Apple Watch "Fundamentally Misunderstood" By Tech Industry
Apple is a company with a lot of watch lovers. Apple designed the Apple Watch as a modern timepiece inspired by appreciation and affection for traditional watches. Apple’s famous designer Sir Jony Ive is a major watch collector with a stable of very traditional mechanical watches; and at Apple and among colleagues, he isn’t alone. …
Sitting at the Apple event in San Francisco on March 9, 2015, I was surrounded by the absolute elite of the tech world’s journalism corps. Everyone there was familiar with Apple, their products, and tech news overall. However, most of them seemed perplexed by how Apple was communicating about the Apple watch – something that I could sympathize with. … Apple was silent on some of the more specific details such as tech specs and the “numbers” people in the tech (and watch) world often use to evaluate products.
This is one of the major aspects of Apple Watch that seems to be driving the tech world nuts. They’re comparing the wearable to laptops, tablets, and smartphones where things like processor cores, pixel density, and megapixels are discussed at great length. For the first time, Apple is putting out a product where quite possibly the core function — at least for now — is just telling time and looking good doing it. Sure, it does tons of other stuff, but Apple clearly wants customers to lust after Apple Watch’s aesthetics before anything else. That’s the hook to get buy-in right off the bat, and it’s a characteristic that most technology enthusiasts are only familiar with in passing. For all the Jony Ive genius worship we’re used to out of these folks, it’s pretty ironic that they continue to be struck so completely off-guard by Apple’s first openly “design first” product.
If you just sit back and look at Apple Watch as a quality digital watch with interchangeable straps and the ability to give you some glanceable info, then I’d say it’s a pretty cool device. In fact, I really believe the one-minute ad Apple recently put together perfectly sums up what this product is meant to be at launch.