My guess is the ability to have an Apple Watch as a standalone device is at least another year away, possible another 2 to 3.
Or Siri dictation.
I had visions of never buying another iPhone again and just using a watch, iPad, and laptop.
Much like the iPod and iPhone were tethered to iTunes and then later gained autonomy, I’m hoping they’ll get there with the watch in just a couple iterations.
They'd effectively be expending resources to make it possible for people who want a Watch to not use an iPhone. Doesn't add up in my head why they'd do that (though I'm with you, I'd much rather just have my iPad).
The reason probably is that it wouldn't be a good product.
That could change though, it would make sense if they manage to pack in enough guts while preserving the battery to make the Watch more stand-alone, no reason it couldn't happen.
The reality of the market is that either you kill your cash cow (with a hopefully bigger cash cow) or someone else will do it for you.
I left my phone at home accidentally the other day, it wasn't until the work day was over and I tried to remote start my car that I realized, since almost every feature I use worked over WiFi (the remote start checks for the phone's presence)
I was really hoping it wouldn't require a phone at all.
Apple are fairly comfortable with their own products taking over their own products (iPod -> iphone, and pushing people from mac to iPad).
If they thought that the smart watch would cannibalise the phone market I'm fairly sure that they would make sure you didn't need to own an iPhone to use the watch.
As to iPads, to the extent that buying a tablet instead of a computer was appealing, it was always going to overwhelmingly bring people from PCs to iPads more than from Macs to iPads. They did deal with a certain amount of cannibalization there, but their tolerance of that was far from a general comfort with any cannibalization possible.
I think that Apple would be uncomfortable with the idea of a $400 watch cannibalizing a $700+ phone. That said, I think that the idea that the watch would significantly cannibalize the phone is silly. Whenever we discuss the watch, it's like everyone suddenly forgets that people fucking love their phones and have consistently demanded larger and larger screens. The idea that suddenly people are going to be all, "No, it's cool, I don't want a screen larger than 1" diagonal" in any substantial quantity is silly.
If you listen to the Jobs official autobiography the iPhone resulted from Jobs / Apples concerns that the phone would become good enough for most people as an MP3 player, and thus would 'cannibalize' the iPod product, and that Job/Apple decided all the phones out at the time sucked and that they could do it better.
The technology for the capacitive screen etc was already in development but for the device that would eventually become the iPad!
But from a high level, nobody in the entire world could be sad if their customers choose a higher-price, higher-margin product over a lower-price, lower-margin product. And suggesting that it's some kind of brave stance to say, "Yes, we'll introduce a higher-price, higher-margin product even though our customers may prefer it to our lower-price, lower-margin product" is absurd, and anyone who tries to sell that line with a straight face should be ashamed of themselves.
My point is that the iPhone took the iPods market from it. Apple had to release a phone to do this, or someone else would have eventually done it.
They did not do it to 'up sell' people, ie the thought process was never, 'lets sell the iPod for 5 years then hit those suckers with the iPhone and up sell them' it was 'lets make the best music player' then 'soon every ones music will be on their phones, we better make a phone, actually the phones we currently use are terrible, we have this interesting touch screen tech from a tablet we're developing, oh shit we can make an awesome phone...'
I'm not saying Apple are brave, I'm saying they are logical, they will release a product that will take sales from another of their product lines, as if they don't someone else will, and any sale is better than no sale. I think they would do this even if the product that was doing the cannibalization was cheaper, eg the iPad is definitely eating some of the Macs potential sales, and I think Apple are very happy about this.
Apple didn't cannibalize iPod with iPhone: it recognized that people wanted it to build a phone and did just that.
Apple didn't cannibalize Mac for iPad: it recognized that people were buying tablets in lieu of PC's and thus invested heavily in making iPad's more user friendly.
Having spoken to many Apple engineers, the company is now as corporat-ey as any other BigCo and will NOT actively cannibalize a product unless it sees an expanding/new market.
Who was doing that? Before the iPad came out I saw tablets used in exactly one place, and it was a university research project on construction management and coordination between building trades.
Even after the iPad came out, the people using them as PC replacements were using them mostly for the same set of tasks like email and web browsing, and (flat iOS 7 redesign aside) the experience for those is basically the same as always.
EDIT - I suppose there have been major additions to iOS since then (like multitasking), but I'd argue it's less because they're threatened by users buying a Surface (or whatever crappy HP tablet existed at the time) instead of a Mac, and more because it's the obvious direction that iOS devices have been steadily improving in regardless of the competition. Apple's perfectly happy to eat the Mac's market with it if there are Mac users who can get by on better iPads.
People collecting "data in the field" is not the hundreds million unit market it is post iPad.
Tablets existed for 10+ years before the iPad, Microsoft especially pushed various monstrosities -- nobody really used them though.
So, no, not common - but not nobody, either.
Yeah, "nobody used them" in casual speech just means very few people. Obviously since they were made some people bought and used them. But the numbers were not worth writing home about -- and one would be hard-pressed to see random people using them in the wild (exceptions by field workers, some kinds of researchers, etc, mostly professional/factory/etc uses).
Motion did pretty well with them and made great hardware.
Nobody was "buying tablets in lieu of PCs" before the iPad.
And by nobody I obviously mean "so few the market didn't matter at all".
Nobody was buying tablets before the iPad.... So I'm not sure what your getting at.
The way I see it now is that many people who now buy iPads would have bought Macs previously, and Apple are happy for this to happen.
Its not really hard to see Apples vision that iPads are the future of computing for maybe 70/80/90% of people, and the remaining 10/20/30% can buy Macs.
Your last statement perfectly represents Apple cannibalizing the iPod with the iPhone.
"The eSIM has to be provisioned via the device itself, which is handy if you want to switch between T-Mobile and AT&T in a hurry, but not handy if you want to switch to a carrier not supported by Apple, or sell your device to someone on a different carrier."
Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular) requires an iPhone 6 or later with iOS 11 or later. Apple Watch and iPhone service provider must be the same. Not available with all service providers. Roaming is not available outside your carrier network coverage area. Wireless service plan required for cellular service. Contact your service provider for more details. Check apple.com/watch/cellular for participating wireless carriers and eligibility.
So, using it as a cellular device by itself would seem to be impossible.