Ramblings on the Apple Watch

hello and welcome to pocket game not busy's weekly news digest it's for the week ending the 13th of march 2015. hi i'm john jordan so um the news that gets the the major kind of hook to hang news off this week um was the apple watch announcement um not the announcement because that obviously happened in september last year but i guess it kind of shows um kind of how the apple watch is different to other apple launches and how apple is a different company when it's launching the apple watch to how it has been launching um the iphone and the ipad originally the kind of announcement came out in september um apple then said that the watch wouldn't be released until early 2015 and and the assumption was that it came out after that that it wouldn't be really until april which is now we know to be the case so um their watch was

kind of i guess again i mean more details were announced there's still there's still some things that people are unclear about but i guess the main thing that was announced was the full range of pricing um and the release date so um and and that's kind of interesting so pricing will take in a while but i guess even the fact the the kind of like the schedule for for the launch was kind of announced as being a kind of a pre-order so that's not that unusual perhaps with a device like this um the pre-orders open on the 10th of april i guess what's interesting is that apple is um releasing the the apple watch in kind of the big the big territories the u.s um most of the european countries japan um china hong kong um but what it's doing it on the 10th of april is pre-orders will be available online so that all appeals are available online but all the apple shops or some of the apple shops the key apple shops in those territories will have the apple watch available so i guess the unlike the phone and and

the ipad which you could kind of see a photo of them or video of them and you kind of knew what you were getting and you know you obviously to hold a physical um hardware object is kind of required to fully understand it but a watch is such a personal device i mean that's a term that um ceo tim cook was using all the time it's our most personal device clearly with wearable devices where you're wearing them on your wrist we all know what a watch is but um an apple watch it's gonna supposedly if it's gonna be so so different i think the apple really want to get into people's hands um so that's why you have this kind of prolonged um kind of pre-order period where you can go into the stores they're going to have they've designed this special kind of display table that will have certain types of watches and obviously there's kind of three different types of watches in terms of materials of the watch but the of the watch and then there's a vast a number of different kind of straps so there's going to be like elastic plasma straps there's leather straps there's metal link straps there's metal band straps there's all my different

straps and that's kind of where the customization comes in but apple's clearly um making sure that uh for the apple watch which which i mean no one really knows kind of how long she's gonna go and apple's clearly spending time making sure that if people are interested they can get it in their hands straight away and obviously from their point of view the amount of engineering they put into the tactile net nature of the device they're hoping people will stop playing around with the watch in an apple store and go right and kind of that's for me so um so there's uh you can get them start pre-ordering from the 10th of april and then two weeks later 24th of april the devices are actually released so presumably um even now there are there's a big warehouse somewhere in china full of apple watches or wherever the warehouse is um and that's another kind of interesting thing that the kind of pricing um kind of may go to moderate it's very unclear um depending on who you talk to what the kind of expectation of uh device shipment is going to be so we've kind of had um to date wearables

wearable computing risk devices smart watches have not been a big um kind of a consumer product so i mean the biggest name to date really is is pebble um which is a much less sophisticated watches obviously big kickstarter a couple years ago they've probably done over a million but that's like a 150 kind of 200 watch that's much cheaper um the android wear devices that have been out there i mean a number of different manufacturers from um from sony to samsung to lg to asus um there's not been really a stand-up signature device in that range you know but generally people reckon all in all less than a million those devices have been shipped and a lot of those will have been given away free to developers so you can probably say the market is around the moment two million probably less than two million units so anything above that from apple um obviously we'll be doubling the market and apple will be the biggest kind of provider of smart watches but obviously this being apple everyone's expecting um you know a large

um amount of shipment so i think you could kind of say anything in the first year of kind of five between five and ten million will be seen as a success it's very unclear really um how many apple fanboys there are who would go out and buy what will be at the cheapest level a 350 smart watch in the obviously in the uk actually the exchange rate is not very good at the moment and the dollar everywhere in the world is very strong so the us 350 dollars is by far away the cheapest way of getting an apple smart watch um but then there's some kind of um obviously when it comes to analysts there's uh there's always kind of a bit of inflationary pressure to kind of give the highest level of shipments and some of them were saying oh maybe there'll be 20 or 30 million apple watches sold in the first year and there was some crazy figure in the financial times i imagine they must've got the decimal point wrong but they were saying three over three uh 315 million apple watches shipped in the first year i mean clearly that's preposterous um i don't think apple would expect that to be the case i guess if you kind of imagine apple announced during that the apple watch a press conference that

they'd um sold their 700th 700 millionth iphone um then i mean they're not all kind of still uh still live obviously the uh three gs and the two and two g's and all those are long gone now but i guess if you expect the kind of current level of iphone users in the world to be maybe 400 450 million kind of live devices you know if you apple got 10 of those people to wear to buy us an apple watch yeah then you're talking kind of 40 kind of 40 million units that would be pretty impressive i think anyone will be pretty impressed with it with a tie ratio of 10 on that um so we kind of mentioned price a little bit um so the box standard one um i mean in a sense kind of they're all blocks down in the sense that the um there's two different sizes there's a 38 millimeter and a 42 millimeter just because people big guys like bigger watches and women like small watches generally or maybe small wrists like smaller watches um but apart from that all the inners are the same um but you basically have like a basic aluminium kind of model and that's coming in

at 350 to 400 and then you have the stainless steel one um depending on again a lot of it depends on the straps but that kind of tops out just over a thousand dollars uh if you thought if you want that one there's a black anodized version of that as well and obviously the one that's getting all the all the kind of column inches or the headlines at least is the crazy gold edition um and that's starting at ten thousand dollars and going up to 17 000 depending on strap so um i mean maybe not the bizarre thing but um one interesting point is you don't get the battery life's the same fetch life's a bit bigger on the bigger watch um the battery life in general is 18 hours so um it's kind of interesting uh someone who uses um using fitbit devices for a long time um so they're wearable not really smart watches all those the kind of top end of fitbit now it could be conceived as a low-end smartwatch but um fitbit is all about kind of fitness and health and tracking those kind of um attributes and an important part of that is sleep so a fitbit device will track your sleep and over time sleep is a very kind of a

key um kind of feature of health a very key kind of indicator to health apple watch won't track sleep because obviously it needs to be charged enough it's pretty massive so people are not going to be wearing them overnight and if they do they're going to run out of battery life anyway um and that kind of to degree kind of shows with any of these wearable devices the kind of limitations you have and how you kind of have to choose your user cases so apple have gone for a fairly expensive device in terms of wearable they've chosen a high definition retina screen a color screen that no matter how good the battery life or how big the battery is or how efficiently they use the the the screen that's needs to be recharged every day so suddenly you've got a device where you can't wear it overnight which means you're not going to pick up any sleep data which is um two degree makes a certain amount of mockery of all the health stuff they put in there um i mean apple being apple have made a big kind of play on how important how things is and they put a lot of kind of um there's some research stuff that they're putting into the iphone and and the

apple watch and obviously there's all the kind of pedometer stuff and the sports they want one you kind of think one key aspect of of apple watch purchases will be people who are looking for a kind of maybe have a nike i have a nike running watch maybe people have those kind of kind of now getting quite old devices and kind of want us on a running watch um so maybe they'll buy one of the lower napple watches and so there's a certain amount of the activity stuff it won't do the sleep stuff which is pretty important um so um but again kind of coming back to the the gold thing which is the gold watch which is everyone kind of hangs hangs the kind of i guess people say with apple now kind of no matter everyone hannah kind of hangs their own um kind of uh kind of uh well what's the term that their own kind of prejudices of apple at the moment and it's kind of interesting now that some people just think it's disgusting that anyone could buy ten thousand dollar apple watch because if you want 10 000 uh mechanical watch or 1000 you know kind of luxury watch that'll be something that would last for a long time potentially it's a family heirloom possible generations that's how some of the marketing goes i'm clean for an

apple watch an apple watch will not last um probably 50 years or certainly won't last 50 years because when working in the battery won't have any charge so you kind of like this weird situation where there's a luxury price device um that doesn't really play into what luxury watches have been before so be interesting to see um but equally the thing everyone points out is there are lots of rich people in the world not just just in china and saudi arabia but there are some people in the world who spending um ten thousand dollars um on a luxury thing is something they can do every year so um it will be interesting to see um kind of quite how that kind of uh kind of market works and whether if people who kind of see start so you start seeing people with these kind of apple gold watches or whether people just you can actually buy it on the cheap aluminum watches and they'll be places that will kind of spring up and they will kind of somehow manage to gold plate your watch to make you look like you have a ten thousand dollar watch in which case you might get robbed um i guess the biggest thing the biggest unanswered questions and it wasn't mentioned at all in the apple uh um presentation was uh gaming so the weird thing is the kind of devices are there apple have kind of said a little bit about how kind of

health and some of the payment stuff you can do with them and they some user cases have been put there you can look at feeds and things like that but it's very unclear exactly how detailed the information that will be um or how detailed the kind of interaction as a sensor you can use the apple watch for so clearly there are a lot of gaming applications it could be used for it's not really clear at the moment um how much apple will be promoting it as a gaming device or potentially they won't be promoting it as an apple as a gaming device but lots of game developers will be using it um as a gaming device and kind of over time the usage case will change and it'll become more gaming device i guess that's the the biggest unknown of all the unknowns that are still unknown about the apple watch um maybe we'll talk about something else next week