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...
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.