Apple Watch: What We Know So Far

What do we know about Apple Watch so far?

Well, not a lot, really. And that’s by design. Apple seems reluctant to promise too much. Or, more aptly, Apple seems reluctant to promise too little. Bold claims can set the narrative, stifle innovation, and bind everyone’s hands in ways that general, “boring” suggestions can’t. And the last thing Apple wants to do is turn Apple Watch into Apple Cuffs.

Of course, the main features of Apple Watch have been outlined, and in the five months since the device’s reveal (with less than two to go before its April launch), we’re getting a clearer idea of what this thing actually is.

It’s a smartwatch, stupid.

“First and foremost” (or so Cupertino claims), Apple Watch is a watch. The company calls it “an incredibly accurate timepiece.” Naturally, they’re quick to amend that tedium — and it is tedious — with various enhancements. It’s not just a watch, it’s a smartwatch. As such, it’s got three main “horological” features:

1. Faces — Apple Watch includes a variety of watch faces with (literally) a million style, color, function, and layout customizations available right out of the box. For people interested in the aesthetics of timepiece design, this is probably a reason to buy in and of itself. Faces are to Apple Watch what ringtones are to iPhone.
2. Complications — This is a traditional watchmaking term, and the metaphor is mostly apt. These are, for lack of a better word, what you’d recognize as “widgets” on your iPhone. Some of these, like Alarm, Stopwatch, and Moon Phase, are familiar concepts as worn on the wrist. Others, like Stock, Weather, and Calendar, are more smartphone-centric in origin.
3. Glances — Call these glorified notifications. Or rather, glorious notifications. If Complications are widgets, Glances are widgets on steroids. Out of all of Apple Watch’s day-one “smartwatch” offerings, Glances are the most primed to change your daily mobile habits for the better. One study shows that, on average, we dig into our pockets to fetch out our phones some 110 times per day. With Glances, your customized alerts will open as you look at them. There’s no power button or home key to press; there’s nothing to “wake up” or unlock. You literally glance at your Apple Watch for the information you want, and there it is. That’s it. And the types of alerts you can have forwarded to your immediate attention are almost infinite in scope. You can assign Glances to nearly any setting or activity you (or a third party developer) can think of. Glances have the potential to keep you informed without keeping you occupied.

Of course, if you want to be polite, being informed usually requires you to inform back. To that end, Apple Watch is:

The Wrist-Based Communicator

When you receive a message on your iPhone, you can make sure that some (or all) of them get forwarded to your Apple Watch. When they do, you’ll get a full-screen notification. If you want to read the message, just twist your wrist to take a look, and the message automatically opens. Easy peasy.

Apple Watch can also take phone calls routed from your iPhone, letting you answer or silence them right from your wrist. Naturally, everyone’s already drawn the Dick Tracy parallel, but it’s right on the Numbers. Plus, since Breathless Siri is finally getting better at understanding your Mumbles (“Apple did it!”), you can actually use her to compose quick text responses or emails to anyone in your contacts list. You can even draw little pictures and send them in real time to fellow Apple Watch-wearers. Animated emoji are on board, too. As is haptic feedback.

The Taptic Engine

Apple Watch includes a few really stand-out pieces of tech under that svelte, metal chassis, and the company’s revolutionary Taptic Engine is one of them. Essentially, this is a refined haptic module (or advanced vibration system) that translates input tapped on the display of one Apple Watch into touch-based output under the backside of another. It’s nothing like the vibrating alert function you’re used to with your smartphone, albeit it accomplishes that task as well (or perhaps even better). The Taptic Engine offers an entirely new, compelling way to communicate specific thoughts and emotions. As Jony Ive says, you can even “send something as personal as your own heartbeat.” That’s because Apple Watch has a cutting-edge heart rate sensor built into the underside of its case.

The Health Tracker

In addition to its workout-tracking accelerometer amd gyroscope, Apple Watch’s custom-built heart rate monitor promises to make the wearable into the industry-leading health and fitness tracker. The heart rate monitor should offer more precision than any other product on the market, giving you useful insight into your cardio performance and calories burned while it lets you track and graph your progress to your various fitness goals. And you don’t have to work out on an elliptical or treadmill, either. Thanks to Apple Watch’s ability to use your iPhone’s GPS, you can track your workouts around the gym as easily as you can track them around the block and beyond.

The Maps Suite

Apple Maps on Apple Watch promises to streamline a potentially dangerous bit of distraction. As useful as live maps and GPS routing absolutely are, they’re sometimes cumbersome enough to be a liability, whether you’re behind the wheel or behind the handlebars or just walking down the street. Siri can give you spoken directions, or the Taptic Engine can silently tell you where and when it’s time to turn. With Apple Watch, it’s going to be a pleasure to navigate your world. But because of its custom iOS build, it ought to be just as much of a pleasure to navigate Apple Watch itself.

The Operating System

One of the problems every other smartwatch on the market seems to have in spades is a cluttered home screen. Another problem is a menu structure that buries useful toggles in a generally sloppy and clunky hierarchy of half-logic and afterthought (Android Wear, cough, cough). Apple has addressed and, from the looks of things, solved these issues with a unique iOS skin than turns static icons into a dynamic web, or “constellation,” of readily-accessible information. You haven’t got to swipe through a slew of apps two or three at a time to get to the one you want. Instead, everything seems to be at your fingertips.

Similarly, Apple Watch sports menus that have been simplified and condensed. In addition to standard scrollable settings, Apple Watch can tell the difference between a tap and a press, using the latter to call up a context menu that displays the most pertinent toggles for whatever app you’re currently using. This is possible thanks to Apple’s new Force Touch technology.

The Touchscreen

Force Touch is the piece of kit inside Apple Watch that you’re most likely to see make its way over to iPhone and iPad in the immediate future. Essentially, in addition to Apple’s famous multitouch sensors, Apple Watch screens house an array of electrodes that deform under pressure, allowing them to identify deliberate presses as functionally different from the taps you’re used to. This all happens inside the structure of the display itself — The screen is not a button! From a purely technical standpoint, Force Touch is one of the most exciting developments out of Apple R&D in some time. In addition to being picture perfect for the aforementioned context menus, you might think Force Touch would be just as suited to providing zoom and pan services on pictures themselves. (After all, pinch-to-zoom doesn’t work to well on small displays.) But you’d be wrong. That duty is reserved for:

The Digital Crown

Perhaps the most controversial feature of Apple Watch, the Digital Crown seems to have been included as much out of zooming/scrolling/home-button necessity as for its clean, traditional design language. It seems a little silly to have a piece of decidedly non-solid state tech on board (Moving parts, yuck!), especially considering that some sort of capacitive “slider” could’ve been built along the side of the device. Still, there it is, and probably for good reason: Remember, in addition to selling us on its electronic prowess, Apple is marketing its wearable — for better or worse — as a fashion accessory.

The Style

With Apple Watch, Apple didn’t just design one product with a couple of different finishes and call it a day. Instead, they’ve made six different versions of Apple Watch, each available in 38mm and 42mm sizes (presumably based on established watch industry gender lines):

1. Apple Watch — 316L Stainless Steel, sapphire glass, ceramic back
2. Apple Watch — 316L Space Black Stainless Steel, sapphire glass, ceramic back
3. Apple Watch Sport — 700 Series Silver Aluminum, Ion-X glass, composite back
4. Apple Watch Sport — 700 Series Space Gray Aluminum, Ion-X glass, composite back
5. Apple Watch Edition — 18-karat Rose Gold, sapphire glass, ceramic back
6. Apple Watch Edition — 18-karat Yellow Gold, sapphire glass, ceramic back

Different materials notwithstanding, there is no known (or expected) technological disparity between any of these models, and their variable pricing will be established at a base of $349. Presumably, this is for the “cheaper” Sport version. It is unknown how expensive the steel and gold versions will be, but estimates range from $500 to $5000 for the the minimum and maximum, respectively. (For what it’s worth, Apple is reportedly building special safes in its retail stores to house the Edition editions.) It is also unknown whether the two available sizes will carry different MSRPs. Apple’s wide selection of interchangeable straps will also affect final retail price.

The Rest

In alphabetical order, because why not:

1. Apple Pay — This “digital wallet” service is being pushed hard enough — and intuitively enough — that it probably deserves mention as a key feature, but the secure payment system just isn’t there yet. It only launched about four months ago on iPhone 6, and the nationwide infrastructure will take a while to catch up to the platform’s promise. Note: In the future, Apple Pay may prove to be a foundational aspect of Apple’s business model, as they’ve established operational partnerships with the big three credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, American Express), allowing Apple to take 0.15 percent of all sales made via the service. Apple Pay, however, isn’t functionally reliant on Apple Watch, and it will sink or swim more on iPhone than anything else. But if paying with Apple Pay on your iPhone is convenient, using it on Apple Watch should prove even more so. (Frankly, I think spending money is way too easy already.)
2. Battery life — While the data remains unpublished by Apple, most reputable sources are claiming ample charge-time for a full day’s expected usage. Apple Watch is made to run mostly in the background, so don’t expect too much if you try to keep the screen and sensors running full-blast for hours. Three to five hours of active use seems to be Apple’s target, which equates to roughly 19 hours of general use and two to three days when in standby or sleep modes. Charge it at bedtime, and you should be good to go. That should be a familiar routine by now.
3. Charging — Apple Watch is charged via contactless induction technology. The charger is guided and held in place by a magnetic “plug” that uses a variation of Apple’s familiar MagSafe mechanism.
4. CPU — Apple Watch is powered by a Cupertino-designed, Samsung-produced, 28nm system-in-package (SiP) chip called the S1. The system is alleged to be more powerful and offer better performance than the first-generation iPad.
5. Durability — There’s no milspec drop-testing or dust-proofing here. There’s no milspec waterproofing, either. In fact, Apple Watch isn’t waterproof at all. It is, however, reasonably water-resistant, so you don’t have to take it off in a rain storm or before washing your hands. Just don’t take baths or go swimming with the thing. (The dive watch segment is probably the only mid-level wristwatch field not worried to death about Apple’s April launch. The rest will have to stay out to sea for the foreseeable future.)
6. Friends button — You may have noticed that, directly beneath the Digital Crown, there’s another button. This is, apparently, a shortcut to your “inner circle,” a.k.a. your Friends list. Ostensibly, this brings up what amounts to your Favorites in Contacts on iPhone, allowing you fast, direct connections with the people you care most about. A convenient feature to be sure, but as the only other physical button on Apple Watch (besides the clickable Digital Crown), it better have a bit more functionality than that.

The TL;DR

Apple Watch is Apple’s first smartwatch. It has a bunch of cool new sensors that can measure pretty much anything. You can use it to make phone calls, respond to texts and notifications, and do all kinds of awesome stuff you never even thought of. It comes in a few different styles, and the cheapest model will cost around $350. There’s even a gold version for really rich people. You probably think you don’t want one, but you’re wrong. So start saving your money, because it comes out in April.

The End

…is only the beginning.