Will Apple Watch Ever Have A Camera?

Well, will it?

We’ve been having that debate amongst ourselves here at WatchAware ever since the first Apple Watch spec sheet was published, and I am in the decided minority (read: “the only one”) that seems to err on the side of “no.” But I’m not totally convinced of that, and articles like this one from Justin Lake always give me pause to second guess my stance.

While the argument around the office is generally predicated on FaceTime’s Jetsons-like futuristic cool factor (which I say is irrelevant from a utility standpoint), Lake presents things from a third-party perspective, basing his assessment of Apple Watch’s camera potential on the most meteoric new social service since Twitter.

Entitled “No Snapchat? No Apple Watch,” Lake’s position is that without supporting the budding (or burgeoning, or utterly overwhelming) selfie habits of teens and twentysomethings, Apple Watch will never make any real headway with that massively dense segment of the mobile tech market:

I’m sure some kids still use iMessage. And Facebook Messenger. But let’s not fool ourselves, it’s Snapchat they use. And it’s Snapchat they love. You can send stupid photos. You can draw on the photos. You can distort the size of emojis. You can send videos. Heck, you can even send money. It’s a goofy app. It’s a social network. It’s a news curator. And, it’s what teens and other young millennials are using to communicate.

Which is why teens won’t be dying to have the Apple Watch. Sure, this demographic probably isn’t Apple’s top priority, but there’s no doubt they are important. But without Snapchat, it’s going to be a hard sell.

No camera = no Snapchat. There’s no camera because, well, battery life. …

Make no mistake, there will eventually be a camera on the Apple Watch. It probably won’t be the 2nd gen, but I think the 3rd gen is mighty likely. And when that happens, it’s going to be a hit with the selfie-sharing crowd.

I appreciate Lake’s concise argument (which you should read in its entirety at the link above), but I disagree on several key points:

1. Are teens really not interested in Apple Watch? I know that young children aren’t, as its got no compelling use case for them, but are teens — who presumably care about trends, fashion, friends, relationships, BFFs, making dates, going to movies, and generally experiencing the responsibilities of adulthood on an ever-widening trial basis — really not interested in the thing? They may not have the cash to splurge on Apple Watch, and their parents might not be willing to part with a month’s grocery bill for an obviously complementary piece of “non-essential” technology, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want one. And if finances are tight for kids who aren’t paying rent, just imagine the finances of first-time adults paying for shelter for the first time ever. Snapchat isn’t going to change that economic equation.

2. Speaking of equations, “No camera = no Snapchat” seems…mathematically improbable. Unless Apple Watch’s absent camera is confirmed to be keeping the social network out of the App Store, I’d venture to bet that we’ll see a Snapchat Watch app in relatively short order. Remember, Pinterest and eBay are still AFK, as are about a thousand other big name brands. I’m sure Apple Watch simply isn’t a pressing priority for Snapchat yet. They won’t lose users in the near term due to lagging wearables support, as evidenced by the fact that Snapchat isn’t available for Android Wear, either. As more Android featurewatches bring front-facing cameras to market over the next several months (in an attempt to differentiate themselves from Cupertino’s wearable), should Snapchat suddenly unveil support for that platform while continuing to neglect Apple’s, maybe I’ll look back and say Lake was onto something.

3. Lake makes the assumption that Apple left a camera out of Apple Watch because it would constitute too big of a hit to battery life. I disagree. While running video capture for long periods of time will noticeably drain your iPhone at an accelerated clip (get it?), taking a few photos won’t. The camera isn’t an always-on sensor, and snapping a handful of selfies a day wouldn’t impact Apple Watch’s power consumption. Apple neglected to include a camera for several practical (and philosophical) reasons, but battery life isn’t one of them.

4. There’s no telling what the release cycle for Apple Watch will be, and I assume it’ll be more along the lines of Apple TV than iPhone. Apple Watch 3 may not hit the market until 2020 or later, and while it’s conceivable that Apple might make a camera part of the wearable’s off-year spec-bump revisions (if it even gets those), that addition seems like something better saved for a major model redesign. (That is, of course, if Apple can figure out a meaningful way to advertise the feature. FaceTime sold a lot of iPads back in the day. I don’t think that same marketing will work this time around.) By then, Snapchat might be dead. It’s too early to tell whether the service is the next Myspace or the next Facebook, and trends today will usually not be trends tomorrow. Snapchat may well be an exception that proves the rule, but even then, so what?

I can imagine there are some iPhone owners — or potential iPhone owners — that will pass on Apple Watch partly or primarily (or even precisely) because Snapchat doesn’t make an app for that. What I can’t imagine is that there are enough of them to affect Apple’s bottom line in any appreciable way. The question then becomes: Will Apple put a camera into Apple Watch even if it has no impact on the number of new customers or retention rates for Apple’s mobile products?

And by “mobile products,” I mean iPhone.

The iPhone is the most popular camera in the world, and it has been for years. Even for quick selfies, iPhone is infinitely more suitable as the primary device than any wrist-mounted solution could ever hope to be (save for users keen on jumping out of airplanes and other statistically insignificant stuff like that). It’s bigger, the sensors are excellent, the low light performance is stunning, and a flash on the rear means that night shots needn’t be particularly well-lit — you just flip the phone around. Usability, however, is dramatically limited once the camera’s taken out of the user’s hands.

Writing about this subject before, I presented the following argument, which I still consider valid:

[I]magine trying to actually take a proper selfie — or, even better, a group selfie — off the top of your wrist. On a smartphone, you’re able to effectively hold the camera in your hand, easily twisting and bending and angling and framing the thing to get the shot just right. And straight-armed, you can hold your smartphone out a lot farther, too, getting wider, better snaps of the people you care most about (even if that’s only you).

Lots of people will say that camera technology has advanced to the point that an itty bitty lens hidden in the black bezel of Apple Watch would be good enough for most folks’ needs. But Apple rarely does “good enough” when dramatically superior comparison points already popularly exist (particularly among its own products). You may recall that the original iPad shipped without a camera. However, since iPad was — and remains — a platform with numerous obvious camera uses that go well beyond the base selfie, customers vocalized their displeasure with the omission. FaceTime on an iPad actually makes sense, and the clamor for it resonated with Cupertino so thoroughly that the company rushed to wedge a pair of wholly substandard shooters into the iPad’s sophomore release.

They were panned.

They were bad cameras, and they captured ugly pictures. Muddy though it was, FaceTime became a silver lining, but there was no comparing iPad 2’s photographic acumen to that of contemporary iPhone cameras. Fortunately, Apple finally finagled a catch-up thanks to those very iPhone cameras, and soon enough, iPad was “retrofitted” with last-gen handset sensors that were more than adequate. This move was mandated out of equal parts necessity and convenience, as it lengthened the lifespan of manufactory components well beyond Apple’s original roadmap.

But with Apple Watch, there’s no place for such parity. There’s no room to use parts recycled from other lines, and a front-facing camera would need to be a brand new design. It would have to be an almost imperceptible pinhole over the tiniest wide-lens module, with a sensor capable of capturing crisp images in low light. Here’s the benchmark, and here’s how Apple advertises it. How do they temper expectations? Is Apple willing to promote a woefully underwhelming experience just to tickle the passing fancy of a penniless market segment? Are they willing to put something that “feels cheap” into the Apple Watch?

Snapchat’s users are using smartphones with expansive screens, excellent color reproduction, and high pixel counts. Snapchat is also fundamentally cross-platform. If Apple Watch gets a camera, those wearable Snapchat fans are going to find out fast that a comparatively low-res blur-fest — as seen by their messages’ recipients on their much bigger displays — isn’t exactly the best thing for their half-joking, half-serious vanity projects. Lake reckons users would love to stretch and skew their pictures on the diminutive Apple Watch panel, that they’d enjoy drawing tiny glasses and tiny hats and tiny mustaches (and great big you-know-whats) all over their tiny selfies, just for laughs. But they won’t. While such might be fun on iPhone, it’s bound to be confining and tedious on Apple Watch.

Try this: Open your Apple Watch Photos app and imagine editing one of those images. Bring up your friends circle and send a fellow early adopter some scribbles with Digital Touch. Aside from a few basic shapes, you can’t get remotely precise enough to create anything meaningful. And in the time it takes to do all that, you could have done it far more easily, with far more precision, at far greater fidelity, on your iPhone. Apple Watch already offers camera throughput and remote shutter control. To me, that seems way more compelling for the Snapchat set. Full-body selfies!

Still, many will argue that such a camera, even a poor one, would simply be icing on the cake, that it would represent nothing but added value for Apple’s millions of customers. And that’s true — maybe it would. But that’s only if Apple can spare the space. They don’t want to add that sort of marginal value while subtracting a more compelling kind. Lake said this was about the battery, but it’s actually about almost everything else. To that end, I previously wrote the following:

There’s also the reality of real estate to consider. On a smartphone, there’s generally plenty of bezel for a front-facing camera. On smartwatches, however, the bezel isn’t an empty placeholder designed to house superfluous pieces of tech. Instead, its thickness is predicated entirely on the amount of mission-critical kit stuffed inside the chassis. That’s doubly true with a carefully-designed piece like Apple Watch, where future revisions are expected to shrink the bezel and expand the display as the overall form factor remains more or less the same.

As Apple Watch’s bezel narrows, so too will any viable area to place a front-facing camera. Perhaps by then, Apple will have come up with a way to embed a lens underneath an array of transparent OLED pixels. Perhaps the wearable’s engineers will figure out how to flush-fit a camera attractively into its metallic chassis. Perhaps Cupertino can invent a screen that serves as a camera itself. Or perhaps Cook and company will conclude that a camera on a smartwatch is a gimmicky idea with so little practical application and such nonexistent sales potential that it doesn’t remotely justify the millions of dollars in R&D that adding such a silly thing would require.

At the end of the day, users will dictate whether or not Apple should add a camera to Apple Watch. If camera-bearing Android Wear devices catch on and provide app experiences that Cupertino’s customers covet, the answer is easy. If an Apple Watch camera doesn’t increase statistical yields and merely constitutes a financial wash, Apple’s decision becomes a little harder. A lackluster camera (and, honestly, a camera in general) would ding the “fine timepiece,” anti-gadget appeal Apple’s so desperately cultivating with the wearable, as would the luxury-killing “me too” response of adding a camera after Google does it first. Ironically, a camera could ruin Apple Watch’s image.

If Apple ever makes a standalone Apple Watch LTE, I’d bet on it having a camera.

Until then, even after writing all this, I don’t think I’d bet at all.