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Apple Announces Smartwatch, Bigger iPhones, Mobile Payments
Today at Apple's September press conference, they announced the new iPhone 6 models. There are two of them — the iPhone 6 is 4.7" at 1334x750, and the iPhone 6 Plus is 5.5" at 1920x1080. Both phones are thinner than earlier models: 5S: 7.6mm, 6: 6.9mm, 6 Plus: 7.1mm. The phones have a new-generation chip, the 64-bit A8. Apple says the new phones have a 25% faster CPU, 50% faster GPU, and they're 50% more energy efficient (though they were careful to say the phones have "equal or better" battery life to the 5S). Apple upgrade the phones' wireless capabilities, moving voice calls to LTE and also enabling voice calls over Wi-Fi. The phones ship on September 19th, preceded by the release of iOS 8 on September 17th.
Apple also announced its entry into the payments market with "Apple Pay." They're trying to replace traditional credit card payments with holding an iPhone up to a scanner instead. It uses NFC and the iPhone's TouchID fingerprint scanner. Users can take a picture of their credit cards, and Apple Pay will gather payment information, encrypt it, and store it. (Apple won't have any of the information about users' credit cards or their purchases, and users will be able to disable the payment option through Find My iPhone if they lose the device.) Apple Pay will work with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards to start. 220,000 stores that support contactless payment will accept Apple Pay, and many apps are building direct shopping support for it. It will launch in October as an update for iOS 8, and work only on the new phones.
Apple capped off the conference with the announcement of the long-anticipated "Apple Watch." Their approach to UI is different from most smartwatch makers: Apple has preserved the dial often found on the side of analog watches, using it as a button and an input wheel. This "digital crown" enables features like zoom without obscuring the small screen with fingers. The screen is touch-sensitive and pressure sensitive, so software can respond to a light tap differently than a hard tap. The watch runs on a new, custom-designed chip called the S1, it has sensors to detect your pulse, and it has a microphone to receive and respond to voice commands. It's powered by a connector that has no exposed contacts — it magnetically seals to watch and charges inductively. The Apple Watch requires an iPhone of the following models to work: 6, 6Plus, 5s, 5c, 5. It will be available in early 2015, and will cost $349 for a base model.
Apple also announced its entry into the payments market with "Apple Pay." They're trying to replace traditional credit card payments with holding an iPhone up to a scanner instead. It uses NFC and the iPhone's TouchID fingerprint scanner. Users can take a picture of their credit cards, and Apple Pay will gather payment information, encrypt it, and store it. (Apple won't have any of the information about users' credit cards or their purchases, and users will be able to disable the payment option through Find My iPhone if they lose the device.) Apple Pay will work with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards to start. 220,000 stores that support contactless payment will accept Apple Pay, and many apps are building direct shopping support for it. It will launch in October as an update for iOS 8, and work only on the new phones.
Apple capped off the conference with the announcement of the long-anticipated "Apple Watch." Their approach to UI is different from most smartwatch makers: Apple has preserved the dial often found on the side of analog watches, using it as a button and an input wheel. This "digital crown" enables features like zoom without obscuring the small screen with fingers. The screen is touch-sensitive and pressure sensitive, so software can respond to a light tap differently than a hard tap. The watch runs on a new, custom-designed chip called the S1, it has sensors to detect your pulse, and it has a microphone to receive and respond to voice commands. It's powered by a connector that has no exposed contacts — it magnetically seals to watch and charges inductively. The Apple Watch requires an iPhone of the following models to work: 6, 6Plus, 5s, 5c, 5. It will be available in early 2015, and will cost $349 for a base model.
Whoever was in charge of the live stream are a bunch of amateurs, incompetent idiots and should be fired, publicity shamed and never hired again.
Interlacing problems with the image, video looping, audio with no video, chinese audio on top of the english one, a stream so full of errors that it froze my Apple TV.
I stopped watching and I'll try later tonight, after Apple has cleaned up that fucking mess. What a joke.
I may be an Apple user and fanboy, but this time the Microsoft and Android fanboys can rip into Apple for this clusterfuck of problems, I'll be cheering for them.
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How many people are wearing fitbits, etc, for fitness? There's a lot of advantage for the fitness and health monitoring stuff to having something on your wrist.
Not to mention, for navigation, simple text messaging, seeing the time,... to be able to use 70% of the functional surface of your phone by glancing at your wrist is nice. Especially since women aren't allowed to have pockets and so the device is even harder to get to :P
I'm not a giant Apple fan, but one thing that I actually liked about their strategy up to this point was keeping their phones smaller. I've had a 4.7" phone, and that was almost too large for my (admittedly small) hands. I've got a 5" screen now, and it's notably difficult for me to use. I'm pessimistic about my future upgrade options at this point, if even Apple is jumping on the mega-sized-phone bandwagon.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
As the android phones grew to massive sizes, they could just keep buying iphones that fit in their pockets (without having to wear baggy pants or cargo shorts).
Same thing happened with the Moto X for me I guess. I was ok with the form factor. Bigger than the iphone, but smaller than the competition...and still just (barely) small enough that I could reach all 4 corners of the screen with my thumb while holding it in one hand. Now the new Moto X+1 is getting even bigger and it is definitely not going to be my next phone. Luckily I am still loving the Moto X and have no reason to upgrade for another year...but I have zero interest in going bigger.
Bottles.
They've caught up with last year's Nexus 5!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
In a few iterations the Apple Watch will be untethered from the phone, have decent storage, and a slimmer form-factor than the monstrosity that was unveiled today.
In a world of tablets, smartphones and smartwatches, dedicated music-players are starting to look rather "quaint".
Have you seen what people are wearing these days?
This is so they can check what time it is without having to attempt to extract their new, larger phone out of the pocket of their skinny jeans, and then try to put it back in again.
Where it'd actually be cool is if it had a 'lack of proximity warning' ... eg, an alert of 'hey, you left your phone' when the two get out or range of each other. Not that it would justify the price (or switching to an iPhone), but it'd be kinda cool, as I just realized I left my phone in my car.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I would not have thought it was possible for a live video feed to go that bad. In addition to all the issues you mentioned, towards the end I had the video feed randomly flip between live content and content from an hour prior. It also froze for a while when the words "Image Stabilization" came on screen, a little too much stabilization!
Bandwidth issues I could almost forgive, or at least understand. But the technical issues they were so technically awful it seemed like they hired a first grade class to do AV and fed them jello shots beforehand.
Hope they can assemble a watchable video for viewing later, it was so bad you almost have to wonder if Chinese is not permanently embedded over Cook's voice in the master recording.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't think they mentioned official battery capacity or battery life numbers, but they did say "very easy to charge at night". That tells me it has 1 day of battery just like the Moto 360.
Honestly, the battery is the worst part of smartwatches currently. It ruined the Moto 360 for me and it comes close to ruining to Apple Watch, if it actually is only 1 day.
I would settle for 3 days, my Sony sw2 goes 4 days without charging. I was expecting the same from Apple, looking at the criticisms of the Android Wear watches which are all focused on the 1-2 day battery life. I don't want to charge a watch every night!! I get it, it has a nice screen and it's slim, and it's running a lot of sensors and wireless transactions, but still... just awful battery life!
I'm a major Apple fan, and even I don't understand what the pitch is supposed to be. It does do some things differently or better than the phone, and it also does some things the phone can't do at all (e.g. measure your heart rate throughout the day), but by and large, I just don't get it yet.
It kinda reminds me of the iPad, where you could tell that they thought they had something special, but that they hadn't yet figured out what all it could do or why it would appeal to people. The advertising focused more on the emotions and feel of the device, rather than on specific use cases. A year later, and the ads were more focused, as was the language they used to describe it in keynotes and other communications.
I think they believe the same thing is true here: they believe they've created something different that developers can use as a platform to make all kinds of cool new things using the cool new sensors it has, but they don't know what those things will be. But they're clearly excited by it, so maybe they know something I don't.
I get the sense that I'll either need to get my hands on one or else listen to a lot of people who have their hands on them before I'll have any concept at all of whether or not it even might serve a purpose in my life. The most exciting feature for me was mentioned in a throwaway line right at the end of the keynote, where they rattled off a handful of random uses some of them have had for it, and mentioned controlling an Apple TV from it: something other devices can already do, of course, but I'd love to see a watch that can interact with smart devices around the home (e.g. locking and unlocking doors, turning on/off lights, dimming the lights when I sit down in the media room, etc.), including something like my media center. But I don't know which, if any, of those things it can do or will be able to do in the near future.
As things stand now though, it's definitely a, "Well, that's neat, but *shrug*" for me.
What is exactly is your threshold for when a product should be created? That it does everything? That everyone likes it? Apple will sell METRIC SHITLOADS of these and do just fine, thankyouverymuch.
MOST Apple products are a little overpriced and underspecced upon release. Look at the original iPod -- it was indeed expensive, had no wireless, and "less space than a Nomad." Then it TOOK OVER THE WORLD. The MacBook Air was a little slow and $1699 or $1799 at launch, and then OH LOOK, the WHOLE PC INDUSTRY tried to copy it with the whole "ultrabook" thing, and by the way Airs start at $899 now.
So yeah, the first batch will be sold to people who are willing to spend $349 to see texts without digging out their phone. Then they'll get cheaper, more powerful, and more useful over the next few years. There is LOTS that could be done here. Maybe they'll create the pico-SIM and you'll be able to use it without your phone, and they'll push telcos into supporting it for free since it uses so little data. Etc etc etc. THIS IS JUST REV ONE. Stay tuned. And if you don't like it, don't buy it. Get a pebble or a moto or a samsung or whatever. Or don't. Apple will do just fine without you.
And finally, "a gigantic set of the population" DOES still wear watches. Apple became the most valuable company in the world JUST A FEW YEARS after introducing the iPhone, the original target of which (as announced by Steve Jobs at MWSF, January 2007) was just 1% of the phone market. A product at which Steve Ballmer famously laughed. Don't worry about Apple. They'll do OK with 1% of the watch market, too.
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Apple doesn't middle-man the banking/merchant transaction in their model.
Unlike Google/Samsung/Amazon, they are not collecting or monetizing transaction or location info of buyers. They limit their liability and focus on where they make real money.
From a different security standpoint, it hardly matters. I am simply astounded that Apple chose to support NFC in their new phone.
NFC was cracked before it was even commonly available in phones by the same researcher who read (and cloned!) RFIDs from passports in the pockets of passersby from his car 10 meters away, in San Francisco.
He later proved that it was possible to gather "secure" information from NFC-equipped phones from 10 feet away, using concealed-on-person equipment that cost less than $200, even when they weren't engaged in a transaction! They just had to have NFC turned on.
NFC is not secure, and as long as it uses radio -- even radio at minuscule power -- transactions can be followed and cracked from a distance.
I haven't turned on the NFC on my phone since I bought it, and I don't really have any reason to.
> Apple doesn't middle-man the banking/merchant transaction in their model.
*THAT* was the big takeaway from the announcement. They're not doing PayPal, they're simply providing tokens to the bank, like any NFC credit card.
That said, the film about the payment process falls on deaf ears anywhere outside the US. I did about four transactions today, three of them were tap-to-pay, one was cash. Having all my cards in one place and eliminating my wallet (I *rarely* use cash, maybe twice a week) is something worth paying for.
A great watch is expensive and made in Switzerland. That's how watches work. Nothing about them makes any sense because the product is fundamentally not about time telling technology, except in an abstract "it's pretty awesome this is just gears and springs" sort of way.
This is not a good smartwatch at $350. It's a bad sportswatch - because it doesn't standalone from the iPhone, doesn't have GPS, and yet is in the same price bracket.
My personal opinion is that on deeper analysis the whole smartwatch thing is a deadend which is being pushed because it's looks achievable, rather then innovative. But there's some fairly obvious problems with what Apple has on display - and they're the same ones as every other smartwatch.