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I'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 quic

• efields 5y ago
  Your 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 ago
    Once 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 ago
  I'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
  • nielsbot 5y ago
    No blood pressure
    • voisin 5y ago
      Rumoured in next one based on some acquisitions they did pre-pandemic.
  • DennisAleynikov 5y ago
    I have been using the samsung line of watches since before apple watch was ever a thing, despite some heart rate variance the leadership in payments samsung commanded was and still is unparalleled. people with apple pay carry a backup card, a samsung watch allows paying with magstripe emulation in case of legacy terminals. pre 2020 pandemic this was indespensible and there are still often inoperable nfc terminals and MST is a great backup. I hate the elitism around the apple watch and its minor changes to standard health tracking wearable tech that has had normal LTE and other full phone functions from the get go... not to mention the ridiculous requirment that an iPad isnt enough to set up a watch, you need to buy into their phones.
    • least 5y ago
      When I first saw that feature of the Samsung watch I thought it was really awesome. I still do. But I also remember it being excluded from some of their watches? Is that not the case anymore?
    • tinus_hn 5y ago
      In other news, Apple devices are not compatible with obsolete standards. Magstripe is insecure and obsolete and in no way a backup for nfc payments. Skimming is a thing.
      • DennisAleynikov 5y ago
        what? skimming is a thing and MST is not an insecure solution on top of magstripe, since it generates temporary cards per every few transactions. It is a backup for a traditional card, not something meant to be similar to NFC since its just a legacy method of payment that is still accepted more places than nfc. you could try to use one of those temporary numbers but whats the likelyhood it expires before malicious reuse?
• Fomite 5y ago
  I'm skeptical anyone has a decade long lead on anything in the consumer electronics space.
  • criddell 5y ago
    When Tesla was starting up I was skeptical that they could overcome GM and Ford's century-long lead in car manufacturing.
• nickbauman 5y ago
  Agree on all counts. It's very hard to put time horizons on anything. But I started wearing a Series 3 watch (3 generations old now) when I started a project my client in 2019 insisted I wear it as I was writing code that utilized HealthKit data from the Apple Watch. Check my past posts I'm NOT an Apple fan boi at all. But compared to the competition, there's nothing coming close to the integration and the UX out there. My partner has a Rage 4 and it's just garbage in comparison. It misses and drops, the display is like from the dollar store. HealthKit is absolutely bulletproof. Every single decision in that API is gold. Every time I think something might be poorly done it's my misunderstanding or they made the best choice you can make. Deep respect.
  • mcny 5y ago
    The only real complaint I have is 8GB is not enough storage to update watch os. But there is praise in the complaint: you can update it at all.
    • d3nj4l 5y ago
      On that note, it feels so un-apple like that their official way of resolving the storage issue with updates is to unpair the watch and pair it again.
      • tinus_hn 5y ago
        They have had instances like that with iPhone where the upgrade to iOS was a backup and restore cycle. It’s a long time ago though.
    • scarface74 5y ago
      That is horrible. I am glad I bought the 16GB cellular version. I would have bought it just for the extra storage even without cellular.
  • vbezhenar 5y ago
    Apple Watch might be the best smartwatches but for me the concept or smartwatch is still novel and I'm not sure if I want to switch. I wear ordinary watches and they're good enough for me. The only killer feature that I need is waking me up in a smart way (monitoring sleep phases and boozing on my hand between 08:00 - 09:00, for example) but Apple Watch does not have that feature. Other features are just not interesting for me. And, honestly, for most other people around me. May be I'm in a bubble, but so far I saw Apple Watch only once in my life.
• xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  Apple has a significant lead in manufacturing, at the very least. I haven't been in the CE industry in several years, but when I was, they frequently bought out entire lines of new tooling equipment with exclusive multi-year contracts. They literally have some of the most advanced, bleeding-edge tooling in existence. It's very, very difficult to compete with their fabrication abilities. Combined with their market position, huge margins, decent but good looking software and UX, it's incredibly hard to catch up to them. Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables because there is no competition at their luxury price point in a luxury device ecosystem like the iPhone. To catch up, first you'd have to defeat the iPhone, meanwhile develop and then unleash a wearable all of your customers also want, and somehow make money doing so. It's a tall task.
• burnte 5y ago
  The whole article is viewing things through some heavily tinted glasses. 1. Apple was early - Nope, Apple came late to the party, years after first movers were there. 2. Voice computing distraction - Again, nope. Amazon Echo devices and Google Home devices are HUGE. Headphones and earbugs come with Alexa and google Assistant integration. Apple tries with Siri but it's consistently far behind Amazon and Google there. 3. Wearables require design expertise. It’s not enough to just throw together some leftover smartphone components and ship wearables. -- Yet, that's what Apple did with the first gen of Apple watch. Gen 1 was also dead in three years. Gen 1 was a pilot project. 4. Ecosystem and technology advantage. - These are Apple advantages, but not ten year leads. 5. No price and feature umbrellas under Apple. - Well, there are a lot of people still wondering what utility they have aside from a few "health" measures. I personally don't care about my heartrate all day, nor my steps, or a bad idea of calories burned. I don't need to monitor my O2 levels, nor get instant EKGs. I personally stuggle to see the point of smart watches. Notifications? I can see them on the phone screen, it's just as easy for me to look at it. Music controls? If I'm in the car the controls are on my steering wheel. At home I just say "Alexa, stop" or whatever. When I have headphones/earbugs in? I can tap the button on my headphones just as easily as I can tap my watch. What else would I use it for? There certain is a price umbrella, too, because you have to have an iPhone and be bought into that ecosystem.
  • D13Fd 5y ago
    I was with you until #5. The Apple Watch is very useful. That’s why people keep buying it. It’s nice to get notifications on your wrist if you don’t have your phone out 100% of the time. The alarms are silent and dead simple to set, and it can function as your wake up alarm in the morning, and sync with your phone as a backup alarm. It lets you unlock your phone while wearing a mask. It lets you pay for things instantly without taking your phone or wallet out. If you are someone who exercises, the utility goes up even more. It’s great to control your podcast or music while out walking or running without digging around in your phone. It’s perfect for tracking your workouts, because it’s always on your arm and it tracks your heart rate. I agree that the EKG & O2 level features are pretty much a gimmick. But the watch generally is an exceptional piece of technology.
• lscotte 5y ago
  I had an Android smartwatch years before Apple even came out with one. Typical Apple reality distortion field in effect.
  • lscotte 5y ago
    Downvoted by the Apple cult, of course!
  • doublepg23 5y ago
    I’ve had multiple wearOS watches and switched to the iOS platform in the last year. It’s frankly night and day, for the extra bulk in the wearOS watches you get worse battery life and dismal performance. A lot of the blame can be placed on Qualcomm’s back for not keeping pace with wearable processors. I’m wondering if Google’s Whitechapel and their cooperation with Samsung can improve this at all, but it’s currently a sad state of affairs. Dieter of The Verge and Linus of Linus Tech Tips have made all the same points scattered throughout this thread.
• sQL_inject 5y ago
  I'm have to sort of disagree, not a decade but easily half a decade lead. Source: I worked in this space years ago with what was, at the time, the leader in the space, and remember how many of my coworkers laughed at the Apple Watch unveil. Now Apple is the one laughing with a girthy, multibillion dollar schadenfreude. Apple has leads in silicon and cross-platform integration which is inarguably led to a better user experience, extended battery life, and smaller form factor. Try piecing together an Airpods Pro grade product with 'off-the-shelf' parts and half the firmware engineers. Apple has orders of magnitude greater scale through their supply chain, and a real clincher: technological mastery of material science; from CNC milled aluminum to tooling for high grade plastic resin, and can shoulder out competitors from even touching the raw material once they've even realized they need it. Apple has solid brand cachet, which drives loyalty which drives revenue. Apple has (last I checked) the highest revenue/sq. foot retail space in the world. Yes, the rest of retail is dying, but Apple controls the image, experience, support, and purchasing of all it's own products. Check out an Apple store on a Friday night in the Bay Area, it's incredible how packed they are. Arguably the most difficult thing for competitors to copy is the culture of industrial design and UX prioritization backed by engineering. Every other major competitor in their spaces shamelessly copies the externals without the same cohesion and mastery of internals -- it's embarrassing frankly (checkout the Oppo 'Enco X' earbud site, it's a poorly made rip off of the Airpods site). I don't own any Apple products, and I don't endorse their labor practices, but I respect their brand, products, and patience in releasing GOOD things at the right time. Consumers do too, judging by revenue. Apple's weakness is now their precarious position in bed with China, which will take decades to undo.
  • orev 5y ago
    I’m glad you highlighted the materials/manufacturing component, which I think is frequently overlooked by tech people (who mostly focus on the chips and software). Apple’s ability to build millions of devices with such precision and tight tolerances is really a huge accomplishment.
    • mmmmmbop 5y ago
      Just to clarify, Apple doesn't actually build any devices. They are built by Foxconn, mainly. It's still very impressing, of course.
• Mandatum 5y ago
  The software side, they’re so far ahead it’s ridiculous. Google couldn’t put out a watch to match the generation 3 Apple Watch today. They probably couldn’t even do that in 2-3 years. Same goes for Microsoft’s and Amazon.
• solarkraft 5y ago
  > 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 On a similar note I’d like to point out that accessibility affects everyone. You don’t need to be disabled to enjoy accessibility. My eyes are fine, (I think), but I find the iPhone X’s lowest screen brightness too bright iOS’s blue filter to be barely effective, so I use a custom color filter (almost full red) and “Reduce white point” and am super happy it’s an option. People used and probably use assistive touch for things that don’t compensate a disability, but just add useful features. The back tap shortcuts are just a nice feature. The zoom is nice if you want to show something to someone a bit further away. I could go on. As someone with perfectly fine hands I love this feature because one thing I hate about modern smart watches (RIP Pebble) is that you have to touch and inevitably smudge up the screen. Bam, problem single-handedly (what pun are you talking about?) solved. Massive kudos. The other, more obvious advantage is that your other hand stays free, of course. > and perhaps costs more to develop than the return they'll ever see on it. As you see, the user base for such features is bigger than you may think. Besides collecting some easy sympathy points for helping disadvantaged people, Apple also seems to be huge in the business of servicing small, but under-served and vocal minorities (where can someone who wants a modern, small phone go?), which will turn into strong advocates for their brand.
  • dhosek 5y ago
    When I showed the designers at a company I worked at a few years ago how to enable screen zoom, they found it an imminently useful tool. Once enabled, ctrl-scroll zooms in/out on the display which is very useful for being able to check pixel-level details on, say, an HTML render.
• whynotminot 5y ago
  > silicon tech being years ahead of the competition is one that is hardly a factor for the smart watch category. What? This doesn't even make sense. This is by far the most important lead Apple has. Their ability to put performant and efficient chips into tiny devices is why they have such a software edge. Other Android wearables suck because the underlying hardware is not able to power the experience without significant compromises. It's not an accident that WatchOS is vastly better than competing Android offerings. It's hardware driving software possibilities.
  • aphextron 5y ago
    "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
    • GeorgeTirebiter 5y ago
      what folks don't seem to grasp is that hardware is (conceptually) software, except it much harder to change... And it works the other way, too, c.f. Lisp Machine. And then there were mainframes B6700 had loadable microcode that 'swapped in' different instructions depending on the higher-level language being run: http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burroughs-b6700-mainframe http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burrough...
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    I don't really agree. I've owned a Fossil Carlyle 5 smartwatch with WearOS and an Apple Watch 3, and Apple's lead is definitely on the software side of things. I actually really dislike the material build of the Apple watch. The screen is designed to expose as much of the surface area as possible to scuffs and scratches, while the body of the watch feels larger than any other smartwatch I've used. The Apple Watch got hotter than the Fossil, somehow, and the sensor bump is also much more pronounced. Anyways, it's not like this is up for debate anyhow. Ask any analyst who's watched the industry for the last decade, they'll still tell you that Apple's advantage is in the software world. If iMessage and MacOS were available on other hardware, Apple would be selling two crazy handfuls of nothing to customers. The average consumer doesn't care if their laptop has faulty graphics, a keyboard failing en-masse or soldered storage. They just want the little blue bubble to pop up when they send a message from their computer. Recognizing that, Apple arguably makes more compromises than anyone else in the industry. Their concept of "iteration" really only involves bringing their product to the next most common denominator.
• scarface74 5y ago
  The hard part about copying Apple in wearables isn’t the software. It’s the hardware. Yes another company theoretically could make hardware that has the same performance/power efficiency as the S1 series in the Apple Watch. But, no other company is going to spend the money since they don’t think they will recoup it. Just as most people who are willing to spend money on high end phones buy iPhones, the same is true for other wearables. Apple knows that it can recoup the up front costs of any research and development.