Category Archives: HealthKit

Apple, HealthKit, iWatch, Smartwatches, Wearables

Apple will make several wearables, but not a watch

12 Comments

Back in January, I did a post titled “Why Apple may not launch an iWatch anytime soon.” The gist of the piece was this: that Apple doesn’t enter markets particularly early, but rather enters at the point where the technology is ready for it to provide the kind of transformative product it’s used to disrupt the music player, smartphone and tablet markets in the past. At the time, my conclusion was that Apple would likely stay out of the wearables business entirely, until such time as the underlying technology was ready. However, given the other things we’ve seen from Apple in the last few months, I now believe it’s very likely we’ll see something in this category from Apple in the near future, but it won’t be a watch, and it’s likely that it will actually be several products rather than just one.

Smartwatches aren’t delivering on the promise, but the promise is flawed too

There are two big problems with the smartwatch market as it stands: firstly, the underlying technology doesn’t seem to be ready, which means it doesn’t deliver on the promise of the category. But secondly, the promise itself simply isn’t all that compelling for the vast majority of the general population. There’s a sense that if someone can just crack the smartwatch category it’ll suddenly explode, but I’m just not sure I agree with that. It still fundamentally seems like a solution in search of a problem at this point. But the coverage – as is so often the case – is driven by a very small number of people who likely are in the target segment and therefore talk up both the promise and the reality well beyond what’s justified.

A different approach solves some fundamental problems

For all these reasons, I’m still skeptical that Apple will release a product that’s identifiable as a watch. If I think about the thorniest technological challenge with smartwatches, it’s the fact that you’re having to squeeze both a fairly smart CPU and a decent display, and the battery to power them, into what has to be a very small form factor. That problem essentially goes away if you see wearables less as notification screens and more as off-device sensors, as Apple seems to, in contrast to Google:

Android Wear vs Apple HealthKit

If wearables are merely providing sensor extensions to the smartphone rather than trying to replicate smartphone functions, you can do away with the bright, big screen and the powerful CPU, and strip both down significantly. On some wearables, you might retain a small display, but it’s entirely possible that others would do away with it entirely. Put in the relevant sensors, a Bluetooth LE radio and a small CPU, and you’d be done. This would allow you to make the device significantly smaller and sleeker, make the battery last much longer, and also allow for many other form factors that could be worn in different places around the body. Continue reading →

Apple, Apple Retail, Beats, Developer events, Distribution, Emerging markets, HealthKit, HomeKit, Mature markets, Retail, Smart home, WWDC, WWDC 2014

Apple is doubling down on mature markets

As we gear up for Google I/O next week, and imagine what we might see from Google there, I wanted to have one last look at Apple’s WWDC, from a slight different perspective. One of the thoughts about WWDC that’s taken a while to percolate for me is that WWDC was a good sign that, from a product perspective at least, Apple is doubling down on mature, developed markets, rather than joining the land rush in emerging markets.

HomeKit and HealthKit are about solving first-world problems

I wrote about HealthKit and HomeKit in a couple of previous pieces here and on Techpinions. I think they’re both much-needed solutions to real problems in the health and fitness and home automation categories. But these are in some ways the very definition of first world problems. Trying to get your smart lock, your smart lightbulb and your smart thermostat to talk to each other is a challenge experienced only by people who can afford to buy the overpriced products on offer in these markets.

HealthKit also comes into its own in part when tying together several different fitness tracking devices, which is another first-world phenomenon. There is, though, another element to HealthKit, which is about access to medical data from various healthcare providers. But again, this is something of a mature-market issue. A recent data set from Opera Mediaworks highlighted the disconnect between mature and emerging markets when it comes to searching for health related information on mobile devices:

Continue reading →

Apple, Apple TV, Developer events, Developers, fragmentation, Google, HealthKit, HomeKit, iOS, iOS 8, iWatch, Microsoft, OS X, Smart home, Smartwatches, Wearables, WWDC, WWDC 2014, Yosemite

Apple resurgent – thoughts on WWDC

Today’s WWDC keynote was a sign of a renewed swagger on the part of Apple, whose executives seemed to relish the deluge of new product announcements they unleashed on developers and on their customers. In the process Apple established or strengthened its competitive positioning against two major foes – Microsoft and Google – while opening itself up in unparalleled ways to developers. Today’s announcements may come to be seen in the same way as Steve Jobs’ original launch of Mac OS X, in that it lays the groundwork in several areas for years of future Apple products.

The demotion of Google continues

Two years ago at WWDC, Apple removed erstwhile close partner Google from the iPhone in two significant areas: as the backend provider for the Maps app, and in the form of the pre-installed YouTube app. But Google’s last major bastion on iOS is its position as the default search engine in Safari, and it’s much harder to remove there. In the sense of typing a query into a search box or address bar in a browser, hitting enter and being presented with a screen of blue links, Google is unrivaled, and Apple knows that. But it has slowly been inserting itself between the user and that search box over the last couple of years, and today’s keynote provided further evidence of Apple’s pre-empting of the Google search on both iOS and OS X devices.

Apple’s more subtle disruption of the user-Google relationship began with the launch of Siri, which began to address some users’ queries without an explicit search, and which uses Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha and Bing, but not Google, as underlying search providers. And it has continued since then, as more third party services have been layered into Siri, pre-empting the Google search for movie listings, restaurant reservations and sports scores. Today’s keynote added Spotlight search to the list of places where users will now find answers to their queries without the classic search box experience, thus further inserting Apple between users and Google.

This is potentially significant for Google, for which the US continues to be easily its single biggest and most lucrative market, and for which mobile is increasingly important. To the extent that iPhone users, which make over 40% of US smartphone users, start using Apple and its tightly integrated third party services instead of Google, for search, that’s pretty bad news. That isn’t, of course, why Apple is taking these steps, but it’s an unpleasant side effect for Google. And a great way for Apple to participate in the search business without having to match Google in the page-of-blue-links business.

A device for every need, not one device for every need

Continue reading →