Category Archives: Studying Apple

Apple, Apple Watch, iPhone, iPod, Studying Apple

The future of Apple Watch will be more like the iPod’s than the iPhone’s

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Note: this is the second post from Aaron Miller, who is now authoring occasional posts on Beyond Devices under the Studying Apple banner. Aaron is on Twitter at @aaronmiller. 

When Apple announced its earnings this week, they were as reticent as they promised to be about the number of Apple Watches sold. Still, some details did leak out giving us a sense of Watch’s first quarter. (Be sure to read Jan’s post where he estimated sales based on what we know.) Here they are, summarized:

  • The Other category, where they include Apple Watch revenue, grew sequentially by nearly $1 billion.
  • Apple Watch customer satisfaction is higher than for the iPhone and iPad.
  • Apple sold more Watches in its first quarter than in the first quarter of iPhone or iPad sales.

The last detail is probably the most interesting one. Comparing the Apple Watch to the iPhone implies a story about a massive future product, if not necessarily about a current one.

But the Apple Watch is hugely different from the iPhone. In fact, it’s much more like the iPod, a product now relegated to Apple’s history despite the recent updates. With iPhone at the top of everyone’s mind, we’re too quick to forget the iPod story and how similar it might be to the one playing out with the Apple Watch.

An Ecosystem Product

First, and most importantly, the Apple Watch is an ecosystem product. Right now, the Watch only works as an extension of the iPhone. Its upper boundary is the total number of iPhones in the world.

This makes the Watch much more like the iPod than the iPhone. From the time the iPod first launched, it was a product tied to a computer, first to Macs then eventually to Windows computers as well. 1 (Remember the Digital Hub strategy?) Just as the iPod existed to enhance the Personal Computer + iTunes ecosystem, the Watch exists to enhance the iPhone ecosystem. The iPhone, even if tied to iTunes early on, was never merely an ecosystem enhancement—nor designed to be one, like the iPod or Apple Watch have been.

Naturally, we expect the Watch’s reliance on iPhones to change over time. LTE and GPS seem like inevitable Apple Watch additions, for example, as does a Watch-native App Store. With true third-party apps coming soon, reliance on the iPhone will diminish even more. But there’s one limitation that may always tie Apple Watches to iPhones: the screen. Absent new technology to overcome how limiting such a small screen can be, the Watch will continue to be a capable iPhone enhancement more than a standalone product. The iPod’s limitations—most prominently, no native way to get music on it—similarly tied it to computers.

An Unsubsidized Product

The iPhone spent its first year not subsidized in the traditional way by AT&T, reflecting Apple’s intent to turn the mobile market on its head. Clearly this stood in the way of sales, because Apple changed tack just a year later with the iPhone 3G and created a much lower entry price for customers.

There are no carriers to subsidize Apple Watch purchases, and it’s hard to imagine such a subsidy ever materializing. (Perhaps we’ll all have wrist-phones someday, but taking calls on an Apple Watch is a current feature and people aren’t going nuts about it.) Without a subsidy, Apple’s profit margin has to come directly from customer’s wallets instead of indirectly through carriers.

The iPod hoed that row, and did just fine. It did sell less total units than the iPhone and had a slower upgrade cycle, but it was a record-breaking product nevertheless.

A Category-Defining Product

It amazes me how easily people forget what MP3 players looked like before the iPod. They were clunky and difficult to use. They were full of deal-killing trade-offs between physical size, capacity, battery life, and user interfaces. Some of the products were especially weird as companies tried to find niches. The iPod eliminated the majority of those trade-offs for a higher, but manageable, price.

To be clear, the Apple Watch category is not just smartwatches. The correct category is wearables, and wearables right now, at the birth of the Apple Watch, are very similar to the early MP3-player market. Some are huge and multi-functional. Some are svelte and limited. Some are banking on unique features trying to find a niche.

Because of the Android ecosystem, the Apple Watch may never wholly dominate the market like the iPod did, but it will define the category. Of course, most of Apple’s products shape their categories. But the iPod defined the category. It organized and crystalized the MP3 market. Back then, people weren’t sure what to make of MP3 players and their future. The same is true of wearables, especially smartwatches, today.

What the Future of Apple Watch May Hold

If the Apple Watch story does end up similar to the iPod story, we may see the following things play out:

  • The Watch will grow the iPhone ecosystem by driving switchers. The famous iPod halo effect gave people a reason to consider a Mac where they never had before. (This was helped in no small part by Apple Stores, where people would go in to buy an iPod and walk out with a new computer.) This effect is not trivial. PC sales as a multiple of Mac sales have been in steady decline since the iPod. It might be a coincidence that Apple reported the highest ever level of Android switchers this quarter, but expect to see even more.
  • The Watch will define and dominate the wearables category. If the Watch moves like the iPod did, you’ll see niche players like FitBit disappear. You’ll see some large competitors play copycat on features and design, but they won’t reach comparable market- or profit-share. Eventually, all wearables will be measured by the Apple Watch, just as all competing music players were measured by the iPod.
  • The Watch will get differentiated in more than just size and build materials. At its peak, the iPod branched into everything from the Shuffle to the Classic to the Nano in order to fit multiple budgets and preferences. It’s reasonable to see Apple doing something similar with the Watch. If I were to guess, I think the fitness tracking will be a core feature across all Apple wearables. (Imagine in three years the inexpensive Apple Fit, where Apple reinvokes the old FitBit-style devices killed off by the Watch. People will laugh at it. When they do, remember the iPod Shuffle.) Being an ecosystem product that can rely on iPhones, the Watch gives Apple the flexibility for slimmer features to get lower price points.
  • The Watch will see slower customer upgrade cycles. In this regard, the Watch will be like everything Apple sells except for the iPhone. 2 iPods continued working for many years beyond their purchase date. (My son is using a sixth-gen Nano that’s now over five years old.) As a result, iPod sales flattened before the iPhone entered on the scene, mostly because Apple had saturated the market and upgrades weren’t moving quickly. Just like with the iPod, expect Watch buyers to be much slower upgrading than they are with their iPhones.
  • The Apple Watch could eventually work with Android phones. I’m not at all confident on last this point because the history lines up much less reliably. Mac market share at the launch of the iPod was a small fraction compared to iPhone market share today. Apple had to get the iPod out to Windows to have any kind of customer base for it. Obviously, there’s no comparison between the 25 million Mac users in 2002 and the nearly 500 million iPhone users today.  Ultimately, this decision will depend on whether Apple feels the Watch serves better as an exclusive feature of the iPhone ecosystem or that it needs to sell to a larger market, followed by a halo effect to drive switchers after they’ve bought an Apple Watch. 3

Certainly, the Apple Watch won’t follow the iPod in every detail. But if the Watch does approximate the iPod’s history, Apple should be incredibly happy. It will be a historic product, and people will forget what life was like before it launched.

Notes:

  1. Only the iPod Touch, which owes its DNA to the iPhone, could eventually operate entirely without a computer. But consumers see it essentially as a less capable iPhone, not a dramatically better iPod. Not coincidentally, it’s been a footnote to the iPhone’s success more than a dramatic culmination to the iPod line. ↩
  2. A recent example: when iPad sales began flattening, some writers declared failure, because they were expecting iPhone-like growth. Smarter analysis recognized that 1) the market for tablets is smaller, and 2) without subsidies, the upgrade cycle is longer. ↩
  3. Obviously, an Android-capable Apple Watch would mean a different Watch than we have now, including a native App Store. Such a feat, though, is not out of the question. ↩
Apple, Apple Music, Friction, Studying Apple, User interfaces

Friction is the Problem with Apple Music, not Complexity

Note from Jan Dawson: I’m honored and grateful to announce that Aaron Miller, my co-host on the Beyond Devices Podcast, will be authoring some posts on the Beyond Devices blog going forward as well. This is the first of what I hope will become a series of posts over time. These posts will have a slightly different tone from the rest of the blog, and will be educational in nature, and frequently tied to research concepts – a concession to Aaron’s day job as a business school professor. To reflect that, these posts will be tagged “Studying Apple“. For more about Aaron, check out the About the Authors page.

Walt Mossberg and others seem to love Apple’s new Music service, but Mossberg’s (and others like David Pogue’s) complaint has been that the applications delivering it are too complex. The criticism applies to both Music on iOS and iTunes on the computer. There is a lot going on in Apple Music; there’s no denying it.

Complexity isn’t the problem, though. Friction is. You might call it a semantic difference, but if you do you’re missing out on an essential aspect of everything human beings make. It’s worth understanding the difference between something that’s complex and something that’s frictional.

User Interface Friction

These three points explain something called User Interface Friction (UIF):

  1. Attention is a scarce resource. Mental effort falls under a concept known as executive function. Simplified, executive function describes the many ways we focus our attention on things. We have a limited store of attention. We can only pay attention to a few things at a time. We can also use up our attention, our ability to focus. Time and rest restore it.
  2. Friction is wasted energy (and wasted attention). Although physical friction has its uses, in most situations friction is wasted energy. It’s a great analogy for users’ attention and software. All of your attention spent on an app should help toward your goal. Wasted attention is User Interface Friction. As excellently described in this article from Coding Horror, low UIF is a goal but some UIF is inevitable.
  3. UIF is affected by both users and the interface. Just like physical friction is a measure of how two surfaces interact, UIF is a measure of how users and interfaces interact. And as app interfaces can be metaphorically “smooth” or “bumpy”, users can also be smooth (expert) or bumpy (novice). Expert users can handle bumpier interfaces, because they’ve learned how to use them.

Obviously, software designers should try to minimize UIF as much as possible. Low friction makes an app more useful and more enjoyable, even if it’s something boring like a banking app. Software designers can even measure cognitive load while users interact with the app, and pinpoint where attention is overspent. (Here’s a 2006 article [PDF] describing ways to measure cognitive load for testing website usability. The Sternberg Memory Test is especially easy to use.) The idea is that if users have to overspend attention to accomplish something, then the interface needs improvement.

I’m not a user interface expert, so I can’t go very deep into the principles of good UI design that have developed over the years. (This Quora discussion is a good place to start.) But I know when I’m experiencing friction. A lot of the time it’s from bad design, but not always.

Some apps are necessarily “bumpy” because of how much they do. Final Cut Pro, for example, is a massively complex video editing application. It does things editors could only dream about a few decades ago. Because of this complexity, Final Cut Pro relies on expert users to reduce UIF. (This is part of the reason Final Cut X, a huge interface revamp, was so controversial.) To be sure, Apple shouldn’t waste editors attention, but it has the benefit of editors knowing how Final Cut Pro works.

Any app, no matter how bad, can be learned with time. That means we can become experts in poorly designed interfaces if we just stick with them. Lazy or poor app designers demand more expertise from users than necessary. Users generally abandon an app if the expertise cost is too high for them.

Apple Music and Friction

Generally, Apple users are not computing experts. That’s not an insult. It’s just the reality of having hundreds of millions of users. Apple’s success fundamentally comes from its ability to make low friction interfaces for very useful products.

Like any company, Apple runs into problems when its novice users are presented with complex products. This encounter puts Apple’s design chops to the test. But some things are just too complex to simplify for novices, and Apple requires users to develop some expertise.

There’s a lot of depth and complexity to Apple Music. Consider all that it does:

  1. Integrates a streaming music library with your owned music library.
  2. Helps you purchase music to make it part of your owned library.
  3. Provides extensive music recommendations—through curated playlists and suggested artists—based on your (complex) tastes.
  4. Brings new music to your attention, organized by multiple criteria.
  5. Plays multiple radio stations.
  6. Gives you a way to organize streaming and owned music in playlists.
  7. Allows you to search for music by multiple criteria.
  8. Gives you control over the play order of the music you’re listening to.
  9. Connects artists and fans, giving artists a way to share their work and lives through multiple media.

This list gets dramatically longer in the case of iTunes on the computer, because it includes movies, TV shows, podcasts, iTunes U, audiobooks, iOS apps, even more radio, and ringtones, along with all the different aspects of organizing, using, and purchasing those things. And let’s not forget all the device syncing, with multiple generations of iPods, iPhones, iPads, and even legacy MP3 players.

How do you keep all of that simple? I’m not convinced you can. Siri commands help some, but don’t get you all the way there. In the end, even the venerable Apple can only get the interface to a certain level of smoothness.

That doesn’t mean we should excuse Apple for bad UI design. iTunes 12 was a big change that introduced a lot of friction. (The money quote for our purposes: “But for now, iTunes 12’s most basic operation—finding and playing media—requires a lot more thought than it should” [emphasis added].)

So what has Apple decided to do with its Music apps? It apparently expects us to develop some expertise. Walt Mossberg and everyone else complaining about the friction in Apple Music also seem to love the value it provides. Apple designers, intentionally or not, are banking on our willingness to stick with it and get better at it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t complain about the friction, though. For me, the worst offender is the mysterious ellipsis button. (Who knows what combination of commands it reveals every time I tap on it? It’s like the UI equivalent of a slot machine.) Over time, we can all hope that Apple reduces the friction for its fundamentally complex Music service. In the end, making complex things frictionless is how Apple pays the bills.