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The Apple Watch wasn’t quite ready for launch either. Apple didn’t know how to market it or what the hell to do with it. It took them a few generations to zone

The Apple Watch wasn’t quite ready for launch either. Apple didn’t know how to market it or what the hell to do with it. It took them a few generations to zone in on health and fitness and the rest is history. The Apple VR headset has been in development for 7 years. They need to release it now and see how the world is using it and tweak it accordingly. It’s going to drastically improve the product.

MBCook 4y ago
> They need to release it now and see how the word is using it and tweak it accordingly. I don’t know. If you release something before it’s really ready you can shoot a whole category in the foot. A 2005 iPhone would have been terrible. The 2007 iPhone was right on the edge of what was possible. A 2005 iPhone would have flopped because the tech would have held it back so bad. Then there is the problem of why I’d want to use it. There was a conversation on Dithering (I think) about this recently. The Apple Watch was still a watch and provided notifications. The iPhone was a phone and an iPod, plus the real internet. The iPad was a big iPhone. They all had predecessors so you sort of knew why you would want it. The value proposition was at least somewhat clear. A VR/AR/MR headset is a totally new thing. For the vast number of people it doesn’t do what their X did but better. You have to convince/teach people why they need this and that’s a MUCH higher barrier than the iPhone/iPod/iPad/Apple Watch/Air Pods had. The only thing that has shown some success is games. Apple is not good at games. They (as a company) just don’t ‘get it’. And if games was enough we’d see existing solutions be way more popular. Plus the nausea issue is very real for a non-trivial portion of the population. Maybe things have passed that magic threshold where, like the iPhone, little additions have added together enough to make Apple’s thing feel way more necessary that what existed before. But I’m skeptical. They need Mario, VisiCalc, Word Perfect, Sonic, Page Maker, something to be their killer app.
jmyeet 4y ago
This is a fun little story. At the time, Angela Ahrendts, formerly the Burberry CEO, had been hired as the SVP of Retail to replace the guy who left to go flop at JC Penny. What you noticed at the time is that Ahrendts tried to position things as luxury fashion items. This was the era when you had the ridiculous $10,000 Apple Watch Edition, Hermes straps and the like. This completely flopped. They sort of scrambled after this inevitable failure and settled on it being a device for health and fitness. I think health monitoring in particular is a huge untapped market. A later version added an ECG. If they can figure out how to do blood sugar testing without a needle that will be absolutely huge for so many people. Preventative care and passive monitoring I expect to become huge industries, particularly with aging populations. It won't be too many years before you see such devices giving you early warnings of a heart attack, for example. From the outside it looked like Apple never had a clear goal for the Apple Watch on launch and just stumbled into it.
laweijfmvo 4y ago
Same for the iPad. It literally only ran stretched iPhone apps at first, with 1024x768 resolution (the iPhone 4 released the same year at 960×640)
melling 4y ago
I had the first Apple Watch. It was great and it was immediately obvious of the health benefits. I blogged about it in 2015 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...
jader201 4y ago
> The Apple Watch wasn’t quite ready for launch either. Apple didn’t know how to market it or what the hell to do with it. It took them a few generations to zone in on health and fitness and the rest is history. The Apple Watch didn’t cost $3k. It’s much easier to iterate on a product that folks can (relatively) easily replace in 1-2 years. Many fewer folks will be ready to replace a $3k device within 2-3 years.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  Technically there was an Apple watch that cost $10,000 in the first generation, I think it had a gold case.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    Yeah, it had a custom gold alloy. Almost the entirety of the price was in the case, and only a limited number were made. I do wonder how much those are worth now, though.

MBCook 4y ago

> They need to release it now and see how the word is using it and tweak it accordingly. I don’t know. If you release something before it’s really ready you can shoot a whole category in the foot. A 2005 iPhone would have been terrible. The 2007 iPhone was right on the edge of what was possible. A 2005 iPhone would have flopped because the tech would have held it back so bad. Then there is the problem of why I’d want to use it. There was a conversation on Dithering (I think) about this recently. The Apple Watch was still a watch and provided notifications. The iPhone was a phone and an iPod, plus the real internet. The iPad was a big iPhone. They all had predecessors so you sort of knew why you would want it. The value proposition was at least somewhat clear. A VR/AR/MR headset is a totally new thing. For the vast number of people it doesn’t do what their X did but better. You have to convince/teach people why they need this and that’s a MUCH higher barrier than the iPhone/iPod/iPad/Apple Watch/Air Pods had. The only thing that has shown some success is games. Apple is not good at games. They (as a company) just don’t ‘get it’. And if games was enough we’d see existing solutions be way more popular. Plus the nausea issue is very real for a non-trivial portion of the population. Maybe things have passed that magic threshold where, like the iPhone, little additions have added together enough to make Apple’s thing feel way more necessary that what existed before. But I’m skeptical. They need Mario, VisiCalc, Word Perfect, Sonic, Page Maker, something to be their killer app.

jmyeet 4y ago

This is a fun little story. At the time, Angela Ahrendts, formerly the Burberry CEO, had been hired as the SVP of Retail to replace the guy who left to go flop at JC Penny. What you noticed at the time is that Ahrendts tried to position things as luxury fashion items. This was the era when you had the ridiculous $10,000 Apple Watch Edition, Hermes straps and the like. This completely flopped. They sort of scrambled after this inevitable failure and settled on it being a device for health and fitness. I think health monitoring in particular is a huge untapped market. A later version added an ECG. If they can figure out how to do blood sugar testing without a needle that will be absolutely huge for so many people. Preventative care and passive monitoring I expect to become huge industries, particularly with aging populations. It won't be too many years before you see such devices giving you early warnings of a heart attack, for example. From the outside it looked like Apple never had a clear goal for the Apple Watch on launch and just stumbled into it.

laweijfmvo 4y ago

Same for the iPad. It literally only ran stretched iPhone apps at first, with 1024x768 resolution (the iPhone 4 released the same year at 960×640)

melling 4y ago

I had the first Apple Watch. It was great and it was immediately obvious of the health benefits. I blogged about it in 2015 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...

jader201 4y ago

> The Apple Watch wasn’t quite ready for launch either. Apple didn’t know how to market it or what the hell to do with it. It took them a few generations to zone in on health and fitness and the rest is history. The Apple Watch didn’t cost $3k. It’s much easier to iterate on a product that folks can (relatively) easily replace in 1-2 years. Many fewer folks will be ready to replace a $3k device within 2-3 years.

wilsonnb3 4y ago
Technically there was an Apple watch that cost $10,000 in the first generation, I think it had a gold case.
- mcphage 4y ago
  Yeah, it had a custom gold alloy. Almost the entirety of the price was in the case, and only a limited number were made. I do wonder how much those are worth now, though.