Yes, It’s Good: Initial thoughts on the Apple Watch
When Apple announced they were releasing a watch, there was a rare uncertainty among my twitter feed — nobody had any clue if the watch was going to be good or not. Why do we need an Apple Watch? Can Apple really strike gold again? Is there a killer app or killer feature for this thing?
I wasn’t planning on buying an Apple Watch initally, I was actually pretty intrigued by the Pebble Time, which had some compelling specs in its favor: waterproof, week long battery, what seems like a more developer-friendly SDK… But as fate would have it, my dad ended up with two Apple Watches on launch day and gave one of them to me. So I had no real expectations going in, I just kind of put it on and started wearing it.
It didn’t take long for me to become fascinated by the product and be able to definitively answer the question that plagued twitter six months ago. Yes, the Apple Watch is good, very good. It has the potential to be great. It’s not a dud, or superfluous, or any of people’s worst fears. It brings some very compelling ideas to the table, that are much more interesting than notifications on your wrist.
The Watch as a Controller
Initially I thought the watch was merely an extension to the iPhone — when you make an app for the watch it’s literally an extension added on to the existing iOS app so it’s tempting to think about it that way — but I realized pretty quickly that I was thinking about it backwards. The interesting idea here is the watch as a controller. A controller for your iPhone, your TV, your house, or any device. The wrist is a natural place for a control panel and the Apple Watch in it’s first iteration already makes that clear as day.
Using the watch as a remote to the Apple TV is so natural that there’s no going back once you see it. Everyone knows how annoying it is to constantly lose your tv remote, but if your remote is perpetually strapped around your wrist that’s not really a problem anymore. Using it to control your iPhone is magical, whether to ring it because you misplaced it, or to play/pause songs — which is particularly useful when your iPhone is accidently playing music in your pocket and you want to shut it off.
It seems inevitable to me that you will soon use your watch to take over control of any arbitrary screen or device — via QR code, bluetooth, or whatever the implementation is, the watch as a controller in the internet of things age is clearly the way forward. Walk up to a laundry machine, control it with your watch, it sends a notification to your wrist when you’re laundry is done etc… The computational power of the iPhone will eventually move to the watch as well, and what we think of as phones will be dumb screens with an antenna that your watch controls. It makes sense that the master device in this new world will be one that is strapped onto your body.
Intimate Communication
When Apple first announced the watch I thought the most compelling feature was the intimate peer-to-peer communication. Most people dismissed it as a gimmick — lol, you can send your heartbeat, emojis and scribbles, they’ve really jumped the shark— but I thought it was pretty unique. I feel kind of vindicated now, because it IS really intersting.
The subtleties of the haptic engine are great, drawing messages to your friends and family feels like a different medium of communication than sending a text message. The message is the same, but it feels more intimate. It’s sort of like the difference between sending a hand-written thank you note and writing an email. No other wearable even touched on the idea that you could use the device as a more personal medium of communication, but Apple nailed it.
Great SDK
The Apple Watch SDK is a home run. It’s like the dollar menu at Wendy’s, a stripped-down and condensed form of the full-featured menu, but sometimes that’s all you need. As someone who spends every day in a full-fledged war against complexity there’s something refreshing about the simplicity of building apps for the Apple Watch. It’s a constrained interface, there’s a fixed number of UI components you can use, but it still feels that you can make anything happen that you need to. I love it.
It also solves another problem that I’ve never known the answer to: If you wanted to teach a 10-year old kid how to program what would you teach him? I never felt there was a good solution to this question in terms of simplicity, approachability, tangibile results, and usefulness in the real world. Raspberry Pis are cool, but there’s still too much overhead to get started and most projects are a bit impractical. But now there’s an answer. Teach him to make an Apple Watch app. done. It’s not too overwhelming, there’s a tangible result, and it’s incredibly useful to start learning about the iOS app dev ecosystem. It’s the perfect entry point to the world of software. If you can make an Apple Watch app you can wear it around with you every day. This is a game changer.
Personal Style
This might be diluted slightly because I know nothing about fashion and desparately rely on Trunk Club to teach me how to dress, but the Apple Watch is just good looking. You looked like a tool wearing Google glass, you look completely normal and possibly even cool wearing an Apple watch. Of course this matters but it’s amazing how many smartwatches got it wrong.
I’ve gotten a bunch of comments already from wearing the watch that have lead to interesting conversations. The “conversation piece” aspect of it reminds me of wearing Google glass, but the conversations are much more genuine. Google glass was only cool because it was exclusive, it wasn’t about the product it was about the person who managed to get their hands on it. The conversations about the watch are of genuine intrigue. People who weren’t necessarily planning on getting one seeing it in action and slowly having the gears turn in their heads. This is a very compelling product, it has people’s curiosity piqued in a way that I’ve never seen before.
Final Thoughts
There are only a couple of really glaring omissions from the watch, lack of a video player, lack of an input mechanism, and lack of a flashlight.
The lack of video sucks since I think it would be cool to Face-Time with someone on your wrist or watch basketball highlights as they happen etc… I’m sure there’s a reason why video isn’t included (battery?) but damn that would be useful. You can’t play gifs natively either, you need to hack it by animating static images back and forth which is kind of a schlep, but a bigger win to whoever gets it right since it’s harder to duplicate. I have a personal goal to figure out how to watch basketball highlights on my watch before the season’s over. I’m pretty sure you can extract static frames from videos using ffmpeg and animate them on the watch somehow, but it would be much better if Apple gave you a way to do this natively.
The limitations I thought I would care about (notifications, battery life etc…) aren’t really that important. Yeah there’s way too many notifications on the watch by default, just turn them off and problem solved, how is that a big deal? The battery life lasts more than 24 hours, so just charge it every night and you’re good.
The question for the future is one of evolution vs. erosion. Will the new ideas the Apple Watch brings to the table evolve into a robust ecosystem of new abilities and interactions and become the transformative product it lays the foundation for? Or will the novelty erode over time and become a cool idea that never reaches escape velocity. From the trajectory I think things are heading, having a hyper-smart wearable is going to become a must-have, and Apple, the company with the most resources in the world, just put out the most innovate and compelling wearable that I’ve seen to date. Can Apple strike gold again? Lets just say, I wouldn’t bet against it.
