Category Archives: Apple Watch

Apple Watch and the Platonic ideal

Malcolm Gladwell and Spaghetti Sauce

I’ve been thinking recently about the sheer range of Apple Watch options, and the departure this represents from Apple’s past product strategy of a single SKU at launch for a new product. As I did so, I was reminded of several TED talks I’ve watched over the years on the subject of choices, and I went back and re-watched some of them. One in particular that seems very relevant to this topic is Malcolm Gladwell’s 2004 talk, Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce. I’ve embedded it below in case you want to watch the whole thing – there’s also a transcript on the TED site in case you’d prefer to read the thing. I’m a Gladwell fan, generally speaking, but I know not everyone is. However, this talk is a good example of his ability to tell a good story around an ostensibly uninteresting topic, and in the process draw out some key messages.

This talk, if you haven’t seen it before, focuses on the work of a man named Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist (don’t know what that is? Neither does Gladwell). Moskowitz’s chief contribution to the world, as Gladwell sees it, was the invention of a concept called horizontal segmentation as applied to the food industry. The key idea here can be summed up by saying that he brought variety to product lines that had hitherto only featured a single product. The mistake, Moskowitz and Gladwell argue, that the food industry had made was to assume that there was a “Platonic dish” – a sort of ideal version of every food product that would be universally accepted as the best possible version of that thing. In reality, of course, people have different tastes, and one person’s ideal is another person’s nightmare, so you need several versions of your product to appeal to different segments. Hence the mention of spaghetti sauce in the title of the talk: Moskowitz was the one who convinced the owners of the Prego brand to diversify their offering, and specifically to introduce an extra chunky version, which became a huge success.

36 flavors of Ragu, 38 flavors of Apple Watch?

So how does all this relate to the Apple Watch? Well, what struck me as I thought about all this is that Apple has very much taken the Platonic ideal approach to its most important device, the iPhone. For seven years, there was only a single new model each year, which you might argue represented Apple’s conception of the ideal phone at that point in time. Next year, that ideal would have moved on a little, but there was still only one. A year and a half ago, Apple introduced the iPhone 5C as an alternative, but really this was just a revamped version of the previous year’s phone, and this past year Apple introduced a different spin, with two roughly equally capable phones in different sizes. Though it’s diversified a tiny bit, it’s largely stuck with the Platonic ideal approach to phones.

But now we come to watches, and the Apple Watch. One way of looking at this is that Apple has not just one Platonic ideal of a watch, but many different versions. In fact, there are 38 versions listed on Apple’s Watch gallery page, which coincidentally is quite similar to the 36 versions of Ragu Gladwell cites in his talk.  This reflects the fact that, when you move from a purely technology product to a an accessory or piece of jewelry, personal taste becomes much more important. As such, the horizontal segmentation approach comes into play, and you suddenly get an explosion of options to meet people’s different tastes and preferences (as well as body size and income).

However, I think the right way to look at all this is that there’s still just one Platonic ideal when it comes to the Watch – in terms of its functionality. The $17,000 Edition contains exactly the same technology as the $349 Sport, and it’s really just the outward appearance that’s different. In that sense, the Watch is a lot more like the iPhone than it is like the MacBook line, where there is a real difference in functionality/capability between the new MacBook, say, and the various flavors of MacBook Air and Pro. Of course, with the iPhone there are also color variations and so on to suit personal tastes, but the basic form factor remains unchanged, so no-one talks about three different “versions” of the iPhone in the same way that they’re talking about 38 versions of the Watch.

Everyone else treats devices like food

Despite the fact that Apple has largely stuck with the Platonic ideal approach for its devices, others have a different strategy. Samsung might well be the Ragu of the devices world, with many different variants designed to appeal to various market segments. Or perhaps a better analogy is the spaghetti rather than the sauce, being thrown against the wall to see whether it sticks. Apple’s approach is focused, but also limiting – I’ve often said that Apple is characterized by the limits it puts around its own addressable market. However, there are significant downsides to the opposite approach too, and not just in terms of the financial cost of a lack of scale around a single product. Another TED talk on choice comes from Sheena Iyengar, and it talks about the difficulty of making choices when presented with a myriad of options:

Interestingly, part of her talk focuses on strategies for making a plethora of choices less overwhelming, among which are categorization and concretization: i.e. divide a large number of options into broad categories, and make the category names (and therefore the differences between them) meaningful. Take a look at Apple’s 38 options and you quickly see that they’ve done both: three broad categories, with names that mean something: Watch as the broad middle category, Sport as a low-end option that could be worn while exercising, and Edition using a common descriptor associated with luxury goods. So even where Apple does offer lots of choice, it’s clear that it understands the psychological impact and has optimized for minimizing the negative impact while helping consumers to choose what’s right for them.

Thoughts on Apple’s Spring Forward event

I had the opportunity to attend Apple’s Spring Forward event yesterday, and wanted to give my quick take on both the event and the brief hands-on I had with both the Apple Watch and the new MacBook. I’ve already written about Apple’s ResearchKit announcement over on Techpinions (for Insiders), and put out a brief comment for reporters yesterday too.

A surprising order

Apple often starts its keynotes with a minor update on retail and other statistics, and this one was no different in that respect. However, it then normally focuses on the main event, followed by one or more additional items – the legendary “one more thing” Steven Jobs was so fond of. What was so interesting to me here was that the Apple Watch was the focus of all the pre-event speculation, and yet it was held for last, almost an hour into the event, and was given only just over 30 minutes of its own. Much of that first hour was taken up with several other announcements: ResearchKit, the new MacBook, the Apple TV price drop and the HBO Now exclusive. I think the reason for this order was likely that Apple had already covered the basics of the Apple Watch in September, with little new information to be announced yesterday other than price and availability.

ResearchKit

See my Techpinions piece for a deeper dive into what I think ResearchKit means and represents for Apple, but in some ways this was the announcement I was most excited about. It suggests various things about Apple and its potential, not least its ability to marshall its considerable resources and its installed base not just in the service of selling more product, but also in the service of doing good in the world. I see this is as a first move beyond the hobbyist self-tracking that’s usually associated with health and fitness trackers and into something that’s truly meaningful in the field of medicine.

New MacBook

The new MacBook is interesting for three key reasons: the naming and positioning, the switch to USB-C, and the technological advances involved. Taking the last first, this is clearly an example of the way in which Apple can, when it wants to, move to extend its lead in key product categories through the use of focused, meaningful innovation. Just as the MacBook Air was a huge leap forward, and has arguably maintained a lead over the competition for several years, this new device is likely to set Apple’s computers apart for the foreseeable future. It’s both a great step forward in portability and a bet on the future – a wireless future which seems more and more possible all the time, and which is being held back at this point mostly by the poor performance of wireless charging. I’ve no doubt that at some point Apple will embrace that too, but for now it’s betting instead on making battery life so long that charging is an occasional rather than a constant concern on these devices.

The switch to USB-C, and the removal of almost all other ports, is the biggest visible representation of this bet on the future, and like the removal of CD/DVD drives and Ethernet ports, will cause some consternation and complaining about the need for various adapters and such. In a scenario where someone wants to power their deice while carrying on a Skype call using an external mic and display, a MacBook user will need to plug three different items into that one port, something Apple has clearly envisaged with its various adapters. But Apple has also been laying the groundwork for this move with a variety of wireless technologies including AirPlay and AirDrop, and various standardized technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi obviously play a role too.

Naming and positioning was the last interesting aspect, in that this device obviously looked a lot like a MacBook Air from the moment it appeared on screen, but was never referred to as such and indeed fills the MacBook slot rather than the MacBook Air slot. My sense is that the MacBook Air filled a temporary role in Apple’s product portfolio, necessary as long as the technologies involved commanded a significant premium over the base level, but soon to disappear as the key attributes (thinness, lightness, massive battery life) make their way into the MacBook line. Over time, Apple is likely to go back to the 2×2 matrix Jobs trumpeted when he returned to Apple – pro and consumer laptops, in two flavors rather than three.

I had an opportunity to use the MacBook for a few minutes at the event, and it’s truly impressive in terms of the thinness and lightness combined with the amazing screen. The absence of a fan is a plus in some ways, but it’ll be worth watching the reviews for the tradeoffs in terms of performance. Others have pointed out that the specs and performance may be more on a par with Macs from several years ago than any of recent vintage, but I’m curious to see how real-world performance is. Talk of taptic feedback in the keynote had me concerned – I’ve never been a fan of haptics in devices – but the instantiation in the MacBook trackpad feels nothing like any haptic technology I’ve ever experienced before. It’s basically used to provide a second-layer clicking feeling for the “force click” even as the new trackpad doesn’t actually travel. It’s another one of those things that has to be experienced in person to be understood, but it’s very effective, along with the new on-screen functionality associated with that force click. The keyboard keys are different enough that they were tricky to use at first, with quite a few typos, at least partly because the keys are wider than in the past. But I’m guessing it’s the kind of thing you’d quickly get used to.

Apple TV and HBO

The Apple TV and HBO Now announcements are interesting partly for what was announced on Monday but at least partly also because of what they signal about the future. HBO Now has some potential, and as I’ve said elsewhere I think a big part of the success will depend on how effectively HBO can get people who currently use someone else’s HBO password for HBO Go to switch to paying $15 per month for their own service. At least part of that will be about making the first real efforts to discourage sharing of passwords, and I’m curious to see how they accomplish that. The price cut on the Apple TV is clearly a concession to the much-lower price of the various streaming sticks such as Chromecast – the new price is now 2x the Chromecast price, whereas it was previously around 3x the price.

But the more interesting thing is what trends these two moves presage. A shift to a cheaper Apple TV suggests either that a new device might be coming or that Apple’s focus going forward might be less about making money on the hardware an more about seeding a base of devices that can in future subscribe to a TV service from Apple (or perhaps a range of services from various providers). I’ve written on Techpinions about what I think it would take for Apple to really turn the Apple TV into something other than a hobby, and it’s really about providing a fully-fledged subscription TV service on the device (and of course on other Apple devices). Apple is no doubt taking a cut of the HBO Now revenues, and is handling billing and so on for the service. App Store revenue sharing would suggest at 30% cut, but I’ve no idea if that’s accurate. I do think this makes it more likely that we see some sort of TV service from Apple, or more deals like the HBO one that allow Apple to act as the aggregator of a loosely-bundled pay TV replacement, and I’ll probably write more about this.

Apple Watch

Lastly, then, we come to what was to have been the main focus of the event according to all the preview coverage, but what ended up being just the last act of a multi-act performance. The key new details were the pricing and availability details. These confirmed to me several things: the Watch Edition is important in terms of positioning and in terms of Apple’s foray into true luxury (and beyond simply affordable luxury, its past focus). But ultimately, it’ll be a marginal story, available only in few places and in small numbers, and sold at a price to make it affordable for very few people. It’s an interesting story, but essentially all the action will happen between $349 and $1100, in the two other categories. Interestingly, that might well make for an ASP very much in line with the iPhone and iPad, somewhere between $500 and $700 per unit.

I had a chance to wear the Watch (the stainless steel version) and play with it some at the event, and the first thing you notice is how much functionality is there. In my five-minute demo we barely scratched the surface of what the Watch does, and I think that’s illustrative of the challenge and the opportunity for the Watch. The use cases for different people will be at least as diverse as they are for the iPad, with third-party apps making up much of the value proposition. Apple talked about three broad things the Apple Watch does: timekeeping, intimate communication, and health and fitness tracking. And there will be some number of people for whom each of these is perhaps the main focus. But there will be many more who will end up using the Watch for a combination of things that doesn’t fit neatly into any of these three categories, but rather combines both pre-installed and third-party apps in a way that creates a mosaic of useful experiences. That makes it challenging to market, but as I’ve said before I think the early adopters who buy the Watch right off the bat will be a big part of how the device reaches the next wave of people, as they discover its usefulness and communicate it to others.

Edit: I’ve been asked by a Twitter follower to add a little more on my experience with the device. It fit well on my wrist, was comfortable and felt very much like the analog watch I normally wear. It instantly felt better than pretty much any of the other smartwatches I’ve worn, at least in part because of the quality and fit of the band. The materials looked great on the one I tried and the others. The screen was responsive and easy to use. The best way to think about the buttons is that pushing the digital crown is like pushing the home button on an iOS device – it always takes you back to the main screen. The other button, meanwhile, is the communication button, which is an interesting departure for Apple – a dedicated button on a personal device for a specific set of functions. There’s lots of swiping involved too, whether to get to Glances, to swipe between Glances, to navigate on the main apps screen, to select emoji and so on and so forth. Then the digital crown is also used for scrolling and zooming, in some cases with the digital crown offering vertical scrolling and swiping on the screen controlling horizontal scrolling. I’m not going to go into any more detail just because I think it’s worth waiting for a thorough review.

I’ll no doubt write more about all of this going forward, and I’ll have at least one other piece on Techpinions later this week (Thursday is my regular day for my public column), but would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, as always.

Quick Thoughts: Apple Watch and notifications

My thanks to Gregg Keizer of Computerworld, for sparking these ideas in a conversation we had earlier today ahead of Monday’s event.

I wrote a piece for Techpinions earlier in the week about the concept of intimacy as it relates to Apple Watch. In that piece, I wrote:

What I think intimacy in computing really means is going a level deeper on the personal side, and perhaps also stripping away some of the non-personal elements of the smartphone. The Apple Watch, then, becomes the truly personal device our smartphones have never quite been. Notifications come in noiselessly, communication with our Apple Watch-wearing significant other can be both more private and more individualized, the tasks we do on the Apple Watch can be limited just to those that are meaningful to us, leaving others for the smartphone, and so on.

I highlighted one phrase in bold there, because I think it’s critical both to the success of the Apple Watch specifically and to smartwatches in general. One of the criticisms of some of the other watches out there is that notifications are something of an all-or-nothing phenomenon: either you get utterly bombarded with notifications or you get none, but it’s been tough to get granular control. With the Apple Watch, this problem has the potential to get worse: with both traditional notifications and apps running on the Watch itself, there’s potential for even more of this. So it becomes all the more important that Apple get this right on the Watch. The ability to manage notifications and other activity on the Watch so that you only get notified for the things you really care about is a key value proposition. There have been a couple of pieces today about how the Apple Watch will handle notifications, but neither of them is clear enough to answer conclusively the question of how well the Watch deals with this issue.

I think there’s an analogy here to the early smartphones, which acted as task-specific extensions of our PCs. PCs were general purpose devices, on which we did essentially all our work. Early smartphones, and especially those made by BlackBerry, majored on email above all else, and allowed us to perform triage on this central form of communication on a dedicated device, leaving the rest for when we got back to our desks. I see the Watch performing a similar role in relation to smartphones, which have now become in some ways general purpose devices in a similar way to early PCs. If the Watch is to succeed, it will do so by allowing us to focus on those tasks that are most important to us, stripping away the rest of the stuff we’ll leave for our smartphones. And for many of us it will do this for our personal lives in much the way early smartphones did it for our work lives.

What the Apple Watch is for

This is my third post on Apple’s announcements last week – my first, on the new iPhones, is here, and my second, on how the Apple Watch might change the smartwatch market, is here (on Techpinions). I had planned to do my next Apple post on Apple Pay, to complete the triumvirate, but my thoughts on that are still percolating, and in the meantime I’ve done more thinking about the Watch, and specifically what it’s for. Benedict Evans and Ben Thompson have both addressed this point, and yet my feelings are somewhat different, and I wanted to share them here. You should absolutely read both of their posts too (Ben T’s are elaborated on in a podcast as well), as they have lots of great insights.

Apple has defined new products in relation to existing ones

Apple has an interesting history of introducing new products, right back to the original Apple computers. I think it makes most sense to think about this visually, and as such I’ve created the video below to illustrate it, but by way of introduction. By way of context, Apple has essentially always introduced new products in one of the following ways:

  • They do the same things as an old product, but in a new form factor (laptops)
  • They replace existing devices in the category (iPods)
  • They combine existing categories (iPhone)
  • They sit in-between existing categories (iPad).

(There is a YouTube video below – if you’re reading this in an RSS reader or your email, it may not show up.)

Continue reading

Techpinions post: Apple Watch impact on smartwatch market

This week’s Techpinions post is a follow-up to my post from a few weeks ago about market prospects for smartwatches, off the back of my smartwatches report. I revisit my conclusions both from that report and from the previous post in light of Apple’s forthcoming Watch. As you may recall, I’ve been extremely bearish about the smartwatch market absent some major catalyst, and Apple’s entry into the market always had the potential to be that catalyst.

The concluding paragraph from the piece is below:

For all these reasons, the Apple Watch will be just the kind of catalyst I talked about in the conclusion to my report. It won’t drive majority adoption of smartwatches any time soon, but it promises to fix several of the key demand- and supply-side barriers to smartwatch adoption, and will be a huge hit for Apple. At the same time, it will provide a boost to other vendors, who will have to compete largely around the Android opportunity and the lower end of the market. Exactly how big the boost to the market will be is hard to estimate until we know more about the watch as we approach its release. But we could easily go from single digit millions of shipments per year to tens of millions in the wake of its launch.

You can read the whole piece, including the reasoning behind that conclusion, here.