3 things about yesterday:
1. The watch is the same thing as the iPad and the iPhone before it - a blank slate for the user (together with Apple and it's developers) to turn into whatever they want it to be. Smartphones and tablets are very personal, and these things will be too. Here's a quote from
The Verge that resonated with me:
Quote:
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...while not conventionally attractive, it does achieve one extremely important goal: anonymity. However big it may be, the soft lines of the case seem to almost fade into insignificance, shifting focus to the strap and display. There will be 34 Apple Watch models across three "collections," and thanks to an ingenious design flourish in the form of a proprietary strap system, each looks distinct.
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(I don't have an opinion on it's appearance yet - I'd bet seeing it in real life will produce a distinctly different opinion than seeing it in a photo. Anyway, I'm not interested in buying one. Maybe that will change as the market grows and matures.)
2. This is a long game for Apple, and the next generation Apple Watch (and the generation after that, and so on) will likely be as different from this years version as the iPad Air is different from the first iPad Mini is different from the iPad 1. No one in their right mind believes it will be a world changer similar to the smartphone -- but really -- how many devices have or ever will reach that peak??
But I'd bet that it will turn out to be a steady business for them.
Apple has great engineers and crafts a good product, but I think it's business sense is often underrated relative to the technical side of the house. I think that the
Mac business shows what Apple could do with just a tiny sliver of the smart watch business:
Quote:
Macs similarly represent only a tiny percentage of the global PC market, with less than 6 percent of the 300 million PCs sold last year having an Apple logo on them.
But those numbers are deceiving. Macs are still enormously profitable, and their high average selling price makes this division a formidable cash cow. In addition, Apple’s product planners have shrewdly targeted the most important segment of the market, the only segment that’s growing and the one that is by far the most profitable.
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3. The phones are more of the same. Some people simply prefer Apple to the other phone manufacturers or iOS to Android/Windows Mobile/Blackberry. All Apple has to do is make an iPhone that's more desirable than the one those people have already and they'll upgrade. In my opinion, the smartphone wars are over. Samsung and Apple are the big winners among the hardware manufacturers - and Google and Apple are the big winners in the mobile software space. All have clearly defined areas that they can claim as their own, and I don't think we'll see any dramatic shifts among the three in the short term. Us consumers have excellent hardware to pick from regardless of the mobile OS we like, and both operating systems have a lot of great software to pick from too.