He compares the Patek Philippe 3940G, along with a photograph. I have and used to wear the rarer top model of that series, with several more complications and digits in the price. I love and collect complication watches. I hate digital watches -- I've kept only one in 25 years.

Since getting the Pebble Steel with leather band (preordered and meant to cancel when I decided I wouldn't use it), I haven't worn the Patek or any of the other mechanicals during my business day.

The moment to moment difference liberating me from "devices" during my business day is too valuable. I don't love it. But it changes my day.

Given your comment, it's an interesting contrast: I no longer wear any other watch besides the Pebble Steel because I hate interruptions even more than I love mechanical watches. The Pebble's soft vibration and glance-ability is so much less intrusive than checking a device, I'm unwilling to trade it.

Couple the manufacturing detail described here with the benefit to the flow of one's day, and I'd argue the Apple Watch is the first digital likely to appeal to mechanical watch lovers in highly connected jobs.

Whatever their merits as engineering marvels, expensive watches are Veblen goods that are worn to display wealth. Similar mechanisms can be put into pocket watches, but that's a much smaller market. Expensive watches have the appeal they do because they fall on the same continuum as everyone else's watch. Change the middle of the watch market and the current high end will look as absurd as a Vertu brick phone.

I think you're missing the fact that the mechanical watch industry is already post-apocalypse (i.e., the Quartz Crisis that started in the 70s).

The current mechanical watch industry does not exist for anything other than emotional reasons and won't see that much of an impact from another $400 electronic watch.

As a collector myself I think it's an interesting development for the industry and I'm sure I'll buy some version of the Apple Watch. I doubt it will replace one of my mechanicals as a daily wear.

I want to live in a world where watchmakers (and other artists) are free to make any awesome and expensive thing that they can imagine. Man does not live by bread alone.

It's not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be mechanical watches.

For things that can be digitally distributed at virtually no cost, or can be bulk produced at low cost (books, music, board games, etc.) I am fully supportive. For things that have a high economic opportunity cost, such as extremely complex watches, luxury cars, things of that nature, I have a very low tolerance because the cost is human life. As a species we have not yet reached a point where every human has the necessities of life. Once everyone has access to food, water, shelter, and internet (education), then I am all for exploring the limits of our potential in every regard.

Mechanical watches are moving art and are rarely purchased out of need. With the advent of perpetual automatics, they approach the ideal of mechanical perfection - a miniature machine which can accurately track time (and many other features) in extreme environments without the need of a power source. As such, they continue to appeal to many different people - with higher end, more complicated designs continuing to come about at higher prices. I'm a software developer and I love my automatics for both their technical merits as well as their aesthetic beauty. To each his own

To me the moral level of consumption is as close to the minimum required to survive and make an optimal economic contribution to society. Everyone needs happiness and entertainment in their lives. The struggle is avoiding excess.

I agree that most of what people spend their money on is the pursuit of happiness and entertainment. My view is that the path to true happiness does not lie in material goods or personal experiences. Rather, helping others in their struggles and seeing their lives improve leads to fulfillment.

As an aside, I think it's your money, and if you want to spend more than I would spend on a server (which is to say, way more than I'd consider spending on a car) on a fancy watch, well, I'm going to make fun of you a little bit, but ultimately, it's your money, and your judgement. But, if fancy watches are primarily signaling, which I believe to be the case, it seems to me that you could figure out how to get the same signaling value out of proving that you gave a certain amount to certain stylish charities.

That's what may change if these new smart watches find their killer app. No one really needed a calculator, heart beat monitor, or other gimmick on his wrist, so digital watches never pulled away on features. That might change now.

Would I rather wear an intricate piece of jewelry or see why my phone vibrated without reaching into my pocket? It starts to be a different calculation.

I only recently got interested in mechanical watches. It's fun to have a mechanical marvel on my wrist for those times when I don't want to reach into my pocket to tell the time using an electronic marvel.

I'm not sure if I'd ever get a smart watch. Perhaps. I actually feel kind of attached to my automatic. If I stop wearing it for more than two days it will stop running. That just seems cruel to the little guy.

Compact cameras are not doing too good, because you can shoot pictures with your phone. DSLR and mirrorless though, are doing swell, with even better projections.

In the same way, I think low end watches (mechanical+smart) will suffer a big hit, but high end watches ($1k+ will not see any difference at all). It's just different market segments. You don't see Martinelli worried about Ikea opening a factory every eayr. They just sell to different people.

I've tried to make that point to people who claim that Apple has ever shrinking market share in the smartphone market. It might seem so to a person who has no idea about marketing, but in reality, Apple's share in the high end segment of the market is increasing.

Watch purists may go the way of vinyl purists, slowly dying out as the competing technology offers more and more convenience.

Well, I don't think people buying 30,000 euros watches are such a big market that Apple should worry about missing them.

That includes former French President Sarkozy (he wears the same Patek Philippe watch), not really the "man with an okay job who lives in a nice apartment in some metropolitan town".

A $50 watch keeps time just about as good as a $10K watch.

And you might even get to keep the former when you're being held up on the way to your Ferrari.

I don't know if I have a use case for the apple watch, I might buy one to try out, see if it works, but I will say -if nothing else, its uniformly a pretty object d'art.

Auto playing link, don't click if your audio is loud:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101619289

Fairly incredible, expensive watches for rent.

What does this phrase mean? Search engines are giving me nothing.

Go an tell that to someone wearing a diamond ring. That doesn't tell the time either.

Of course that would remove any remaining doubt that the purpose of a $60,000 watch is to signal wealth rather than tell time.

Alternatively, maybe we'll see mechanical watches with a smart watch "complication". At the very least I'm sure we'll see partnerships between (some) high end mechanical watchmakers and smartwatch platforms.

After all, I have expensive leather shoes and trainers. Other than the fact they both go on my feet there is little similarity but I can and do own, use and like both.

That's a 50.000 USD watch?

Aside: I was totally surprised by how similar the  watch looks to the original iPhone.

I'm typing this on an iPhone 5, and I'll be pre-ordering the 6+ as soon as I can. This is my second iPhone; I started with a 4S. Fighting with Android became less and less appealing over time, and I currently only jailbreak iOS to get bluetooth / wifi tethering and because my physical mute switch is broken after a swim in the sink which I've worked around using Activator to toggle silent with a long-press on the status bar.

This rings true to me. I was long a diehard Android/Linux guy - even an explicitly anti-Apple person. 5 years of professional development later and I'm typing on my 15" MacBook Retina Pro which I have not had to restart in something like 42 days, thinking about which iPhone I'm going to dump my Galaxy SIII for in a few weeks' time.

I still run a GNU Linux on any desktop I have, and I actually don't see that changing anytime soon (my Linux complaints are generally with built-in peripherals on laptops which is hardly Linux's fault but still makes for a bad experience), but Apple has really won me over. I've got an iMac in my bedroom, an iPod I climb/bike/run/ski with. I can't see becoming a watch-wearer with the Apple Watch (I haven't worn a watch ever really) but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

I'm curious to see if Apple can do what Google couldn't, and make wearables a significant presence in the market, thus forcing other companies to react. If we leave other companies to break trail, as it were, I think the acceptance of wearables is still a little further off.

I think the next phase on wearable computing will include around-the-neck wireless devices. These are an example: http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&fiel...

I've seen a lot of folks recently wearing around-the-neck Bluetooth headphones. I was really skeptical of them and considered them a fad, but then received one as a present. I have subsequently been blown away by the value and convenience, and now believe that around-the-neck will be an important part of the future in wearable computing. I think the innovation was a combination of being small, light, well designed, effective wireless, long enough battery life, and an unobtrusive place to rest on the body.

Advantages:

- The absence of wires between my pocket and my head is a HUGE benefit. I now wear the wireless headphones by default, which are super convenient while doing routine activities like chores around the house, or changing clothes, or while traveling between house and car, etc. Wires get in the way and are inconvenient enough to stop me from using headphones (e.g., while buckling a seat-belt, or moving laundry around). Neck headphones are convenient enough to wear by default, and don't get in the way.

- The device overall is so convenient that I barely notice I'm wearing them. I frequently fall asleep while wearing them after listening to a book or podcast. They are small and light enough to evaporate from your senses.

- They're small enough to fit inside most shirts if needed

- Being continuously present around my neck removes the pain of unbundling wires from one's pocket. Those wires are always tangled. The neck device's wires are short and can't get tangled. The device magnetically contains its earbugs when not in use, so no dangling wires.

- Battery life is good enough that I can use them the whole next day even after leaving them on overnight (assuming audio isn't playing all night)

- While tethered to a primary device (smartphone or tablet), I can roam almost anywhere within my house within audio reception

I'm listening to audio substantially more now as a result of the device. While I think glasses would be far too intrusive, I've started wearing wireless headphones all day long by default now. I see many people doing it too. I could see these devices either replacing glasses or complementing them (move the processing units out of the glasses frame, and down around the neck, perhaps with an easily detached wire - a wire to the neck is probably doable).

What's not easy is finding new audio content dynamically while wearing them. I'm a big audiobook and podcast fan, so I listen to Audible and NPR and the like. But I have to prepare all my content ahead of time on another computing device to which the headphones are tethered. If the headphones were interactive, and commands were available by voice, to find and listen to books, podcasts, or the news, then I think they could form quite the electronic companion.

A full phone could probably be designed with that form factor (but no screen). Or imagine if I could control appliances within my house. TV, turn on. Search for "<the latest movie>". The headphones relay the command to my device, which instructs the house. There's a lot of potential there.

Are you now an "Apple guy" because you have money to spend and no longer consider Apple devices overpriced for their value, and you now value your time more?

Just curious (this is what happened to me you see; I want to spend time getting things done, not faffing around).

When I was presented with the original iPhone, I was pissed but overtime as I came to see the merits of it, and by extension Apple hardware. At work I use an iMac, but my personal laptop still is a Lenovo (with Ubuntu 14.04). But I'll be pre-ordering the next MBP as soon as it is announced.

I don't have the patience that I earlier had to debug seemingly simple but drawn out errors/bugs. Apple nails the entire experience (s/w & h/w), and for a developer for whom Time = Money, this is the best possible investment one can make. I also wouldn't have considered Apple hardware had I not been working (and earning) substantially.

But I'm still not an Apple guy and for one-off setup stuff I stick with non Apple hardware (routers, etc). But I wouldn't call them overpriced, they work out of the box with as minimal config required as possible.

I never "disdained" Apple devices, but they were not in my acceptable price range until I started having a regular salary.

But I don´t really think they are so much better than Windows or Linux systems in terms of "getting things done".

I just value their design and the tight hardware-software integration, and I find the premium price to be acceptable, now.

This is definitely a big part of it, yes. I could make it work with Android/Linux, but I can afford Apple products now. Also, as a 100% remote developer, I need my laptop/phone/ to be totally reliable, or it reflects on me professionally. For this reason also I am far less tolerant of say, random battery life issues with my phone. Additionally, some proprietary software (quite annoyingly) only runs in Windows/OSX. Again, I could boot a VM, but I'd rather not, and I suppose these days I can (literally) afford not to.

> This rings true to me. I was long a diehard Android/Linux guy - even an explicitly anti-Apple person.

I keep hearing this but there's always some other reason lurking behind it.

I have never been an anti-Apple person. I use Linux on my desktop because I need something that just works. It must never fail on me and all tools I need must be readily available. Mac probably comes the closest, but speak with any Windows person and it's "yeah just install this usb driver to get the adb going and then install this binary stuff from a website and then..". No thanks, I have work to do.

I suppose the same can be true for the iPhone as well. Instead of rooting and installing homebrew and stuff to tether, just get something that works and click the button.

I don't "fight" my tools, Linux, Mac or otherwise. I get something that works instead. For the past decade, that has equated to Linux on a Thinkpad for me.

Since Linux users for the most part doesn't need to mess with drivers, it just keeps working. (And thank you everyone out there who keeps making this possible.)

Agreed - I still use Linux on my desktop for this reason as well. I can have years' worth of uptime, if need be. I haven't used a Thinkpad, which the comment below suggests is a better laptop/Linux experience, and I have had some annoying issues with Wifi drivers, etc while using non-Ubuntu versions of Linux. There's also inevitably some corporate software of some variety that you run into that needs IE/Safari, so it's nice to have them around. The software for my GPS has no Linux installer, and while that isn't a deal-breaking fact, I use that software to plan climbing and skiing trips, so it's nice to have. It's one more voice saying "pay for the convenience" I suppose.

I'm trying really hard not to start a flamewar, but as someone who has exclusively used (and still uses) Android since the first Moto Droid, Google cannot be trusted, even with the Nexus brand. Take the Galaxy Nexus as evidence, where a similarly aged iPhone was still receiving the latest iOS updates. Or take NFC: Android users have been quick to mock Apple for using NFC, but every time I asked a clerk at the one store nearby that supported paying via a phone and NFC the clerk had never seen it used. Google doesn't tend to "finish the job" for lack of better words.

With respect to the grandparent and the "Fighting", I have to agree with the grandparent. There is NOTHING NEW in the iPhone 6 and yet I'm thinking about getting it and making it my first iOS device because I'm sick of fighting everything from updates to not having the latest apps (which are iOS first usually https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332000#up_4332278). The same thing happened with me and Linux as a desktop OS after years of use: http://xkcd.com/619/

I've installed Cyanogenmod on every Android device before and Cydia on my first iOS device (my first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS).

The clerk you are talking about, will still not know what NFC is for payments in a year from now. It doesn't change anything that Apple now joined the same game with Apple Pay... It's more infrastructure related and demand related.

Just like the Apple Watch, there is no actual demand for NFC Payments from regular users.

There was demand for the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Also Maps applications are used a lot (Navigation).

We don't use watches anymore (check your smartphone), we still pay with our wallet and with cash.

When I was living in the UK about 70% of my purchases were done with a chip and pin card, even a couple of beers at a pub.

This because in the end it was quicker and easier than using cash.

If NFC makes paying quicker and easier than using cash or cards, the demand will be there: by the end of the month there will be millions of iPhone6 customers waiting to test these new features.

If I were a shop/chain owner, I would be scrambling to try to please them, before the competition does.

() There are limits. My MasterCard, for example, will let me make contactless payments up to a total of $50. At that point it will require me to make a Chip&Pin transaction in order to reset the $50. When this happens the reader will just say "Insert Chip" or something.

Also, it's often difficult to see whether a retailer has contactless even when you're standing Right There and then you do the normal chip+pin out of shame because you feel like a right fool with your card out.

Next time he goes out with them, he will have his wallet. To give back the money he borrowed from his friends.

When the above situation can be handled.. There is an option for a walletless life. Where i live (Belgium), this won't happen within the next 2 years

The vast majority of men in the US will have their wallets with them regardless. The iPhone 6 will not, and is not designed to replace driver's license, etc.

If that problem is solved, there can be a future for a walletless life.

It strikes me that our NFC infrastructure is way better than yours too. Somewhat a reverse of most patterns in tech-infrastructure. It's just a pity Google won't support the Nexus' NFC capabilities in Australia - I bet Apple will.

In fact, in young circles (in the US), this seems to have become the defacto way of transferring money socially between individuals. I don't think I have paid someone I know with physical cash in years.

Either way, you're comparing 2 year old phones. I also got tired of fighting with Android and installing custom builds, but it's not really necessary these days. Stock builds are much more polished, and many of the more advanced features from OEM and custom builds have been integrated into stock Android. I recently got a HTC One and have found little need to root or install any custom ROMs on it - it does everything I need and doesn't seem worth the hassle any more.

I do agree with what you say about Google not "finishing the job". Many apps and services have been released with a lot of promise, but then been left relatively unchanged from early versions. If Apple Pay succeeds where Google Wallet has failed to gain traction, it will almost certainly be down to Apple making more of an effort to get merchants and services to support it. Perhaps they simly have more influence, but Google isn't exactly a small company, yet they often seem to fail in these areas. In particular, they make little effort to support things (Google Wallet NFC payments is one example) outside of the US. They're an international company, they have offices in many other countries, and yet many of their services remain US only, or take at least a year to be offered elsewhere.

Having control over your own phone is a genuinely useful thing, not some abstract ideal. I've been using a wireless tether with a Verizon unlimited data plan for the last 5 years, something I simply couldn't have done with an iPhone. (And it's amazing how many hassles that removes -- I can get internet in the park, or in any shop no matter how shitty the wifi.)

1. I use this ROM: rootzwiki.com/topic/36706-romaosp62114-shiny-rom-ota-like-stock-android-444-ktu84p/#entry1031982

I have all the control over my phone I desire to have, it does everything I could never need it to, I don't have to worry about my own ROM, or if updates to the system come, I press the update button when the phone tells me to do so, in short, I have the phone-appliance, a construct I am supremely happy with.

Apple products only have three errors (in order of likelihood):

1) You did it wrong. 2) It doesn't do that. 3) and rarely, It's an honest to god bug.

95% of the problems I've ever had with my phone are fixed by turning it off, and turning it on again - this ease of use led me to buy a Mac, another choice I'm quite happy with, it all more or less just works - and with the Mac I have enough freedom to replace the built in apps that don't work with ones that do - Chrome/Thunderbird/Adium instead of Safari, Mail.app and iMessage.

Google simply stopped supporting the Galaxy Nexus because they didn't feel like it.

I too have the same problem with NFC, apart from here in the UK no Android payment systems are ready on the phone itself (you can only install it on some devices).

And yes google are terrible at sending clear messages.

Just look at yesterdays confusing discussion RE hangouts/gchat/gtalk/google voice.

No idea what is going on there.

I notice that people attempting to communicate via Hangouts (on their phone?) doesn't notify me in Talk. If I attempt to call someone who has Talk on their phone from my web browser (therefore using Hangouts), they never get any notification. I can therefore never get in touch with my brother, unless I call him using Talk from my phone. If someone attempts to talk to me via Hangouts, the message is shown in my inbox in the web interface, but NOT on my phone in GMail, nor in Talk on my phone. I therefore never find out about a message until I use the web interface, which I don't really do because I have GMail on my phone......

It's a bit broken.

Agreed about NFC, it's frustrating that I've had NFC on my phone for 2 years now, but still not been able to use it for payments. EE does have an NFC payment service now, but for some reason they only let you use it on a few specific phones, not including my HTC. I'm not sure if this is down to differences in the hardware or just favouritism. I'm hoping that Apple Pay will at least push more places and services to support NFC payments in general.

I keep the old one on my phone and resist installing the new one. Also, Google Local has gone?

That's the problem with cloud services I suppose, but at least if they had the decency to keep cloud services going whilst there were obvious users of them (without breaking things), that'd be appreciated. I mean, how long has MobileMe been going for OSX?

I'm not dumb. I used to write highly multithreaded network code for a living. I took Diff Eq in college! But Android makes me feel dumb, so I'm selling the N5.

But I can understand why it would be annoying.

It's almost as bad as "do you want to view this site in the tapatalk app?".

You just gave a far better explanation than I did in favor of the appliance-phone device.

What really frustrates me is the camera. Some photos are great, others look like the image has been made deliberately bad. I don't think the Nexus phones will deliver a great camera experience any time soon, and there's only so much compensation that G+ can make to a dull, blurry photo.

> if there was only one there would be less innovation

Does not compute.

That doesn’t really sound like innovation.

EDIT: Never mind, I didn’t pick up on the actual gist of your comment, that being the copying done by each company forces the other to come up with new, possibly innovative ideas to one up the competition.

I used to write apps for palm pilot and it was a hell of resource constrained C.

In a sense, tools like these were the precursors of today's mobile cross-compilers and cross-platform development environments (e.g. Unity).

I hate those things too, but I'm still chomping at the bit for the Apple Watch (and plan to disable all notifications except SMS). Why?

- Wrist GPS while driving

- Siri without taking phone from pocket

- Music remote control (hopefully video, too)

- NFC payments

- Heart monitor (QS)

- Other cool apps as yet unimagined

I certainly don't blame anyone who doesn't want one; it's a bulky, expensive frivolity. But its UI affordances create opportunities for active use cases beyond the passive notifications that have characterized smartwatch functionality until recently.

I recommend trying GPS while driving without any screen at all. Pull up navigation on your phone or stand-alone unit, then place it in the center console where you cannot see it. Let it give you directions only though TTS.

This is how I've been using GPS for years now, I find that I pay much more attention to the road and actually have fewer navigational mistakes (probably because I am paying more attention to the road).

Even if the GPS is accurate to a few feet, it doesn't know where the back of the line in the left turn lane is!

But I have the feeling that Watch is not meant for driving situations :) It could be quite good while walking around a new city.

For me it was the fact that I wasn't trying to 'beat the system' and guess a better way.

As for music remote control, headphones generally have controls somewhere on them or the cord so you don't need to take your phone out.

You never need more than a quick glance at a normal wristwatch.

> What about using your arm to change gear?

If you need to look at the gear shifter you're doing it wrong... (I drive a manual daily btw)

> How do you use dashboard SATnav if you shouldn't look at your GPS whilst driving?

You don't 'use' it. You take a quick glance to know when you need to turn. I'd say it IS dangerous to program your next destination while driving.

The issue isn't looking at your wrist watch, it's shifting your attention to your wristwatch. If the GPS on the watch had a simplified interface with say, only an arrow when a turn was coming up, I'd say it's a great idea. If it's a full map, you'd need to take your attention off the road for far too long while you loop at the map.

And again, all of it is more complicated and less effective than simply using the voice commands that any phone can already send through your car speakers...

I would agree programming a destination whilst driving would be dangerous; my TomTom doesn't show a QWERTY keyboard for text input so it is even more frustrating.

Sadly my car (2008 VW Golf TDi GT Sport) does not understand that I have a phone. It knows how to pair with my phone via bluetooth for calls, but it does not work the other way around - my phone can't send audio to the car. The audio head unit is a bit thick (it will resume in the wrong place for MP3 CDs, and the optional iPod interface is really dumb and requires creation of playlists, which is not very helpful for a 160GB iPod; that's a lot of playlists).

Admittedly perhaps my car is considered old (6 years, 86k miles in a diesel) but I am certain that there are many more cars that don't have bluetooth duplex audio. It would be wrong to assume that all cars have it.

Come to think of it, my wife's car (2010 Mini Cooper) doesn't have two-way audio either! It's got a USB interface so the iPod works properly, and you can pair to make and receive calls via bluetooth but I don't think it can pipe audio to the car.

Unless I am mistaken?

There are a lot of things you shouldn't do, but people do anyway. I'd rather someone looks at their wrist on the steering wheel or speak to their wrist instead of fidgeting with a phone or the GPS device in/on their dash.

Please don't look at a screen while driving. You might end up killing people.

Please don't use the navigation built into your car while driving.

Please don't look at your speedometer while driving.

Please don't look at your gas gauge while driving.

Please don't look at the clock while driving.

Please don't change temperature controls while driving.

In the US (with terrible driving schools), they teach you how to maintain control of your car while glancing at a screen for a brief moment of time, because it's necessary to do so. Looking at a GPS or at the radio is far different from doing something time consuming and interactive like texting.

If you think glancing at a GPS is an unacceptable risk, you should probably abstain from driving altogether.

If anyone can build a market from scratch it is Apple, but why would the younger crowd want a watch at all? Unless you are older than 30 (or perhaps even older), you likely aren't in the habit of wearing a watch. What is going to compel the younger crowd to do so?

The modern smartphone has little in common with the devices that were known as telephones until about 20 years ago, yet it has retained the name. It's not easy to predict something like this. (In the film Back to the Future II, the hero's 2015 house is filled with telefax receivers. There's a scene where his boss sends a fax to all of them and printed pages start pouring out. This is how people imagined the future of telephones a mere 30 years ago!)

The meaning of 'watch' as a timepiece may soon become as antiquated as the meaning of 'phone' as a fixed receiver on an analog landline.

That said, the word "watch" is likely a very good word to keep for the wrist-devices: their natural UX, given the limited possible set of affordances, is designed around passive alerts. Which is to say, they watch for events, and you watch them.

My recollection of history is a bit different. What I remember is that people were practically begging Apple to build a phone. You might say there was a half-hearted attempt with the ROKR, in partnership with Motorola, but it didn't really address what people were seeking. The calls for a phone done the "Apple way" continued. Now, I do believe Apple ended up greatly exceeding the expectations of the customers with the iPhone and, as you suggest, perhaps even created a new market segment because of that, but was hardly a surprise to see them announce something phone-like.

There's a part in this terrible move "Time Cop" (1994, set in 2004) where one of the characters uses this communications device that's a rectangular slab with a 2" or 3" bezel and is two or three inches deep, but has a touch screen. I thought, wow, this is what they thought an iPad would be, but what we have is actually better.

If they're gonna buy it it won't be on the merits of its watch functionality. So it's not about being a watch, in the same way (or actually far more so) than a smartphone is not about the phonecalls.

It's a machine you wear on your wrist that also happens to tell time.

Mind you, what the "younger crowd" wants is not really that predictable in the sense of "why would they buy a watch".

If it becomes a kind of fashion statement, they'd buy it, the same way hipsters now buy vests and hats (the kind of which people haven't really wore since 50 years or so), huge headphones (something that was a tiny market a decade or so ago, despite everything being available), etc.

It annoyed me how much they touted how incredibly precise it is. As if 50ms matters on a wristwatch.

They already are (along with any sort of wrist/hand jewelry) in many testing centers.

I agree with the sentiment, but, based on my interactions with OSX and iOS, I assume it's not essential that the watch buzz and interrupt you all the time. I have all popups & notifications disabled in OSX and iOS, and they're still great tools when you're ready to pay attention to them.

I won't be getting an Apple Watch v1 (because it's not waterproof, and well, v1), but it wouldn't surprise me if I bought one down the line. I think there's a lot of interesting things that can be done with all the new sensors, and UX.

She's also pretty fashion conscious and while she isn't happy with the design, I think it passes the bar. She really would prefer something with Apple guts and external design by her favorite fashion brands, however.

Unless you're the president of the United States or something to that effect. People have too little family time as it is once you start adapting what you wear in order to accommodate further encroachment on the little that remains soon there'll be nothing left.

Work can usually wait until the next day.

And if you do have to be on call outside of regular work hours make sure you're compensated for each and every minute that you're on call.

- The NSA won't hack into it

- Most will work decades and follow me, given I service them every 5 to 8 years

It would be great to see apple release a video similar to the 'making the mac pro' that shows just how sophisticated and precise their manufacturing for the watch would be.. it might even get a few more people on board that have an interest in production quality.

The iPhone and iPad had apps, the iPod had podcasting and iTunes. WATCH has nothing equivalent. It seems to be a drastically cut-down iPhone you wear on your wrist, with a few haptic doodads added to create a USP.

It's aiming for a weird market that Apple has traditionally done well in - emotional spending and evangelism - but it's trying to cultivate desire by attempting to be explicitly fashionable, instead of offering 'magical' user benefits that lead indirectly to the perception of being fashionable. ('Show, don't tell.')

Obvious conclusion is that it's not a Jobsian coup like the last few revolutions were.

Maybe it could be with more thought about where it fits as a product, and what makes it unique. But currently 'small iOS wrist device for semi-fashionable people' seems like a challenging place to succeed in.

Additionally, the iPod launched when the iTunes Store was in its nascency. In fact, iTunes wasn't released for Windows until a few years afterwards. It wasn't possible to load apps (small games) on the iPod until the release of the iPod video.

With the promise of an API at launch, there is more of an ecosystem in place than existed for the previous products you mentioned.

But my point - which apparently no one understands here - is that the products were always conceived originally, from the top, as part of a strategy that included a stack of support services and interactions with a user community.

I'm not seeing that on offer here.

Of course WATCH does apps. That was always a given. But the App Store is saturated, and once devs have produced the obligatory new watch faces, fitness, dating and friend-finding apps, my guess is that the opportunities for doing something compelling, original and gotta-have-that are smaller than they were with the original iPhone.

There will be an exception, or maybe four or five. There will not be thousands of potential gotta-have-that apps to match those that are available in the iPhone/iPad app store.

Apple has always been one of the few tech companies that understands that you don't sell hardware, or software - you sell a complete package of unique and exclusive benefits that happens to run on a hardware device.

That worked for the original Mac, then the OS X Mac, then the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. All had obvious user benefits that were so intuitively compelling they barely needed explanation, and which were enhanced and supported over time with software services that made the package even stronger.

I'd be interested to know what the downvoters on this thread believe is the equivalent user benefit and software support package for WATCH.

I don't believe 'It does apps too and there's even an API, so therefore there's an ecosystem' is the most insightful answer to that question, or that it's what users are looking for to persuade them this is a must-have device.

It's gonna take some time to figure out the killer apps for this computing paradigm. There's nothing at all wrong with the Pebble, it's just that the apps to make it worthwhile don't really exist yet. Apple has enough dirty money to get other people to do the heavy lifting in that arena.

Probably existing developers (knowing objective-C, libraries, OS; swift too) will end up being the most important resource...

But I think you're right that it's simply not a general-purpose device, like apple2e, mac, iphone or ipad. It's too limited. It's more like an ipod, appleTV, game console or kindle.

BTW: I hate the way apple fanboys downvote any comment that can in any way be interpreted as remotely critical of Apple or Apple products. It's more interesting to have a discussion. As it is, your first comment is so down-grayed, I can't actually read it.

It's the same issue really with EMV cards in the US, no one will install readers until there are cards, no one will issue cards until there are readers.

At the core of it, the physical card standard is 'good enough' for most people.

Apple may have the market clout to drive adoption in the US. They have experience in getting partners together, to make new technology actually work. Yes, it may take time, and they may go niche by niche.

I think the 200 million iPhones are the ecosystem. I don't see an obvious point to the watch by itself - it seems like it's main "feature" is to expand what your iPhone can do.

The absolute most expensive iPhone is the 128GB iPhone 6 Plus - $950 w/o contract. But it's the highest-end phone in a world with millions of millionaires. This gives a way for iPhone customers to pay more to get more.

I think the Apple Watch is similar.

Before long, a Watch can also be self-contained, technically, but remains limited by form-factor: tiny display. Unlike Glass, it must remain accessory... or so it seems.

But consider: the iPhone is primarily a consumption device. In many ways, it is predicated on many use-cases not requiring a full computer. Is it possible a Watch-size device will similarly turn out to cover many important uses? Obviously, you can use it as a phone. For music/video. To read txt messages/short emails. Casual games.

It's a real consumption device (unless Siri gets unrealistically good). Maybe many web-site functions (i.e. the actual use of the website, not actual current website) can be delivered via Watch: lookup opening hours; store locators; product list/price/specials. Perhaps Watch versions, as we now have Mobile versions - and of course, Watch App versions).

Rather than tethering the watch to your phone and having the watch just being treated as another phone peripheral, you could just as well do the opposite: have the phone tether to the watch to serve as e.g. a keyboard and secondary display.

Even the TRS-80 Model 100 had it's own market for software that was thriving for about three years - complete with requisite magazine support.

...

My hunch is that the new generation of people who recently discovered the recent application ecosystems are shocked to find out that some slightly-older people remember when this same exciting feeling happened before - I would imagine all the way back to the late 1970's when you could put a computer together yourself and sell software out of your garage.

My point isn't whether or not there's an ecosystem, but whether or not there's a planned ecosystem which is deliberately designed to add value, and created as a conscious strategy - not just something that happens by accident.

I wish people here would stop thinking about technology and think more about the overall user experience - which is not about hardware or software or ecosystems, but about creating gotta-have-that experiences and life-changing tools.

So far I don't see WATCH doing that. It might, and there may be plans, and we'll all be surprised a year from now.

But so far, there's no evidence that Apple are thinking about WATCH in those terms. And that makes it different to previous launches.

But to me, this doesn't feel different - just larger.

Even the cycles seem to the same - with early adopters leading the way, the first wave of quick and dirty apps, then more polished apps, and then the tsunami of shovel-ware that kills the market for newcomers.

I remember there being a big market for these devices and apps back in the day.

Which leaves me in the obscure situation of upvoting comments I disagree with just because I think they shouldn't have been downvoted.

Reading between the lines the impression I got is that the WatchKit API will let you define widgets that come with your app and that will be downloaded to the watch when the App is installed on the iPhone.

I think this shows there is an ecosystem- it's the App ecosystem and it's the most vibrant one out there. But it's not exactly the same (which may be the cause of the parents confusion)

Regarding value.. imho, the next evolution of the technical maturity model for mobile will center around decision support. This is where I see wearables providing the most value, which may have significant impact to business process applications and sensor networks.

To the average consumer, this may mean having ambient access to specific economic information, transactional data or live media. It will become a part of your daily informata and utility / Internet usage.