Apple Watch: Five Weeks, Third Impressions
I think customers comes in two species: Cats and Dogs.
When presented with new cat food, our feline masters suspiciously tiptoe around it, sniff cautiously and, having carefully examined their human servant’s token of devotion, finally deign to sample it.
Dogs have no such sense of decorum and hierarchy, they joyously snarf up the new dog food. I’m a geeky dog, I happily jump on new tech products. But, as the advertising industry lore is fond of asking: Great. But does the dog come back to the dog food? Does the interest last once curiosity is sated?
I’ve learned not to trust my first impressions, I recall my first mistaken views of the iPod (not a chance in a commoditized MP3 player market), Windows Vista (great UI, much better than Windows XP), or the iPad (disappointing, can’t do what a Mac does…).
A great analogy by Gassée and one I completely agree with.
In my five weeks with Apple Watch I’ve witnessed similar results. My wife, for example, likes jewelry and watches but wasn’t really convinced that the Apple Watch was ideal for her. However, as the days and weeks rolled on, she’d notice small things that the Watch helped me do better. Things such as track my health and fitness, let me answer texts faster, even pay for things. None of these things individually are game changing, but collectively they’re really nice to have. Now her skepticism has turned into optimism. She doesn’t even own one yet, but she tells people how cool it is.
I suspect that as we see third-party bands, watch faces, as well as Apple’s own software and hardware improvements, this product will begin to become more and more popular. It really does feel like iPod 2.0 to me. And we all remember what the iPod turned out to be.