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How Apple Watch Is Really a Regression In Watchmaking
Nerval's Lobster writes Apple design chief Jony Ive has spent the past several weeks talking up how the Apple Watch is an evolution on many of the principles that guided the evolution of timepieces over the past several hundred years. But the need to recharge the device on a nightly basis, now confirmed by Apple CEO Tim Cook, is a throwback to ye olden days, when a lady or gentleman needed to keep winding her or his pocket-watch in order to keep it running. Watch batteries were supposed to bring "winding" to a decisive end, except for that subset of people who insist on carrying around a mechanical timepiece. But with Apple Watch's requirement that the user constantly monitor its energy, what's old is new again. Will millions of people really want to charge and fuss with their watch at least once a day?
I take my watch off at the end of the day. I put it on in the morning. How big a difference is it to set it "on a charger on my nightstand", instead of just "on my nightstand?"
Much ado about nothing.
Has there been some change over recent years that has made phones hard to get out of your pocket? Why would you want to do anything on such a tiny screen when a bigger one is within reach almost 100% of the time?
Or even wear a watch?
Until somebody discovers a better battery!
Will millions give a shit about an overpriced nerdlinger status symbol? Stay tuned as Bennett whateverhisface submits his thesis.
there were self winding watches.
Do none of the other smart watches require to be charged? How is this a problem restricted to Apple?
How come this thing doesn't run off body heat, or have a mechanical generator in the same fashion of the old self winding watch? which was extremely reliable by the way. A tritium backlit display would be really cool.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
>> Watch batteries were supposed to bring "winding" to a decisive end
Someone has never heard of the automatic (aka self-winding) watch. I realize that the concept has only been around since the 18th century, but really, it's pretty well known.
I wound my watch as a kid. I wouldn't call the 80s ye olden days . . .
Back in the day, you didn't need to charge your phone every day. Now you do. Big deal?
...how does that make the entire watch a regression in watchmaking?
That's like if a new Tesla were to be released, now with the ability to leave the atmosphere and break orbit, but it requires fuel to do so, and you sat there shaking your head about what a regression it was in car making.
Bleh
This "article" could have just been jammed in the summary, hell Bennett writes larger blog posts in the summary all the time! I can also honestly say I thought to myself "well this is really lame" before noticing it was a shameless dice self post.
I hate apple and have no interest in a "smart watch", but having to charge the damn thing all the time is a well understood problem, something which is weighed as a con vs whatever pros people find in these things. If I had any interest in the features, I doubt this would be a show stopper. It just becomes a slight addition to the list of things I do before going to bed. If value of that effort exceeds the annoyance of that effort, then it's worth it?
This article doesn’t do anything besides point out the issue and make a fairly obvious correlation (something the author probably felt was way more clever than it actually was)?
Wearing a watch in itself is already "is a throwback to ye olden days". I haven't worn a watch in decades, and I see a lot of people without them. When I need to see the time, I can glance at the corner of the computer screen, or check my phone.
No one WANTS to charge their freakin' watch every day. But they will. The hordes will buy it because it is Apple. It will be an inconvenient product, but its trendiness and Apple logo will overcome all common sense and logical thought.
I, for one, am not interested in having to ensure my watch is plugged in nightly. I may not be Apple's target demographic, though.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
Whhhaaaaaaaambulance!
Seriously? We have to charge our phone nightly in most cases. Is it really a big deal charge your watch too? Put them both on the nightstand side by side.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
What more could a fanboi want?
Replies such as this make you look foolish, and do nothing at all to tarnish the reputation of those you target. Another thing: rarely has "Anonymous Coward" been so appropriate.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
A fair few people stopped really using watches when smartphones took off. If they want a watch primarily as a timepiece then yeah, "dumb" watches are less hassle, but if a person likes the non-time functions of a smartwatch then maybe the daily charge isn't so bad. Just because it is on your wrist doesn't mean it should be judged entirely as a timepiece, so comparing the time between "charges" to a ye olde watch maybe isn't the best comparison.
My old Nokia could go a week between charges. Yet I have to recharge my Android phone daily. Yup, it's a horrible regression in battery life. And in exchange, all I got are a ton of features that I use all the time. Oh, and my old rotary phone didn't require charging ever. Heck, it didn't even need to be connected to my household power.
Smart watches are no different. They have their pros and their cons.
What's a watch?
I bought my Casio in 2005, it's solar rechargeable. I've worn it daily with the original batter every since I bought it, never a problem and the time is always right. I'm too utilitarian to want something that needs constant attention. Maybe it comes from being a tech, I get tired of fixing problems and see no reason to generate them.
Great watch.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You don't need to charge your landline phone (except wireless) but you pretty much need to charge your cell phone daily or at least weekly. How many people would like to go back to landline? Apple watch has similar physical dimensions as regular watch and they both show times. Similarities end there. The apple watch can do many more things that regular watch cannot and it needs battery for those functions. If you are happy with what your watch does, ignore apple watch (I am going to do that), but many folks may like to have one.
Thought that Apple put out a Nano that could be used as a large watch years ago. Just had to get a third party band for it.
The voice quality on cellphones is a throwback to ye olden days. Will people really want to struggle to hear each other with these new cellphone devices?
But I'm on a 15 minute schedule so taking my phone out of my pocket and looking at it all the time would be a pain in the ass.
I received a Pebble as a wedding gift, and I was reluctant as to whether or not I'd like it...I now wear it every single day, and feel naked when it's not with me. The benefit of an "always-at-a-glance" notification system can't be overstated. Granted, the battery life is such that I only need to recharge it a few times a week. While the prospect of charging my watch every night would be a step down for me, I'm already in the habit of charging my smartphone every night, so my evening routine wouldn't change all that much... Given the aforementioned benefits, I wouldn't consider the nightly charge a dealbreaker whatsoever. I think this is a "Don't knock it til you try it." situation.
Most automatic watches have power reserve for a day or two. You must move your hands to charge it or use external winder. Self winding is a misnomer. Batteries can keep it charged for years. Other option is solar charging (this is what I am using but that too uses batteries for reserve) or heat gradient charging (which most people haven't really heard of since it used to cost fortune and very few were ever produced).
In the early days of watches there were no wrist straps. Pocket watches were all that we had unless you count Big Ben! The wristwatch ended the reign of the pocket watch once as for all, or so we thought. Will people really stop wearing watches just because they have a clock on their phone?
See the subject line.
They can't put all those features in the version 1. Wait for the Apple Watch 3S coming out in 2020.
The answer is "Yes" for those people that will buy the Apple Watch. These are people with money to burn on a time piece gadget and have the time and inclination to take care of it. If you want a watch that doesn't need charging every day there are tons of them out there. There will be only one Apple Watch. Get it? It's called marketing if you don't and if you want to discuss it in detail and critique product marketing in particular you should really learn something about it.
Nobody needs a Rolex. Nobody needs a Breitling. Nobody needs an Apple Watch. They want one because the devices are special and they have earned them through hard work. The same can be said of designer clothes that require dry cleaning. Why buy those things that need special care and cost more? Because they make you feel better about yourself and say something about your accomplishments.
This has been going on since human society existed. We always look for ways to differentiate ourselves from others. So what? If you have the money and the time to take care of something nice then why not. No, these things are not necessary, but how many things we use every day are truly necessary?
We do have to come up with a better word than "GAY" to describe things that are unnecessarily frilly, froofy and effeminate. How people love really has nothing to do with it.
> "Watch batteries were supposed to bring winding to a decisive end, except for that subset of people who insist on carrying around a mechanical timepiece."
Self-winding mechanicals draw power from the motion of your wrist, & need winding only when left unworn for several days. So Apple is going back even earlier than that.
A mechanical self-powering engineering marvel on my wrist is more exciting than apple's gee-gaws IMHO.
My sundial never needed any recharging or battery replacement.
Mechanical watches were so ridiculously convenient and useful that people would gladly wind their watches once a day. Similarly, if the Apple Watch proves convenient and useful, people will gladly charge it once a day.
Of course, the most myopic aspect of these articles is the unwritten presumption that today's state of the art will never improve. Yes, Apple Watch will need to be charged once a day for the next couple of years, but charge times are going to improve tremendously as Moore's Law continues to plug along. The Apple Watch will improve in a way analogous to the way mechanical and later quartz watches improved far beyond the limitations of the original pocket watches and wristwatches.
> Will millions of people really want to charge and fuss with their watch at least once a day?
I can't speak for everyone else, but I vote a decisive no. I already have a stupid company-issued phone with a non-swappable battery that I have to charge every night, and occasionally during the day if I use it a lot. I tell ya, I long for the days when a pager would run for weeks on a single AA battery. The thought of having a second device that needs that level of care and feeding is frankly revolting.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Except now, we think digital watches that run down in a day are a pretty neat idea.
Whatever "progress" and "evolution" are, Apple is the opposite.
I've had one 10 years and never had to have it serviced and it does what I want a watch to do, tell the time. Now if only someone made a mobile phone that you could hear and didn't drop calls...or in other words worked like a phone. What an amazing thing that would be.
Analogously, cell phones are a throwback to old crank phones because you have to charge them before you use them. We used to have perfectly good powered land lines. Cell phones with their short battery lives and constant attention are for eclectic hobbyists I'm sure.
And don't get me started about notepads when a paper and pencil pad can store your information for a century or more with no format changes impairing data retreival. current ipads are the equivalent of undecipherable babelonian cuniform clay tablets. Ludicrous anyone would want to go back to such fragile formats for information storage
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
inadvertently topical as tim cook just came out.
Nope nope nope nope.
... I am still waiting for a smartwatch that doesn't require a mobile phone like my old school Casio Data Bank 150 calculator watch. Its battery replacement is every few years too!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I honestly think the only way these things will take off is with the whole charging pad system that has kept popping up in the news lately. Most people take off their watch when they go to bed, but plugging it in along with other devices is inconvenient and obnoxious, esp if you're fumbling around late at night. A pad to put it on would make it feel less inconvenient.
I haven't worn a watch for a few years, and nothing out there makes me want to.
Battery life alone is a detractor. I could consider a more than one day life watch, and a cradle to charge it, with an option on the fly, but we go on to reason two:
Nothing in smartwatches is showing me a killer feature. Even fitness is half a loaf, since Google Fit is worth a try and the price is right...
A phone on my wrist is not very attractive to me. That small a screen for text previews, not so much. An alarm clock? Got that. Calendar? No advantage.
I am clearly not in the target market.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If I were to wear a watch, I'd like to be able to comfortably wear it while sleeping. I'd like it to record my vitals. I hear variation in sleep vitals is a pretty good way to detect illness early on.
Maybe it could vibrate at me when I snore, before it wakes my bed partner. Or vibrate to wake me in the morning, since I can apparently sleep though any noise. Hey maybe my bed could be one big charging mat!
But I don't like to wear a watch, so never mind.
As a train, the airplane is pitiful. It can't haul as much freight or as many passengers. It costs more. It needs to land and be refueled more frequently. And who needs an airplane anyway? Trains are safer as you are less likely to die in an accident. Trains may not be as fast, but what's the hurry? I like sitting in the car and seeing the country go by at ground level. You can't see a damn thing from an airplane and what you do see looks like little toys. Yep, only an idiot would build or buy an airplane because I like trains.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Honestly, nobody wears watches. Most of society has given them up in favor of our pocket screens. Those already need daily recharging. It's not like the apple watch is even competing with a standard wristwatch. Obviously watches have far better power consumption than our phones, but we all eschewed watches for phones a decade ago.
Compare the watch's running time to a pebble or other competing device, not something that isn't even the same. I see plenty of articles that bash the new iphone for poor battery life, but none of those articles bitches that landline phones never needed charging and we've taken this huge step back. They justifiably compare it to some android phone that lasts 2x as long (but nowhere near as long as a landline phone)
There is a litany of other flaws that can be pointed out if you really want to take the watch down.
I have a good number of watches.
My preferred are the Casio Tough-Solar (I have 5 of them) and Citizen Eco-Drive (2 of them) like the name suggest I never change the batteries of theses.
I also have some Samsung Gears watches, the original watch (v700) on a normal use (ie I don't spend the day playing with 2048 or taking picture with it) can stand 4 days without problem (around 15 to 20% of battery use by day).
For me, the Apple iWatch is like other iProduct from this company: bad technology, bad design, bad software good marketing; remind me the old Microsoft.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I remember that the first iPhone was a real "gotta have it." I'd been waiting for a web browser and email in my pocket for years.
Smart Watch? I'm not really sure. I like my self-winding watch. It's not very accurate, but when I need time to the minute I just look at my phone.
I think the only appeal of the smart watch is that it'll vibrate, so it's easier to feel.
No, I will not work for your startup
One step back, two steps forward. This is how I see it. Battery tech will evolve and so will the energy efficiency of the devices. It may be slow with regard to today's pace.
It's like saying the browser is a step back from the standard desktop environment. It is, but it also allows you to do so much more.
All this from someone who does not wear a watch.
If wound daily, my daily wear watch (handwind only, no auto) takes 8 turns to wind. Less than 20 seconds.
My other watch is automatic, it winds itself. If I have to wind it due to not wearing it, like, during the weekend, then I hand-wind it about 10 turns.. again less than 20 seconds.
I never understood humanity's aversion to winding a watch. it's a no-brainer, something that is second-nature and takes very little time. Even if one has a battery of 5 watches, winding all of them in the morning takes less than two minutes.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It's not clear if this will work post-Jobs. Jobs was able to get people to wear dweebish white wires hanging out of their ears. Tim Cook can't do the Reality Distortion Field thing.
Will millions of people really want to charge and fuss with their watch at least once a day?
Wrong question. Of course they won't want to any more than they want to charge their cell phones nightly. They might do it anyway but they won't want to.
No the real question is whether the device scratches a figurative itch. I know relatively few people my age and younger who regularly wear a watch. Some do but almost never because they actually need to or because it solves a significant problem for them. When I was young wearing a watch had some practical value. Today not so much. Maybe it will be a breakout product but it seems to be a solution in search of a problem to me.
To be honest I haven't seen any smartwatch that really would make me want to add a device or replace the watches I do own. The only real practical value I can see in one is as a chronometer (duh) and a portable sensor package for certain activities like running or health management. I suppose there is a fashion angle to it too. Pack a thermometer, barometer, accelerometer, altimeter, GPS, humistor, gyroscope, photodetector, etc into a compact watch and there are some very awesome uses for that even if the battery life is relatively short. But I cannot really see myself wearing one all the time because my phone already does much of that and is more generally useful to me.
Now I can get back to shoving my tongue as far up Apple's anus as humanly possible.
We used to have phones that would last 5-7 days, some longer, between charges. My Nexus 4 rarely makes it through the day without multiple trips to the Joule stream.
The new digital watches by Apple and Motorola are not very green (just like cells) because they require a lot (collectively, given the volume of use expected) of power to do essentially useless tasks that the user isn't requiring of them at any given moment.
How much power do we think, collectively, goes into empty anti-virus cycles for home PCs? If we could kill that set of services and get back the juice, I'd bet it would actually be discernable by average consumers because EVERY PC, cell phone, etc. kind of needs these services (some will argue *NIXes don't, but they still do as long as users are ignorant and make bad decisions).
The watches and phones also tend to have a lot of processes executing as services that arguably don't need to be so that they can watch, like eagle eyed caffeinated hawks on amphetamines, for activity in their very limited area of concern. Most of the time, the users aren't using those services (so they could be shut down a lot of the time if it was done intelligently).
Computers, in a very real sense, are inefficient energy consumers.
Really, another one?
Good thing I'm getting an Android Wear watch, not like those Apple sheeples and their 1 day battery life, pffft.
aka, why does an article single out Apple for a problem inherent in the entire product category?
But I'm on a 15 minute schedule so taking my phone out of my pocket and looking at it all the time would be a pain in the ass.
So look at the clock on the wall or the one on your PC or the one in your car or the one on your appliances...
Maybe it's different for you but I rarely find myself without a clock of some sort within eyeshot unless I'm actively exercising outdoors. Not to say watches aren't useful in the right circumstances but they really don't help me track time in my routine day any better than I already do.
Smartwatches could take a revolutionary leap by dropping the watch moniker altogether and all the design constraints that come with it.
I was considering getting an Apple Watch but I had no idea you needed to charge it so frequently. Interest=Gone.
Like a previous poste, I too have a Citizen SkyHawk A-T Eco-Drive watch that self-charges whenever in the light, whether I wear it or not. It also self-calibrates each night from the radio signal from WWVB transmitted by NIST. In the 6 years I have had it has never stopped, lost time, the battery level gauge has never dropped below 90% and I wear long sleeves most of the time.
Is the iWatch such a pig that it cannot at least charge partially while being in some sort of light?
There's been android smart-watches for quite some time.
There's experienced people who can answer just that.
I think that this Apple watch like the other new smart watches on the market are just the beginning. Battery technology will evolve as well as the energy saving in the watch OS to allow longer use. Rule 1 in technology -- You never buy ver 1.0 of anything unless for investment purposes..
The hordes will buy it because it is Apple.
Apple has had plenty of flops over the years. Newton, Lisa, Apple III, Pippin, Macintosh TV, QuickTake, the 20th Anniversary Mac, the ROKR E1 phone, Ping, and more besides.
Apple sells a lot of stuff because they normally make pretty good products but people don't buy shit solely because it has an Apple logo on it.
Its all been going downhill since the invention of the digital watch. I wear an automatic. I haven't had to wind my watch or change a battery since ever. I used to wear a digital watch becasue it was cheap, but now I've made the jump to mechanical I will never go back. My watch is accurate to +/- 3 seconds a day, which is all I need it to be and only 3 times the error of a typical quartz watch (+/- 1 second a day), it never needs winding, and I have an intricate work of mechanical art on my wrist rather than some mass produced plasticky junk. All I have to do is service it once every 5 years, which in itself is an enjoyable activity, whereas in 5 years the Apple Watch will probably be obsolete. I don't have to worry about my watch getting malware, or spying on me. I don't have to worry about a LiPo fire breaking out on my wrist.
Er, "camp" serves that purpose.
this is actually also wrong for mechanical watches, as they take a constant amount of energy. So no matter how many times you look at the watch and do other things, you can be sure you don't have to rewind outside of your usual schedule (which is normally once in the morning, and takes no 30 seconds, and you don't even have to take off the device). So Apple's Watch is even a step back from mechanical watches.
Just a fair warning. It is a worthless blurb.
-Nuke the moon
I see two other problems as issues.
1) not familiar with the iWatch, but if I have to touch it with my opposite hand to display the time it's a loser. People stopped wearing LED watches (except for a recent resurgence among hipsta-doofusses) because you had to touch them to display the time. Also the fact that you couldn't see them in bright light was a problem. They were replaced by LCDs that didn't require touching any buttons to see the time, but still require buttons to see them in darkness. Many analog watches aren't visible in darkness anyway, so this isn't such a big deal by comparison.
2) Current rechargeable battery technology will require that the battery or the entire watch will require replacement every two years or so. Maybe not such a big deal because the technology will surely change and people will want to upgrade just like they do with their phones. Problem or not, better plan on getting a new one every two years. Maybe they'll just bundle them with phones so both stay in sync technology-wise.
You mean because there's one drawback to the traditional watch it's regression? I guess mobile phones are a regression because I don't have to charge my landline. Oh wait, you mean the added benefits outweigh the drawbacks? Exactly.
didn't actually kill it. Or did it?
I hate Apple as a company. Look through my past comments and you'll see that I bash them probably even more than they deserve. Yet, even I think this is a silly argument. We aren't coming full circle. It's more like we're just further along on a spiral staircase. Our positions may seem to line up in a superficial way (winding / charging) but the circumstances and what you get for the effort is are very different.
Oh, it relies on winding. It's that the winding happened so long ago people don't think of it in those terms.
Yeah, same is true for my GPS watch. I know that it *can* make it through a few runs but anxiety over it running out mid run forces me to charge it every day.
Buy a Patek Philippe instead, it is probably cheaper in the long run.
"Haier Plans To Embed Area Wireless Chargers In Home Appliances" http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Now if only there was an appliance that could be put into lonely tech-geeks bedrooms that would also charge a smart watch. Nope, got me, I can't think of anything...
I'd been holding off on the whole smart watch thing, I figured Apple could make it work if anyone could. To say I was disappointed with what they presented is an understatement. It's bulky. It needs constant recharging. It doesn't do anything special that all the other watches don't already do. Where's the innovation? Its shiny - but it's not going to change my life.
I mulled it over for over a month before finally buying a Pebble Steel. They've got it right. Apple have completely missed the boat on this one.
My Mechanical Watch has several critical advantages over a battery powered watch.
The main one is cost and service. My Mechanical Watch (an Orient Mako) requires service around 5 years or so. A battery watch requires a new battery every year to two years.
When you open a watch to either service it or replace the battery, you incur costs of new seals, other things, that gets pricey. Not having to worry about batteries dying is a huge plus for a mechanical watch (that winds itself by motion). Sure, my Orient Mako could be more accurate (it is still only 15 seconds fast a day); it could be hacking (second hand stops when you pull out the crown). But its cheap, around $100, has good lume on the dial, a diving style rubber band adjustable for looseness when typing on the computer, tightness other times, and a rotating bezel for timing all sorts of cooking and other tasks I do every day.
Some things just work and don't change for not only decades but centuries: jeans, watches, radios, coke bottles, buttons, zippers, shoelaces, t shirts, etc. Not all change is good.
Would you rather wear a cotton t shirt or one out of polyster?
I don't see a point in todays smartwatches and I'm not an Apple Fanboy but the truth is, I'd bet money that Apples Smartwatch is the first worth looking at if you're into this sort of gadget and have no problem entering Apples golden cage.
Their recent retina display iMac says it all: ... a "Think Button" - WTF??? etc. And, of course, don't get me started on the default windows installation. ... That's how backwards it is compared to the stuff Apple builds.
Apple implents things before others even think about it. I recently bought a ThinkPad as my Linux Workstation and to avoid Apple. The whole device feels like from a different era. Clunky crappy plastic, strange features and behaviour, a boot screen that looks like some highschool kid designed it, in the 80ies
Say what you want about Apple, but these guys know how to do hardware and they know how to do software and they know how to integrate both. The amount of detail that went into the Apple Watch is staggering - as usual, I have to ad. For instance: The display is so small, they added pressure as a metric to touch, to have a wider range of input.
This summer I looked at a Sony Smartwatch, out of curiosity - it felt like a prototype from 2004, with a low-res screen and some flaky widgets on it. I have no doubt apples watch will be a few generations ahead, because that's what apple does. Innovate to sell their shiny stuff.
Then again, I'm steering clear of Apple for a while now. Their iPads and iPhone are just to damn expensive to be a viable alternative to android tablets and phones and my 3 year old MB Air is going to last at least another 5 years. Who knows what comes then ...
My smartwatch I'm getting as soon as it has an AI built in and I can unhook it from Google, Apple or whatever Megacorp is ruling the world then.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I thought that computers were supposed to relieve us from the oppression of staying synchronized.
The charger comes with the watch. They wanted a fully sealed chargeport.
Everything isn't a conspiracy.
If you just think of "smart watches" as watches, then of course it seems absurd to have to charge them regularly. Traditional watches don't need to be charged for years at a time because pretty much all they do is tell time. But smart watches aren't really comparable to traditional watches. The only similarity they have is that they are worn on your wrist (and can tell time). Once you stop thinking "watch" and start thinking "tiny wearable computer", the charging isn't really an issue.
Somehow i wonder if the Samsung CEO will now also come out.
Don't forget to wind your watch!
Wow, so you get one charger and you'll never never ever ever ever have to get a new one? Man you are SOOOO awesome. How do you do it?
Noun confusion continues to spiral out of control about the "Apple Watch".
In Apple's case, "Watch" does not refer to 'Watch' as a slang word for 'Chronograph', i.e. 'clock'.
Apple uses "Watch" as a verb and metaphor for the ability of the iPhone add-on to sync with Yosemite and iOS8 and Cloud Drive devices over WiFi.
The basic function of Apple Watch is to 'Watch', a verb, to view information feeds from iPhone, iMac, APBPro, iPod et al. devices running Yosemite and iOS8.
The wall plug is the same as for the iPhone or iPad, it uses an inductive connector on the watch side so that the watch doesn't have exposed terminals and can therefore be water-resistant.
Just because you're likely to have to charge it overnight, it doesn't mean that the user has to "constantly monitor its energy". This is a ridiculously biased perspective.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Before the electric watch, there was the watch with an internal movable weight (small, unbalanced on a central pin), that would automatically wind the watch as the wearer moved through the day. It would not over-wind, but would keep the watch wound without movement for up to a week. No batteries. I don't know why a small internal generator attached to such a weight along with a small super capacitor could not keep an electric watch running forever...except the battery sellers would not be happy.
I'm sure at some point they'll start making cpus to save energy so that the watches last way longer. A watch is a different beast from a cell phone, which is a different beast than a tablet, which is a different beast than a laptop. Give the industry time to specialize.
People who wear watches now tend to chose automatic mechanical wonders, or ultra durable workhorses digitals (like a G-Shock). Few would be interested in a fragil, figity, impersonation of a watch that couldn't last through most overseas flights. On the other hand, most who don't wear a watch say they already have a cell phone that tells the time, with a display you can actually read.
Yes, it is true that the battery is currently still a pain point, and it will take a few more years to break the 1 week barrier. I don't think it will stop sales though, people are so used to charge their phone daily.
But I also think that the battery is just one of the many elements, and even an Apple hater has to admit that they were thorough and innovative in several areas, most notably in the straps and bracelets. These things have been in status quo since decades inthe traditional watch world, while Apple truly started from scratch. For example you can resize the bracelet without tools. No sales clerk hammering on it. Then you have the straps with the magnetic locks. And the sporty straps wher ethe leftover bit folds under the strap, which is very neat (I expect that this last one comes from designer Mark Newsom who is assisting Apple with the watch design, he had done similar straps for his ikepod brand). Also the lugs of the straps are integrated and can easily be replaced, meaning every strap can have the ideal lug instead of the generic one on traditional watches.
In general the material choice is also more akin quality watches than the Pebble etc, for example the ceramic back.
All in all, while the local Apple hate puts blinders on the eyes of many slashdotters, if you have an open mind you have to admit that they really thought things through.
Will I buy one? Maybe in v2 or v3 when they will have added more sensors. The health focus will be the killer app for commercial success.
It takes 10 seconds to wind a mechanical watch. It will probably take a couple of hours to charge an Apple watch.
"I don't know what time it is, my watch is dead!!!"
Analogously, cell phones are a throwback to old crank phones because you have to charge them before you use them. We used to have perfectly good powered land lines. Cell phones with their short battery lives and constant attention are for eclectic hobbyists I'm sure.
And don't get me started about notepads when a paper and pencil pad can store your information for a century or more with no format changes impairing data retreival. current ipads are the equivalent of undecipherable babelonian cuniform clay tablets. Ludicrous anyone would want to go back to such fragile formats for information storage
Hardly, since charging a cell phone entails plugging it into a power line, which makes it no worse than a powered land line phone. In contrast, battery powered electric watches (or mechanical watches powered by the movement of the wrist) never need to be plugged in, which gives them a distinct advantage over the Apple Watch.
Yes, all the best mechanical watches already had built-in bluetooth and music players in addition to being able to wind themselves
because you have to charge them every day.
As are laptops and smart phones. Oh, wait, THEY DO A LOT MORE THAN OLD FASHIONED WINDABLE WATCHES. It's almost as if the technological standards of the day have changed.
I'm trying to stay up to date here. Initially, it was "his", simple enough, and understood to be gender neutral. But then, it became "his or her", for those who just can't learn. Now, is it "her or his"? Is that what we can go with now at least for a few weeks? Being female myself, I feel absurd that someone is going to these great lengths because they are terrified that they will somehow offend me. I would rather just type less and still get the point across, and "he" seems to be the most efficient way to get that done.
You know, in ye days of olde, women did not carry pocket watches, so it seems a little absurd to say her.
I guess now we would even say, when someone puts on her or his dress.....
My submariner originally designed in the 1950s has a 42 hour power reserve, no winding no cables just a very nice watch that always works. Any quartz watch would give you about 2 years, and even a modern winding watch would give you longer run time.
..but a sizeable credit debt and all the overpriced trendy sh*t I can be sold:
"I was into having watches that needed recharging nightly before charging was cool!"
Besides, my Google Glass needs a power boost and the free trade manufactured, recycled bamboo generator attached to my $4K brakeless fixie can't charge them both, especially when I'm at Starbux and those pesky office people have all the outlets taken up!
i have been wearing watches that need to wind since years. i actually like the ritual. also i always take off my watch in the evening before going to bed.
the actual question i think is another one. imho there are two category of watch wearers – probably there are pleanty of more, but i like to simplify things:
1. those who wear kind of expensive watches
2. those who wear a watch as a piece of function
the ones who fall into category 1. are those who will be willing to spend thousands on a watch. i don't believe those are the ones who will buy an apple watch. they would rather wear a patek or a jaeger.
the ones who fall into category 2. might be the right ones. they are looking at functionatlity. human beeings are quite willing to change some habits, if they feel what they get in return is good enough. defentely taking the watch off and having it charged every evening is a little change in habbit compared to what the apple watch seems to be promising.
I am 30 years old and I wear a watch. It is a mechanical, self winding one, with perpetual calendar. Tells the time and date and is imho the pinnacle of time keeping.
I also have an iPhone and a Nexus for my mobile phone needs. Recently I've acquired an old Nokia 6310i and I'm genuinely considering using it as my main and only phone, trading in the various (mostly useless) features of the smartphones for the 2 week battery life on one charge. It has bluetooth to connect to my car handsfree system, it has a metric ton of names capacity, it can make and receive calls and text messages, sincerely, do we really need more from a phone? I can text 10 times faster (literally) without looking at the keyboard or the screen of the 6310i whilst I need to give all my attention to typing on a touchscreen. Yes, we all need satnav and stuff, but that can be literally had with any recent pda or inexpensive smartphone.
I think information technology evolved a lot faster than battery tech. It did so back when Nokia produced the first colour screen phones who used the quite powerful batteries from back then in less than a couple of days. It's still nasty today. Imagine a phone like the 6310i featuring a 3000mAh battery instead of the measly 1100mAh the BPS-2 had. One could realistically use their phone for a month without charging it more than once.
And let's be honest, do we really need to be located and tracked everywhere with the purpose of "improving our lives" (read: get sold adds and stuff we don't really need) and lose countless hours browsing social media?
Obviously this is a question to which each and everyone will respond in their own way and it's good because each and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
But consider we went from watches that were passed from generation to generation, sometimes even as rites of passage to something that looks cheap, feels cheap, does a lot of stuff but won't survive for more than 5 years (and I mean the watch here). I'll gladly pass my favourite watch to my son and hopefully he will see it as a memento, something that will remind him of me and the values I instilled in him for years to come. Now try to do that with an iWatch.
Comparing an iWatch to a wind-up watch is kind of silly, really. The two things that they have in common are that they are timepieces and they share the same form-factor. It's a portable computer, smaller than a smartphone--of course you're going to have to charge it nightly.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't walk and text.