You're going to carry your phone with you anyway.
Even if the phone did have a cell antenna and did have a battery good enough for it, and even if it had human-level natural language processing, you'll want a phone-sized screen for, you know, all the stuff that you use your phone for today, for examples including but certainly not limited to: reading anything longer than an SMS. Looking at a web page. Looking at a map. Playing games. Taking a photo. Showing pictures/video to other people.
The idea that we'll give up on having screens big enough to actually look at things is just crazy. We love our phone screens. The one thing that people demonstrably want their phone screens to be is bigger.
If you're going to be carrying a phone-sized screen with you 95%+ of the time anyway, why on earth would you make the expensive, difficult decision to jam a cell antenna into your watch. Much less all the valid points that people make about voice interfaces and battery and so forth.
The ability to not carry my phone is the only reason I'd be tempted to try a wearable device again (I had a gen 1 Apple Watch and sold it within a month). I'm not really interested in using it as an "always on" watch, but if I go for a run or take the kids to the park I'd love to be able to leave my phone at home and rely solely on my watch to stay connected. I wouldn't be using it for browsing or meaningful work, but to be able to receive calls, text messages and scan emails without carrying my phone would be great (cracked screens make the playground an expensive activity!).
Just like how yes, if you have your laptop on you, you'd almost always prefer to use that over your phone, but your phone can be with you in many more scenarios.
A product that sacrifices general utility in pursuit of a 5%-10% use case is a niche product. Nothing wrong with that, but Apple isn't looking to add a new niche product.
Now, obviously, if you could throw cell connectivity onto a watch for very little cost and very few compromises to the rest of the watch, then sure, you would. But in the real world, cellular connectivity for a watch would be an enormous additional cost both monetarily and to anything else you wanted the watch to do. It doesn't make sense for a product that's trying for mass appeal.
The idea that a personal computer is a good idea is just insane, for this reason:
You're going to be connected to a mainframe anyway.
Even if your personal computer did have enough storage and power you're still going to want connect to the mainframe to access reports and data.
So if you're going to have a connection to a mainframe anyway, why bother with all that local computing power?
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I'm not saying it's a good idea in the current ecosystem but there are advantages to the watch having it's own network connectivity, and in fact I believe the current watch does connect directly to your wifi access point using credentials shared by the phone when possible.
The main issue with watch cellular access at the moment, is cost of paying for a phone contract for a watch, when at least at the moment, you will probably want a phone too.
Tim Cook also pooh-poohed headsup displays as a barrier between people, instead of connecting them. But, since earplugs and people checking their phones already disconnect people, this seems like diversionary bs to me. Apple is surely working on this, as they work on many things.
Small displays are the problem, bigger phones are popular despite their awkwardness. Headsup displays solve both: large display, out of the way.
Not sure about input; gesturing to yourself is going to look even crazier than talking to yourself.
In the early seventies I used to carry my Philips portable cassette player and headphones everywhere, people thought I was crazy until Akio Morita had the same idea and got Sony to create the Walkman. Now people wear headphones in the street and hardly anyone thinks about it at all.
My point is that what you think is crazy now might well be normal in ten years time, or perhaps even tomorrow.
That sounds painful.
(The word you are looking for is pooh-poohed.)
Wonder if it's technically possible...
It's handwavy Sci-Fi right now, but...
But battery and power draw constraints put this two to five years out, depending on aggregate data needs.
What about above-device "floating" gestures, e.g. Project Soli [1]. Gesturing above instead of on the device means much more space in which to do things.
We're basically out of technology for the next innovation period. The truly "magical" next step is a direct neural interface, and we're an unknown number of years away from that.
Nothing else can improve on the hand-sized touch screen. The alternatives all come with serious compromises. Voice is too loud and public, portable floating holographic displays haven't been invented yet and may suffer from privacy issues, and there's not much else available.
In-eye projection is probably the most promising approach, but the product would have to be no heavier than existing glasses, and I can't imagine that being viable for five years at a minimum. A decade would be more realistic.
We might have LCDs with holographic resolution by then, so all kinds of interesting things might be possible. But for now, hand-sized touch screens are as good as it gets - and will be for quite a while.
Of course there's still a lot you can do with a small touch panel. There's huge scope to make software much, much better and smarter than it is today.
Great opportunity for a jam session!
If I could have floating gestures in front of my desktop I'd be very happy. Scrolling a page by waving my hand while leaning back in my seat. I think someone made something like this with Kinect.
It has been a while since I've used one and got to that opinion, and apparently software quality has gotten better. so if you are interested in this kind of thing it's maybe something to look into.
Currently I lean back, cross my arms and hold a wireless mouse when I read long articles.
If you have paid attention, Apple has reduced the ambitions of the watch. It's targeted at health/fitness and notifications now.
In movies and books they all have dental audiotransmitters, both in/out. Whisper to siri, no one will notice.
Edit: if she will read messages and rss-like things to me only, I'll probably look at the screen much less often.
no one including siri
I wonder if you've seen the rotating bezel of Samsung gear s3 in action, it might change your mind. But the watch UI is not the bottleneck, the constant wearing of a watch is.
I know it sounds a bit gimmicky (like using an iPad as a camera), but my father in law has a Galaxy Tab which is what he uses as a phone/tablet/computer. He just carries it wherever he goes.
Forcing people to learn foreign languages to talk to their devices is not a good idea.
Cook's comments followed a report on Monday from technology research firm IDC estimating that the tech giant sold 1.1 million units of the Apple Watch during the third quarter of 2016, down 71 percent from the year-ago quarter.
I don't think so. For that to happen there would have to be a quantum leap in user interfaces and right now I don't see any technology on the horizon that could provide that leap. Watch screens are too small for anything but displaying simplistic stuff, let alone letting the user meaningfully and fluidly control the device.
Voice interfaces have been tried for decades. They mostly failed. People are comfortable with them in very private environments (e.g. cars) but not when others are around (for good reason).
I think the author is right to conclude that Apple thinks we're still firmly in the smartphone era.