How Apple Watch Needs To Change Apple Retail
While the Apple Watch shares some similarities to Apple’s other mobile products, the experience of using one is totally different. A smartwatch becomes an augmentation, an extension of your body. It has to fit your wrist, and be comfortable, and provide subtle utility. It must look and feel good to the person wearing it. A watch is often more about fashion than utility.
Proving those elements will be what convinces someone who walks into an Apple Store to walk out with an Apple Watch. So to really try an Apple Watch before you buy one, you’re going to have to wear it.
That’s true. Though the Apple Watch is a piece of technology, it’s also perhaps equally a piece of jewelry, and people like to try on jewelry before they buy it.
What I don’t understand yet is how Apple is going to approach this. We’re just a few days away from the Spring Forward event (and likely only a month or so away from Apple Watch making it to retail), yet nothing about the Apple Stores in my area have changed, and little progress seems to have been made on the collaborative Jony Ive-Angela Ahrednts retail revamp. Can Apple really alter the entire format of their stores to accommodate Apple Watch buyers in a month’s time? Sure, if they’re just going to carpet the floors or something, fine. But that doesn’t change the fact that trying on an Apple Watch in an Apple store won’t really tell the wearer all that much about the device itself. (Too bad that rumored rental service isn’t going to happen.) It seems like they should set up “experiences” in the same way that golf stores have little AstroTurf putting greens and virtual driving ranges.
I’m almost as fascinated to see how Apple sells their new wearable as I am about understanding the device itself. Luckily, the wait is almost over.