight + XNA) and just opened the C and C++ toolchain to app developers (NDK style), instead of rebooting the ecosystem multiple times, their stuff would probably still be around.
- MichaEiler 5y agoThank you. I was wondering about this too. Breaking app compatibility between WP7 and WP8 was IMHO the death sentence for the platform...
- pjmlp 5y agoExcept that doing it once wasn't enough. 8.0 had separate models for phone, tablet and desktop. Then 8.1 unified tablet and desktop, while keeping phone apart for view code, so UAP was born. With Win10 everything got merged together as UWP and the whole One Core marketing happened. Then since the WinDev team had some score to settle, C++/CX was deprecated and replaced by C++/WinRT, which to this day after 4 years in development, still expects developers to manually edit IDL files and the generated code without any kind of Visual Studio tooling support. Now they have WinUI 3.0 with 1700+ issues on Github, with Project Reunion just hitting 0.8, with the very long term roadmap of unifying everything, assuming it doesn't get canned as well. So most of us that believed on the ideas behind WinRT just gave up, and went back to classical Forms/WPF/Win32.
- wetpaws 5y agoAnd yet it can't make a smartwatch with a power consumption less of a freaking nuclear submarine. Wearable balttery should be counted in weaks, not fractions of a second.
- makecheck 5y agoApple’s lead seems to be more in tangential things that are very hard to replicate: Apple Pay, supporting the highly popular iMessage, etc. These can never work with any other device. There are definite flaws in the device. I find buttons unnecessarily hard to tap for instance (they should offer more vertical space), and the face is so sensitive that it routinely triggers unwanted actions. It is really annoying to start something I want (like a timer) and notice some time later that I somehow accidentally stopped the timer by hitting my watch on something. As far as 3rd parties, I have seen a general trend of apps gradually withdrawing their support for watchOS. There just aren’t that many useful things to do on a small surface. For apps suited to this (timers, reminders, etc.) it is fine.
- smoldesu 5y agoYep. Apple's game has always been marking up marginal utility, and that's ultimately what you pay for here.
- rubicon33 5y agoTo start a timer, raise your watch to your mouth and simply say “start 1 hour timer”. You don’t even need to say “hey Siri”. It starts listening on the gesture of raising it to your mouth. Genius. Raise watch to mouth and try things… “Text Danielle ____” “Open Pandora” “Open wallet” There are also settings to disable active watch face unless it’s raised. I have that enabled and never have issues accidentally hitting it. Check your settings and let me know if that helps.
- varispeed 5y agoDo they collect this information somehow? I mean by wearing this device and using e.g. a timer, do Apple employees can find out for example how often did particular person use the timer and for how long?
- tshaddox 5y agoThe raise-and-speak feature is extremely unreliable. It seems to refuse to trigger if you’ve interacted with the watch in the last few seconds, so if you try to speak to it and it doesn’t trigger, it certainly won’t trigger when you immediately try again. It also triggers all the time accidentally when my watch was nowhere near my mouth. I frequently look at the watch and see a message like “I don’t understand that” with a transcription of something it thinks I said. “Hey Siri” is also unreliable, mostly because if you hesitate for a few too many milliseconds it thinks you’ve finished your query. I almost exclusively use Siri by holding the power button on my iPhone or Apple Watch.
- sfblah 5y agoI find the article’s mention of the “static smart speaker mirage” unconvincing. I use Amazon Echo at home and have found its voice recognition and capabilities vastly superior to those of Siri. In my opinion it’s fair to say this is an area where Apple is flat out losing to the competition. I too had assumed the watch or phone would provide all that functionality, but it appears I was mistaken. I think the major lead Apple has in wearables has to do with ecosystem. I wear and Apple Watch because I want to listen to Apple Music while running. Doing so is clumsy with any other device.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoI’m not convinced the wearable market has been cracked at all. I feel when it finally is we’ll roll our eyes at the current day smartphone concept.
- tornadofart 5y agoApple wearables are terrible, sorry. What use is a watch that I have to reload every night and can't be used decently on it's own? Anyone who has worn a decent, say, polar or garmin, sports watch for more than a day will be amazed and terrified to discover how bad apple wearables are. A good touchscreen is all they have to offer.
- doobeeus 5y agoI'm wondering if Apple tried selling it's current line of smartwatches a decade from now whether they would be competitive or just retro.