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Apple Watch – What can you do with it?
- res0nat0r 11y agoApparently you can't do a lot of things with it if you have tattoos on your wrist: http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_tattoos_and_the_watch_please_read/ http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_ta...
- huhhhh 11y agoYou're tattooing it wrong. But seriously, how could Apple not test this?
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoI have a feeling that the Apple of old would have caught this instantly, when it was largely the boutique brand for creatives. Today's Apple? Not surprising at all.
- freehunter 11y agoI'm not sure that's the case. This feature (which is entirely optional and can be disabled) is looking for skin. Metallic ink tattoos don't look like skin, and only a small percentage of people have such tattoos on their wrist. However, a massive percentage of people have hands that are shaped like hands, and yet the Apple of old made a mouse that doesn't seem to be designed for anything even remotely resembling a human hand. They've literally always been form-over-function. They may have caught this issue and said "those people can disable this completely optional feature".
- jacobolus 11y agoTheir “puck” mouse design was intended to ameliorate RSI by encouraging a grip with only the fingertips. Unfortunately, nobody got the memo about the “proper” way to hold the mouse, and tried to grip the mouse the same way they were used to... which of course sucked. (And it was also difficult to guess the orientation of a round object.) It’s definitely a bad design especially given the context of existing mice, and a case of poor communication, or insufficient user testing, or even hubris maybe. Your dismissive summary of their intentions is not at all fair, however.
- freehunter 11y agoI make no judgment of their intentions. Merely stating that even back in the day, Apple was known for making some questionable design decisions. Good intentions or bad intentions, it was not a highly functional mouse.
- phs2501 11y agoI do grip mice "properly" with just my fingertips, and the puck mouse still felt incredibly horrible.
- zerohm 11y agoI like the way you found a new way to say "this never would have happened under Steve Jobs!" Nice work.
- edgyswingset 11y agoThe Apple of old (and by that I mean Steve Jobs) decided to tell people they were holding their phones wrong rather than launch a device which worked no matter how you held it.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoNo I mean a 80s and 90s hacker culture where weirdos were valued and guys with tats would be testing things. Apple today just seems way too button down, for good or bad.
- greglindahl 11y agoNot only do you need a tat, but you need a tat covering the skin under the watch that's done with metallic ink. What fraction of people with tats have such a tattoo? I have a lot of friends with tats, but none that meet those criteria.
- snowwrestler 11y agoThe iPhone 4 did work no matter how you held it, as evidenced by its long tenure (sold for 4+ years), and high sales and customer satisfaction ratings. If you carefully held it in a very particular way, you could make it lose a couple bars. Jobs said: there's no reception problem, just don't hold it that way. It turned out he was right.
- elorant 11y agoThe Apple of old almost went bankrupt.
- pmelendez 11y agoDepends how old you want to go. For me is Woz's AppleII kind of Apple which was exceptionally quality driven and economically was a great success.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoFor a long time they were incredibly successful while Woz and Jobs were active.
- istvan__ 11y agoOh boy, in a world that is focused on productivity (aka deliver asap something even if it is partially broken) and not too much of quality, this can happen very easily.
- jonknee 11y agoASAP? The watch had been in progress for many years and was even announced and demonstrated publicly 7 months before it started to ship. It was definitely not rushed out the door.
- istvan__ 11y agoSorry I was focused more on the making process than the actual product. This happens with software more often than with hardware. I started to work as a hardware test engineer back in the day, and I know how hard is to deliver something without problems like this.
- DannoHung 11y agoSeems like they tested every other factor though: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204666 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204666 They do explicitly note that you may need an external heart rate sensor band in some conditions if the pulse oximeter isn't working for some reason.
- josefresco 11y agoThe proclivity of hipster-douches with full sleeve tattoos in tech makes this even more shocking. All jokes aside (I can live with the downvotes), I could see this easily falling through the cracks for a company new to wearables. What about hairy arms? What about skinny arms?
- r00fus 11y agoNo it means you can't use wrist detection to auto-lock because the metallic pigments in some tattoos interferes with passive skin sensing. There's an option to turn it off. How many people have metallic pigment tattoos on their wrists?
- oxide 11y agoa lot?
- sanoli 11y agoHow many watches don't work on people with tattoos on their wrists?
- eric_h 11y agoHow many optical pulse oximeters don't work on people with tattoos on their wrists. The watch works fine.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> How many optical pulse oximeters don't work on people with tattoos on their wrists. AFAIK, very few, because optical pulse oximeters usually go on fingertips or earlobes, even ones that are attached to wrist-mounted displays.
- sanoli 11y agothats dishonest/apple fanboyism. The watch doesnt work as advertised. Edit: on people with dark tattoos.
- julianpye 11y agoThis kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office. Which is itself a reference to real-life results involving motion detection/computer vision/image processing (this was a particularly bad problem in the earlier days of the field, but still persists today to some extent).
- JoblessWonder 11y agoHere is a great video showing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM I think I just like their banter.
- r00fus 11y agoRight, because people who have chosen to get dark tattoos are just like people who were born with darker skin.
- seanp2k2 11y agoBoth cases illustrate how the technology fails to adapt to the physical world.
- swombat 11y agoReminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- korvenadi 11y agoiAd support on apple watch is a stupid idea. who wants to show ads on a watch?
- ctdonath 11y agoProbably developers who want to make money off a "free" sales model. In an age of widely-known popular logos, might not take much space at all to render an "ad". The exclusion of ads from the Watch could (wild speculation here) point to a future without ads in the Apple ecosystem. Ads are typically obnoxious, tolerated only because the host app is free. Given their very un-Apple-like feel, maybe there's a plan to wean them out of the walled garden.
- MCRed 11y agoSuch a plan, I think, would require another method of monetization. Paid apps as a monetization strategy has failed. Advertising I think is failing too. Free with in-app purchase is making a lot of money but people don't like it. This is a big challenge for apple.
- Kurtz79 11y agoSome data to back your assertions up ? App store revenue has been increasing constantly since its launch. http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/15/app-store-google-play-revenue-q1-2015/ http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/15/app-store-google-play-re... http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/27/app-store-record-growth-q2-2015/ http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/27/app-store-record-growth-... I agree that it has problems (visibility of quality apps, abundance of trashy apps, high competition) but profitability does not seem to be one of them. EDIT: (Answer to TorKlinberg below) I guess so, I don't see why it should not figure. "People don't like it" it's just an opinion which I don't see being backed up by data, in the end people "like" with their wallets.
- TorKlingberg 11y agoApp store revenue includes in-app purchases, right? Does Apple publish the percentage of revenue that is from in-app purchases, and specifically game microtransactions?
- snowwrestler 11y agoTo clarify--this is a plain-English rundown of the features and functions that a developer can include when building an Apple Watch app. For example, it says that devs do not have direct API access to force touch or the digital crown. (As opposed to a consumers' view of what you can do with it.)
- gesman 11y agoI totally cool with apple watch to be the toy for kids. Kudos to Apple's marketing abilities for pimping it as a luxury thing (I wouldn't even call it a watch. Wearable perhaps?) and making people to salivate over it. Apple's marketing is something worth paying for to learn from.
- epaga 11y ago"I’m also not sure if you can submit an app to the store that is only an Apple Watch app, like say a timer or small utility of some sort." Yes, you can: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-for-apple-watch/id986664742?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-for-apple-watch/id98... or https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flip-coin-coin-flip-decision/id982838378?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flip-coin-coin-flip-decision... for example. Pretty amazing that apps like those two got the green light from the App Store Review Team.
- smackfu 11y agoIt seems like standards can be a bit relaxed when you are submitting an app that aligns with Apple's strategy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoI don't think it's that. Perhaps they put the Apple watch release date as the app's release date and they rushed it through at the last minute. Though I really don't see how the first one, with an iPhone app that is just a blank screen, got through.
- smackfu 11y agoMy thinking is that if you want to say you have thousands of apps on launch day, but barely any developers have run their apps on real hardware, you have to relax your standards a bit, and figure it will work its way out in a month or two.
- nasalgoat 11y agoNormal turn-around time on app approval is about 7 days for us. When we added watch support in our last release, it was done in 2 days.
- c1sc0 11y agoIn the time window just before release apps with WatchKit extensions went from "Waiting For Review" to "Ready for Sale" in less than 24h with the "In Review" time lasting less than an hour. Now we're back to 48 - 72h review times
- rikf 11y agoInteresting that apple seems to be following the same model as they did with their mobile devices in terms of developer functionality. Their view seems to be to start off really tightly locked down and then gradually open up additional features to developers. It makes sense in that its much easier to open stuff up after its been locked down then to lock down stuff once people have built stuff on it.
- joakleaf 11y agoI think this goes well with their other line of thought:"It is so difficult to remove a feature once we've added it, so it is best to be careful adding new features and start with a few great features first." That's how they have developed iOS. I recall a high-ranking individual (Jobs, Cook, or Forstall) from Apple saying this a couple of years ago, but I don't remember when, where, or context. Sorry.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoYeah. Remember how the iPhone was originally limited to web apps?
- threeseed 11y agoEvery restriction that Apple made makes total sense for the short/medium term. Watch faces need to be impeccably programmed or are likely to dramatically reduce battery life (some of the existing ones use OpenGL). Developers shouldn't be redefining the behaviour of force touch or digital crown before users have had a chance to properly learn them and access to heart rate surely had FDA implications. Tim Cook has stated that the focus for iOS development through to version 9 and likely a release or two afterwards will be performance and stability. Only then if Apple can push the battery life a few extra hours will they likely open the platform up a bit more. Fully agree with the author how amazing it is seeing so many buggy apps after having a week to play with my watch. Even from some of the established players e.g. getting quota exceeded errors using Twitter.
- duiker101 11y agoThey will probably "unlock" all the features you want in the upcoming version so people will buy those to have things that should have been there from the beginning.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoWhy? Apple's never done that before.
- macavity23 11y agoExcept with the iPhone, which couldn't run native apps when it was launched.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoYes, but weren't iPhone OS updates free? At least, I think only iPod touch owners were charged.
- baldfat 11y agoWatch further establishes people into the Walled Garden which is Apple. I still think people just don't wear watches will cause watches to be a very minimal form of wearables. I seriously would wear a bracelet that had a larger usable surface and longer battery life and faster cpu :)
- gofishdigital 11y agoYou can also short cut the system by spray painting your $400 Apple Watch with some $20 paint to make it look nearly identical to the $10k Gold Apple Watch
- danso 11y agoIt's pretty exciting to anticipate how developers might do innovative things with the Watch...but until then, I'm pretty bearish of the device as something of real utility. It's not just the particulars of Apple's execution and implementation, but just that the physical form factor of a watch inherently limits it...and the coolest things we've seen watches do in fiction, such as Dick Tracy's wrist-walkie-talkie, are done just fine via smartphone. And glancing at your watch all the time is not much less of a social interruption than pulling out your phone. What annoys me in reading consumer-facing reviews of the product is how much of the perceived potential is through things that should be done by software...for example, the ability to filter notifications from the phone...there's no reason why a second (or third, fourth, etc) layer of notification triage can't be implemented as a phone setting...in fact, I think iPhone's Do Not Disturb mode is fantastically better done than its Android equivalent. But to think that the Watch, or any ancillary device, is needed to inherently solve the problem of filtering information overload...it's as if rather than developing better spam filters, email providers just encouraged consumers to make multiple email accounts to handle the deluge. So hopefully Apple increasingly opens up the API for developers, to do things far beyond what Apple has anticipated in its marketing plan.
- ForrestN 11y agoDo you have an Apple Watch? Is this review based on your experiences using it for some time? I think in practice some of your guesses about notifications and interruption are proving wrong for most people because of the phenomenology of the Taptic engine.
- danso 11y agoI haven't used it but I think there are some biases going in that would affect how I feel of it regardless. For example, for my iPhone, I limit notifications to calls and SMS. Except for the occasional marketer, phone calls are normally "important", and I'm not sure, Watch or not, how I could effectively whitelist calls in such a way that would not block the myriad of important calls from first-time numbers. In terms of text messages: I guess it's hard to think of a situation in which the ability to glance at my wrist instead of investigating the vibration in my pocket is a huge advantage. Text messages can sometimes be important, but if I'm expecting a text message in a given time period, I'll put myself in a situation in which having the phone out is not a problem (i.e. not be in a movie theater). I guess one situation in which having a watch is better than a phone: when you're moving around in such a way that you don't notice/hear the phone going off. I've missed calls that way. But I guess I'm not in that situation enough to justify a new device...I mean, that's helpful, but we're not yet that far removed from a time when we had to arrange our rendezvous and appointments with no expectation that we could contact people in mid-transit (i.e. before cell phones). I don't consider myself a huge Luddite. I waited in line for the first iPad, but with that, I felt the value proposition was obvious: this is a computer you can walk around with in one hand and read/navigate/etc....even just reading from a tablet is obviously appealing, in the way that reading a physical book/magazine/newspaper is more appealing (despite limitations) than from a laptop or desktop. The value of iPods and iPhones was never hard to figure out either, even if you doubted whether or not they were worth the price over their competitors.
- brosky117 11y agoOne thing that I've always imagined but haven't heard much in these discussions is the real potential behind the Apple Watch being the near-magical NFC interactions that could be achieved with its position on the body. For example, paying for groceries, opening locked doors, starting cars, etc. I feel that someone would only need to see a Watch user wave their hand and magically do something once before wanting that same "power".
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoIt already works with Apple Pay!
- zwily 11y agoI've paid for groceries a couple times now with my Apple Watch. It is magical.
- jonknee 11y agoFor cars that problem has been solved for several years--keyless entry / ignition is pretty common these days (with the added advantage that your key lasts for years without charging and you can give it to someone).
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago>Can I build a watch face? No Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not block the functionality. >Can I access the users Heart Rate? No. This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be a priority. This works on AW right now. This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want AW and Pebble to continue being the only smartwatch game in town. This seems to fall into the Apple conventional wisdom of, "New product? Wait until Rev A." AW isn't perfect but its kind of what I expect for a smartwatch platform. Its lightweight and somewhat of an accessory to your smartphone (not another app/ad platform), but still feature rich and developer friendly.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoI'm not sure why you're being downvoted; I couldn't agree more. Not being able to build a watch face is incredible. Android Wear and Pebble both had this ability really quickly (Android Wear was at launch, I believe Pebble added it shortly thereafter) and much of this was done years ago. But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.
- deong 11y agoAndroid Wear didn't have it at launch either. It took six months or so to release an official watch face SDK. People did immediately hack watch faces together by making an app whose UI was a custom drawn watch face animation, but that was a little clunky in that you had to have an app on your phone for the face, and some of them were pretty rough on the watch battery. But yes, overall I agree. It's a bit surprising just how locked down it is. Especially when it's hard to see the gain from it. The Apple Watch seems to have a shorter (or at least not longer) battery life than most of the Android Wear models that allow taxing the watch battery to do quite a lot more stuff.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
- dignick 11y agoYou can do bi-directional notifications between host app and extension with MMWormhole, which uses CFNotificationCenter: https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMWormhole https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMWormhole I think overall Apple has done a fantastic job of v1 of this product line, it's pretty polished. As an App developer who has been working on a watch App, while there is a lot you can't do I understand why you can't do it, it will come in time (native Apps later this year), and what is there right now is pretty good. Shameless plug, the App is currently in review: http://napkin.io http://napkin.io
- sylvinus 11y agoInteresting that they are using a separate process on the iPhone. Is that to prepare for a future where the whole extension will actually run on the watch itself?
- pmontra 11y ago"Your Apple Watch app acts like a separate process running on a separate device, however behind the scenes the OS runs a ‘skeleton’ like version of your host application on the user's iPhone and the Apple Watch extension in tandem, both on the iPhone" I totally missed this limitation until now. So the iWatch works only if you have an iPhone and the phone is in communication range with the watch? What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?
- gdubs 11y agoYou can still go on a run, for example, without the phone and listen to a few gigs worth of music. There's apparently a bit of machine learning that allows the watch to do all of its health metrics on your run, once it has gotten to know your patterns.
- orbitur 11y agoNo GPS though. I was hoping the watch would at least have that so I didn't have to put up with Garmin's terrible software anymore. Maybe rev. 2.
- rickyc091 11y agoI can't foresee GPS being a standalone component on watches due to battery drains. Garmin's watch currently gives me 10 hours on GPS, but that's also due to the fact that all it does is track my run.
- JohnBooty 11y agoI've never seen a sleek, tiny watch that had GPS. The Fitbit Surge is the smallest I've seen and it's still pretty huge - more like a bracelet than a watch. Pictures of it on actual wrists here: http://www.cnet.com/news/fitbit-charge-charge-hr-and-surge-heart-rate-wearables-hands-on/ http://www.cnet.com/news/fitbit-charge-charge-hr-and-surge-h... I don't know the nuts and bolts details but I think GPS has power/size requirements that preclude it from fitting in the size of something like a "normal" watch, at least until there's a major advance in battery technology.
- lighthawk 11y agoThough the Apple Watch is still cool, I'm still seriously thinking of getting a Pebble Time: https://getpebble.com/pebble_time https://getpebble.com/pebble_time However, development for the Time so far hasn't been as easy as I'd thought, e.g. some of the examples provided to develop watch-faces, etc. online didn't seem to be fully up-to-date to use with color/Time.
- kenrikm 11y agoI've been working on a pretty complicated watch app that will be going live to our users in the next few days. The simulator actually does a pretty good job at faking a real watch. I was worried about the communication between the phone and the watch over Bluetooth being slower then the simulator however I've had a apple watch since Friday and there is no noticeable delay (though I'm not sending images)
- brudgers 11y ago[Caveat: I am not suggesting that there won't be a market for software that runs on the current generation of wrist located wearable computers. I just think as an interactive interface, the form factor will wind up as an evolutionary dead end for reasons similar to those by which touchpads have largely displaced trackballs.] I referee soccer. This means that some number of times a year, I regularly get paid for an activity where a wristwatch is my only piece of tech and I rely on it while breathing heavily and making spectators, team officials and players express their unhappiness. I have half a dozen wristwatches in my referee bag. When I run center, I accumulate wristwatch-wearing-hours two at a time because I have to get things right. No amount of software sophistication can overcome the ergonomics of wristwatches. The wristwatch form factor has poor ergonomics for an interactive device because it always requires two hands. Placing a small machine on the wrist puts it out of harms way by placing it behind our primary method for interacting with the physical world. Wristwatches work ergonomically because they require limited manipulation and are primarily displays. To the degree wristwatches offer interaction, quick interactions are done by feel. Timex's Ironman series performs its intended function well because the lap button is easy to locate without looking. However, basic wristwatch ergonomics mean that hitting that button is two handed and slows down a runner. Even worse, bringing an arm across the chest briefly inhibits full expansion of the chest and thus lung capacity. Only because the information the watch provides is so valuable is such a biomechanical cost a viable engineering tradeoff. Running a wristwatch off a phone turns two-handed one-device operations into potential two-or-three-handed two-device operations. Sure, the obvious solution is a voice interface...but when everything runs on the phone, then a wristwatch is just a bluetooth microphone with a small display...with wrist mounted microphone versus headset mounted. On the other hand, The wrist is a well protected place for mounting sensitive equipment on the body and the wristwatch is a reasonable form factor for sensors, yet in the long run serious sensor platforms want to be open as do the platforms for analysis of sensor data. Proprietary interfaces are not likely to be the direct road to the quantified self.
- hfourm 11y agoits screen looks nice atleast
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gdubs 11y agoPersonal anecdote: I got one and am happy with it so far. I roam around the house / office without really thinking about where my phone is. The health aspects have been the stickiest feature for me -- I actually appreciate the "stand up for a bit" notifications, and enjoy hitting my daily goals. Phone calls work surprisingly well -- much better than speaker phone IMHO, because you don't have to hold a phone, and you don't really need to hold your watch up to your face either. Voice recognition is solid. Glancing at a notification feels a lot less distracting than digging out my phone to see of it's important and then getting sucked in because now my phone is open. (I know, self-discipline...) The customizable watch faces make me wish the phone had a similar feature -- I find myself trying to "glance" at my phone, expecting it to light up automatically. My face has the weather, calendar, and activity tracker on it, so I get a lot of use out of that. The build quality is nice (I went steel, and it definitely has a luxury feel to it). Mostly it has a fun retro-future quality to it. Some apps are a little buggy, but it doesn't really matter -- we're living in the future :)
- gdubs 11y agoWWDC is right around the corner, so we're likely to see the APIs open up a bit. Apple's rollout strategy makes sense here. Restrict the number of ways developers can kill the battery, because it's the Watch people will blame, not the poorly engineered apps.
- puppetmaster3 11y agoYou can return it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ProAm 11y agoI'm going to wait for the Flavor Flav Edition, which will be a iPad on a chain worn around your neck.
- rebootthesystem 11y agoI am having trouble finding a reason to strap a $400+ device to my wrist. I have not had a need to wear a watch permanently for over 20 years. Heart rate monitor? I have a Polar watch in my gym bag for that. Swimming? I have several swim watches, however, I will typically use a finger-mounted SportCount because it doesn't require interrupting the stroke to bring both hands together to operated (you operate it with your thumb, single handed). Time? I have my phone, computer, TV, microwave and, yes, el-cheapo LED nightstand clock for that. Even while travelling if I don't feel like taking my phone out of my pocket there are clocks everywhere. And, you might laugh, but years of sailing, kayaking and outdoor activities have taught me to estimate time to a useful degree of certainty by looking at the position of the sun. Silly, I know. I am simply saying that I can't remember the las tome I thought "If I only had a watch on my wrist permanently...". Anwering the phone? Please.