Search results for: “apple watch”

  • Apple Watch Ultra 2

    I was fortunate to get an Apple Watch Ultra 2. It is the third Apple Watch that I have owned and the sixth wearable. My previous history in wearables were:

    A Yamasa Tokei analogue pedometer (I received it around the time I was in primary school. It came in handy for guesstimating walking distances when I was in the scouts). What I didn’t know at the time is that the 1960s-era interest in pedometers that eventually spawned my device was driven by Japanese interest in combating obesity due to modernisation during the post-war economic miracle.

    If you are focusing on your 10,000 steps a day you can thank Dr Yoshiro Hatano and manufacturers like Yamasa who eventually sold their ‘Manpo-kei’ (10,000 step measure) in the west as ‘Manpo-meter’ devices from the 1960s through to the late 1990s.

    Nike Fuelband – I really enjoyed the simplicity of this device, but it was very fragile and I ended up going through three devices in a matter of months.

    NIKE+ FUELBAND SE

    Casio G-Shock+ connected device that was let down by its software, but very much a go-anywhere device.

    blue G-shock

    Polar Loop fitness tracker – it was more reliable than Nike’s Fuelband but I didn’t really enjoy it as device.

    The Polar Loop activity tracker looking super cool. Check out the full review wp.me/p4oEpL-ld #health #fitness

    Apple Watch series 1 and 2 – I lasted about 48 hours wearing the series 1 Apple Watch, but did better with a series 2 device.

    apple watch series one

    Apple Watch Ultra 2

    Apple Ultra 2

    My expectations have been impacted by poor experiences with earlier devices.

    How have I found the Apple Watch Ultra 2?

    I have worn tool watches all my adult life, a mix of mechanical dive watches and Casio G-Shocks. That meant that I didn’t think about where I took my watches. Into the shower, or the swimming pool – the watches could take it all in their stride. But the Apple Watch couldn’t.

    The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is a classic ‘go anywhere’ watch. It is waterproof like a Casio G-Shock. So fine for swimming, in the shower or scuba diving. Titanium means that it’s hypoallergenic, and corrosion resistant; even more so than most grades of stainless steel. However, if you wear it in the sea or at the swimming pool, rinse the watch in clean fresh water afterwards, like you should do with any other dive watch.

    I found the default straps sold with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 were excessively clunky. Awkward to wear and got snagged in random situations. Instead I favoured a Nike Sports silicone band which is ideal for the gym or working in the office.

    I bought a cheap clear bumper for the Apple Watch Ultra 2. It keeps fingerprints off the screen and gives items like the buttons and digital crown a modicum of protection from being activated by putting on a jacket as we go into a cooler wetter autumn.

    Battery life on it seems to be more generous than the older Apple Watch models I have used and based on what I have seen I think you could get a weekend out of it without a charge.

    The ubiquity of Apple watches on the wrists of Londoners mean that this doesn’t attract any good or bad attention.

    What’s it like?

    Compared to previous Apple watch models I have used the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is faster and more sophisticated. I get the sense that the Apple WatchOS is now supported by less non-health related apps than previously. My watch supports alerts for my train ticket bookings, airline flights and my preferred taxi app.

    Part of this might be down to watch might make contextual sense in the 10 second app usage time that a consumer would have. And when does it make sense to just pull the phone out of your pocket.

    There isn’t the same lag that made the first series Apple Watch unusable, as the device has become more powerful and more processing happens on the watch. Apple’s health app is more tracking than I need, so I haven’t used it with apps like Strava.

    What’s good about it?

    All of the Apple watch models have been impressive pieces of engineering and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is no exception. In their own way, they challenge Swiss industry for a different type of engineering prowess.

    I really like the strap that I landed on. The material is the right texture and unlike other straps I have worn it doesn’t hinder my typing on a laptop. That being said the strap owes a lot to Marc Newson’s prior work in the early 1990s for Ikepod. This all means that you have a device that feels nice on the wrist.

    One of the first things that I liked about the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is ‘night mode’ a plain red on black face, rather than the distracting colour complications. It would be great if this could be a universal theme carried through all the watch faces.

    Thanks to mobile phone contracts, Apple watches like G-Shocks are surprisingly poor signals of status. In a city like London, that has its benefits.

    What could be improved?

    The Apple Watch is over nine years old. A number of problems have been there since the first device launch and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is merely the latest in the line to carry them.

    You can’t wear your watch on the inside of your wrist. I used to scuba dive without a dive computer, relying on pre-planned dive tables, a depth gauge and air pressure gauge for my tank. I got into the habit of wearing my watch on the inside of my right wrist so I could hold my gauge console in my hand and see my elapsed dive time at the same time. It also means that your watch is less on-show in public settings.

    Screens default to being overly busy with Apple trying to cram in as many complications as possible which compromises ‘glanceability’ – the key experience benefit that wearables like the Apple Watch Ultra 2 provide. Apple should also start to think about accessibility on across the Apple Watch range as much as it does on a Mac. I have have worked bleary eyed from deep sleep, looked at the watch and not being able to read it until my focus kicks in. How could the haptics function in the Apple Watch be used better?

    Less apps now support the Apple Watch than have done previously. The more apps that support a platform, the more likely you are to get at least some sticky experiences that add to the utility of the device.

    It’s not a particularly stylish device to look at, but it also doesn’t lean into function in the same way that a Casio G-Shock does. This means that it could be better protected out of the box than it is.

    The battery life is better than previous generations of Apple Watch, but it still creates battery anxiety. Unlike Casio or other manufacturers, there’s no solar top-up option.

    I don’t know how precise the data is. It measures blood oxygen level but freely admits its data isn’t good enough to be used in a medical situation. If you move to an Apple device from a Garmin or similar, you may find that your step count and activity measures may vary.

    Price-wise, it’s expensive. It does offer value for what it does, but it’s expensive. You can spend as much, if not more money on a G-Shock than an Apple Watch Ultra 2; but the G-Shock won’t be a worry on issues like obsolescence, software support or even battery replacement in the same way that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is. I have G-Shocks that I have owned for almost 20 years and are perfectly fine. I won’t be able to say the same of any Apple Watch.

    What’s its use?

    Still a great question. When I had my first Apple Watch, I stopped using it after 48 hours for a few reasons:

    • I couldn’t see a good user case coming thorough in the product at the time
    • It was slow
    • It had poor battery life

    At the time Apple had thrown a number of things at the wall. There was a luxury line with a $17,000 version with a gold case and official third-party leather straps by Hermès. Apple still sells a Hermès co-branded range, but the gold models are no longer made.

    In the intervening years Apple has committed to a number of areas:

    • An extension of your phone, on your wrist.
    • Integration with payments
    • Integration with identity
    • The quantified self

    The use cases I have personally favoured included being an extension of my phone, when it rings my watch vibrates. But since I work most of the time at home and the phone sits on a stand in front of me, this tends to be only useful when I am out. Glanceable updates from a few apps, notably weather and my taxi app.

    The Apple Watch Ultra 2 can work as a standalone phone attached to your existing number, but that depends on your mobile carrier supporting it. I didn’t opt for this for reasons relating to my current service plan with 3 UK.

    Tracking activity and the quality of my sleep. The quantified self is the area where Apple really pushes now, as do third-party developers such as Strava.

    Apple also allows integration with Apple wallet, but you have to turn your wrist in an awkward position to work with most ‘tap-and-go’ systems. It is just as easy to do it with your phone or card.

    Finally, Apple and some car manufacturers have been looking at using Apple devices as your car key. I live in London and even if I did need a car, I would be going for a pre-owned vehicle.

    Is it a watch?

    Is the Apple Watch Ultra 2 actually a watch at first glance seems like a ridiculous proposition, if for no other reason than you have the word ‘watch’ twice in close succession.

    But on closer examination, it’s a pertinent question. Watch sales actually dropped as cellphones became ubiquitous. You had the time in your pocket or purse and the phone went everywhere with you. If you went abroad on holiday, it even changed time zones unless you specifically set it not to do so.

    Watches offered some benefits from using the cellphone as a portable clock.

    • Easy to read / glanceable.
    • An analogue face allowed you to visually understand elapsed time.
    • It sent social signals in work about taking time seriously and likely punctuality.
    • More broadly the watch demonstrates signals about style, wealth, taste and even sub-cultures. This can be especially true of luxury brands and the countless collaborations that Casio has done with its G-Shock range over the years.
    • Finally, if you have an automatic movement watch or a solar powered quartz one, you don’t need to worry about a dead cellphone battery.

    Smartwatches in general, have put a simplified version of your smartphone on your wrist. Depending who your mobile service provider is, your Apple Watch Ultra 2 can become a fallback phone, allowing you to leave it charging at home.

    But as a watch it’s trying to do too many other things. Update you on your messages, provide a simplified experience of some apps (airlines and taxi services in particular) and activity tracking. All of which is squeezed into a screen area about an eighth the size of my smartphone’s screen.

    This all comes with experience choices and compromises. It’s this lack of functional purity that is a moat between even the most technical G-Shock and an Apple Watch Ultra 2. Your watch will never compromise on telling you the time despite being a really shitty dive recorder or digital compass.

    Yes you can spend the price of a Porsche; on a Patek Philippe watch with lots of complications, but realistically it’s an objet d’art that happens to look like a wrist watch. On that measure the Apple Watch Ultra 2 isn’t a watch, despite sitting on your wrist.

    More information

    On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge | renaissance chambara

    Wearable devices | renaissance chambara

    Living with the Apple Watch | renaissance chambara

  • Living with the Apple Watch

    I got the first iteration of the Apple Watch and managed to put up with it for about 48 hours before giving up on it. I have managed to persevere with the the Apple Watch 2.

    Apple managed to speed up the performance of glanceable content, but it still doesn’t have the use case nailed. Watch 2 tries to go hard into fitness, which is a mixed bag in terms of data and accuracy. I am not convinced that it is any better than Fitbit and similar devices.

    They did improve the product in two design areas. The Nike straps make the watch less sweaty to wear on your wrist. It is now comparable to wearing a G-Shock. They also managed to life-proof the Watch. You can now wear it swimming (but I wouldn’t advise snorkelling or scuba diving) and in the shower.  The battery life is still meh.

    I upgraded the OS to watchOS 4 public beta but haven’t managed to use the Siri powered contextual face yet. As a concept it promises to be a step in the right direction to provide the kind of transformation wearables needed.

    watchOS 4 made me realise something that had been nagging me for a while.

    The Apple Watch doesn’t have any personality, or at least traits of a personality that I’d care about. It’s a detail that disappoints me. Mostly it’s invisible as a device, with the occasional glances. It gives me the occasional messages that sound like a vaguely resistant teen or like bursts of micro-aggression.

    1

    It wouldn’t take that much effort to have a bit more manners or personality in the copywriting. How about some icons?

    Susan Kare was the icon designer for original Apple Mac, back in 1984. She came up with icons that were useful and gave the machine a personality. You got a sense of the personality behind the developers who created the machine. This was the kind of detail that Apple was known to obsess over.

    dogcow

    Some of the icons like the dogcow, the bomb and the sad mac became iconic shorthand amongst Mac users. The dogcow was used in printer utility to show page orientation.

    Like the early Mac, the Apple Watch doesn’t have a clear killer app and defined use case. It would benefit from manners, humour or even a bit of Siri wit. What’s more using well designed icons would reduce the effort in terms of product localisation.

    You could argue that limited device resources don’t allow it. But I don’t buy that theory, an Apple Watch has more memory and computing power than the original Mac. I think its about that legendary attention to detail that Steve Jobs had (and drove everyone else made with. Apple has tried to codify this in their process, but you can’t bake in quirky obsession.

    I guess I am old school Apple. I use an iPhone because it works well with my Mac, rather than the other way around. I still come across things where I see ‘Ahh, Apple’s thought about…’ in my Mac. My iPhone is a portable extension of my data, and doubles as a mobile modem for the Mac as needed; it gets in as the Mac’s plus 1.

    By comparison the Apple Watch has less of a connection to the Mac and leeches off the iPhone. For a product that has little use case, it needs to work harder at building loyalty through my relationship with it as a device.

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  • 48 hours with the Apple Watch

    My experiment with the Apple Watch is part of a larger project. I  decided to experiment with wearables a while ago. My first experiment was with the Casio G-Shock+ series of watches that takes the well-loved brand and drops some rudimentary notification function, BlueTooth LE capability and a companion iPhone app together as a workable but unambitious package.

    The Apple Watch is a different experience and has a different ethos to the Casio G-Shock+. The Apple Watch experience starts as soon as you receive the package.

    I was surprised to be presented the box by security in reception, mainly because it had roughly the same size and weight as a toner cartridge for the office colour photocopier / printer.
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    My immediate reaction was that Apple may have made the packaging look like this to mask the first drop of watches from over-ambitious eBay entrepreneurs in the postal service.
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    But it soon became apparent that Apple had built a packing equivalent of a Winnebago RV for the watch.
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    Inside a long heavy duty cardboard box is a giant whale of a coffin for the watch and space underneath for the charging cable and plug in charger. All of this seems at odds with Apple’s move over the years towards less wasteful, more environmentally friendly packaging.

    At the same time the experience didn’t feel special to me, just slightly perplexing, ok very perplexing. I have been involved in the launch of a new Huawei smartphone over the past few weeks and that packaging provided a more luxurious experience.

    An email arrives to my home account letting me know that I can set up a live video call with someone who will help me set up my watch. An alarm bell rings in the back of my head that makes me think that the product might not ‘just work’ which the a core tenet of the Apple experience.

    The watch itself has some nice industrial design touches.
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    The Apple Watch strap was easy even for a mechanical klutz like me to change, by pushing a button and sliding the strap in or out of a groove on the case.

    The case is nicely made (as something the price of a premium Casio or Hugo Boss watch should be). However as a bit of a watch head the case did not blow me away, if I didn’t know about it’s smarts it felt very much like a Fossil watch.

    Switching it on and pairing it with my iPhone was very easy, the problems began when the iPhone app schlepped across all my iPhone applications that had Apple Watch capability, without a thought for how often I use them. This means that the home screen is covered in an acne rash of default and third-party applications, 80 per cent of which I don’t regularly use.

    Whilst I am in awe of the the way the device hides the process of syncing with the iPhone I am less impressed by the slow speed of glance content loaded from the iPhone more slowly than it would be to just take the iPhone from my pocket and look.
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    When glances do appear, they appear in an amazingly high resolution.

    The killer app

    The haptic alerts were handy and Accuweather had made the best Watch app. WeChat shamed Twitter with its comparative usefulness. But ultimately I still don’t know a compelling reason to own an Apple Watch beyond trying to understand where it fits in a customer’s digital life.

    The Apple Watch is a two-handed device, for instance unlocking the Watch by typing in your PIN. Flashback to a childhood encounter with a friend’s Casio Databank flooded my memory whilst unlocking the watch.

    I found that I tended to use the crown when the watch wasn’t on my wrist, probably sounds a bit pointless.

    Like the Casio G-Shock+ before it, Apple hadn’t mastered prioritising alerts or putting intelligence behind them. I think that this a major issue, since app developers will try to go for maximum notification real estate as part of the ‘grab’ of the attention economy. I think that this is an Achilles Heel of wearables in general.

    Conclusions

    The Apple Watch didn’t encourage me to ‘play with it’ to find out its features, the way other Apple products from the original sit-up and beg Mac to the iPod and iPhone did. I can’t say that I have had any real enjoyment out of using one. So much so, that I was quite happy to leave it in its charger most of Sunday, whilst my iPhone is never an arms length away.

    Notifications are going to become very tiresome, very fast.

    It isn’t particularly friendly to use and at 48 hours in, I still haven’t really got to grips with the device.

    This feels like a first step in a long journey needed to fix the human smartwatch interface.

    The Apple Watch feels like a solution looking for a problem, just in the same way that the Mac only found its calling with Aldus desktop publishing software and an Adobe powered laser printer, so the Apple Watch is dependent on some clever app development in the future.

    I suspect the kind of programmable world that we would need for the device to thrive, for instance your iPhone seeing that you have enough time in your diary, ordering your morning coffee at Starbucks and then the Watch telling you to step in the cafe and pick it up just as you are about to walk past doesn’t exist yet.

    The experience did get me to marvel at the engineering that went into the device, but at the moment it feels that all that effort has been largely unrewarding in terms of customer experience. I still wear my collection of G-Shocks or fine Swiss watches on my right wrist. I don’t think that many watchmakers have much to worry about yet, except those targeting the mid-market of big brand, mediocre movements.

    More information

    On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge
    On wearing a smartwatch
    On Wearables

  • First Apple Watch impressions

    I was underwhelmed by the Apple Watch wearable product. It is impressive what they have done, but from a product design point of view the case looks cumbersome rather like a slightly better Samsung Gear. The use of haptics was one of the smarter things that I saw in the demonstration and the use of emoji as an essential ‘social lubricant’ borrows heavily from Asian mobile usage of stickers on the likes of LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat.

    Looking at the demonstrations, I still think that the use case for a wearable still isn’t there for mainstream consumers. The use cases for haptic communications for instance were downright creepy and I wasn’t convinced by the cloud of spots interface. The fitness app and workout apps were similar to products from the likes of Suunto and Polar or the miCoach app by adidas for a smartphone. There needs to be more general purpose apps, then the Apple fitness option might be able to drive out the fitness sector.

    In terms of the industrial design, I was particularly interested in the strap. Apple has borrowed a distinctive looking catch and strap connector  from one of the strap designs from the now defunct Ikepod Watch company co-founded by Marc Newson who recently joined Apple’s design team.

    Ikepod Megapod strap
    ikepod

    First Apple Watch strap. This probably explains why Marc Newson was brought on board as part of Jonny Ive’s team; as the Ikepod strap was something that he had designed back in the mid to late 1990s. You can see it on the Hemipod watch design here.
    applewatch

    While the case shape looks suspiciously like a homage to H Moser, I think that luxury brands won’t be particularly concerned, at least at this first Apple Watch, lets hope that future iterations prove me wrong. More on design here.

  • Apple Intelligence delayed + more

    Apple Intelligence delayed.

    Apple announced that features showcased during the 2024 WWDC enhancing Siri would be delayed. Apple Intelligence delayed represents a serious breach of trust for Apple’s early adopters and the developer community. On its own whilst that’s rare from Apple, it’s survivable.

    Sad Mac icon

    Apple has made other FUBARs: the Newton, some of the Performa model Macintosh computers in the 1990s, the Apple Pippin, Apple QuickTake cameras and the Apple Cube computer from 2000.

    The most recent game-changing product has been the AirPod series of headphones which have become ubiquitous on the tube and client video calls. But there has been a definite vibe shift around perceptions at Apple.

    • Recent product upgrades to the MacBook Air were given a muted welcome. Personally I think Apple came out with a banger of a product: the M4 processor in the MacBook Air M1 form-factor at the Intel MacBook Air price of $999.
    • The Vision Pro goggles are at best a spoiler on the high-end market for Meta’s VR efforts, and an interesting experiment once lens technology catches up with their concept. At worst they are a vanity project for Tim Cook that have a very limited audience.
    • Conceptually Apple Intelligence told a deceptively good story. Let others develop the underlying LLMs that would power Apple Intelligence. This solution is partially forced on Apple due to the mutually exclusive needs between China and its other markets. But it also meant that Apple had a smaller AI challenge than other vendors. On-device intelligence that would work out the best way to solve a problem and handle easier problems without the latency of consulting a cloud service. More complex problems would then be doled out to off-device services with privacy being a key consideration. The reality is that Apple Intelligence delayed until 2027 because of technical challenges.

    Key commentary on the Apple Intelligence delay:

    Chungking Express.

    One of my most loved films is Chungking Express directed by Wong Ka wai. It was one of the reasons that I decided to take up the opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong. This YouTube documentary cuts together some of the oral history about the making of the film. The story of the production is nuts.

    Drone deliveries

    Interesting documentary by Marques Brownlee on the limited use cases and massive leaps in innovation going into drone delivery systems.

    Effective Marketing for Financial Services

    Les Binet presents a financial services-specific view on marketing effectiveness. It has some interesting nuances, in particular how brand building is MORE important in subscription services.

    Tony Touch set

    Tony Touch did a set for Aimé Leon Dore. It’s an impeccably programmed set.

    LUCID Air focus on efficiency

    It’s rare to hear the spokesperson for an American car company quoting Colin Chapman’s design philosophy – which he shared with Norman Foster.