WHAT'S THE APPLE WATCH FOR? YOU FIGURE IT OUT
APPLE'S
HAPPY TO TELL YOU ABOUT HOW ITS WATCH LOOKS, WORKS, AND IS MANUFACTURED, BUT
HASN'T LAID OUT THE NEED IT SERVES.
In 2010, when Steve
Jobs introduced the iPad—Apple’s last new product category before the debut of
the Apple Watch—he first set up the product by publicly pondering what had been
the middle space between the smartphone and laptop. In doing so, he asked
whether there was a need for a device that did a few things better than either
of them. Surprise, there was, with books, email, movies, web browsing, and
games leading the way. It wasn’t that some combination of smartphone or laptop
couldn’t handle these things. It was that the iPad was optimized for them.
The way the iPad was
introduced helped set expectations for a device whose purpose many questioned.
Five years later, Apple has talked a lot about what the Apple Watch
does—activity tracking, notifications, maps, and novel non-verbal communications, mostly. It has also shared a good number of
videos celebrating not only its design but the many watch and strap
combinations. It’s even provided a rare and welcome peek at its envy-inducing production process. But all of this hasn’t provided a raison
d'être for the company's wrist-worn fusion of steel, sapphire, and
silicon.
There could be several
reasons why Apple hasn’t gone to great lengths to explain who its watch is for
or even what big-picture need it serves.
It’s self-evident. The closest analog equivalent to the
modern tablet is a magic sheet of paper that can display any kind of content.
Given that the iPad was introduced during the netbook fad, Apple may have felt the iPad needed to be
explained. The Apple Watch, though, includes what it is right in the name. It
is, like its forebears, a piece of jewelry, and provides useful information you
can digest in a glance—in the same spirit as how watches have always let you
quickly check the time.
It’s tough to predict. Jobs was right about the tasks at which
the iPad excelled. Its uses, however, went well beyond a few isolated things.
The number of iPad apps in the five years since the tablet's introduction has
swelled from 3,000 to more than 725,000.Many of the top apps are, indeed,
games, just as they are for the smartphone. However, there have been
others—Skype, Facebook, Pandora, Dropbox, and Twitter, for example. When
Microsoft released its free Office apps for the iPad, they shot straight to the
top of its download charts. And of course there have been many highly
specialized apps for the iPad.
This time it’s
personal. Apple has noted
many times how personal a device the Apple Watch is, a claim it has stood
behind by releasing an unprecedented number of models and accessories at
launch. The Apple Watch targets a broader array of price points than any
product in Apple history, and the fitness-focused enthusiast snapping up a $349
Sport model for classy heart-rate monitoring may have an entirely different
purchase motivation than the $10,000 Edition buyer primarily considering it as
high-tech jewelry. Besides, its success with the iPad gives Apple the
confidence to know its strong developer network will follow it to new
platforms—giving the watch a path to an array of uses that even Apple can't
predict.
Competitors have paved
the way. Coming into the
market with not the first but the most transformative product is an Apple badge
of honor. Apple did not release the first app-centric watch. When the first
Pebble smartwatch was released, I wrote about how its app selection set
the rules of the road for smartwatches
in terms of their basic capabilities. To be sure, Apple Watch is a more capable
device than the original Pebble or even the Pebble Time, but is attracting many of the same kinds of apps, at least as
a baseline.
BY ROSS RUBIN
http://www.fastcompany.com/3045210/tech-forecast/whats-the-apple-watch-for-you-figure-it-out
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