Posts tagged with "apple watch"

Nike-Branded Apple Watch Coming October 28→

On September 7, 2016, Apple and Nike announced a Nike-branded version of the Apple Watch called the Apple Watch Nike+. Nike’s version of the Apple Watch did not debut with the Apple Watch Series 2, which became available on September 16th. Instead, Apple Watch Nike+ will go on sale October 28. 2016.

The Apple Watch Nike+ features a custom watch face and four distinct bands. As we reported after the September 7th event:

The new Nike-branded Apple Watch consists of a custom watch face available only to buyers of the watch, and a custom band. The band is basically a standard Sport band in construction, but includes distinctive holes throughout the surface, the interiors of which are a different color than the surrounding area. The result stands out, and I actually quite like it.

The band is available in four different colors, which vary the scheme between light and dark gray and a neon yellow-green (Nike calls the color “Volt”). The watch face mirrors these colors, and is available in several different styles, all which incorporate Nike’s distinctive font and logo. The Apple Watch Nike+ also includes a permanent complication along the bottom of the display for the Nike+ Run Club app, which I assume comes preinstalled on the devices since the Complication can’t be removed.

Earlier this month, Apple updated its website with a teaser that said the Apple Watch Nike+ would debut on October 28, 2016. That was confirmed by Apple today with a press release. According to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer:

Running is one of the world’s most popular activities for staying in shape and being healthy, and with Apple Watch Nike+, runners will be even more motivated to achieve their performance goals…. The response so far has been incredible and we’re thrilled to get Apple Watch Nike+ onto customers’ wrists starting Friday.

The Apple Watch Nike+ comes in an aluminum finish and is priced the same as the Apple Watch Series 2. The watch will be available on Friday in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the UK, and the US, with other countries being added shortly thereafter.

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Apple Releases Ads Spotlighting the Apple Watch and iPhone 7

Apple posted three advertisements to YouTube, one featuring the Apple Watch Series 2, and two showcasing the iPhone 7.

The Apple Watch Series 2 ad, titled Go Time, highlights the Watch’s fitness features and water resistance. Backed by Sinnerman, a classic song by Nina Simone, the ad begins at dawn showing a swimmer getting ready for an early morning workout. The swimmer adjusts his goggles and pulls his hand out of the water to start a workout on the Apple Watch. Through a series of quick cuts, the ad shows other people involved in all sorts of activities, including yoga, running, jumping into a pool, biking through a rainstorm, dancing, and sprinting out of the subway. In between each activity are clips showing off features of the Watch like the Activity app, Messages, notifications, the Workouts app, and the Breathe app, which is new to watchOS 3.

Morning Ride starts with a man looking out into a thunderstorm while checking Apple’s Weather app on an iPhone 7. AC/DC’s Thunderstruck starts playing in the background as he gets ready for his morning bicycle ride despite the rain. He mounts his iPhone to the handlebars of his bike, starts a tracking app, and prepares to take off into the rain. The thirty-second spot ends with the lines ‘the water-resistant iPhone 7’ followed by ‘practically magic.’

Midnight highlights the iPhone 7 Plus in Jet Black. The ad follows a young man as he skateboards around a city in the middle of the night taking photos with his iPhone. Backed by In A Black Out by Hamilton Leithauser, he takes videos as he passes through sprinklers, showing off the water resistance of the phone, captures moths flying around a single light bulb, and photographs a deer that wanders into a gas station. The ad concludes with the young man on a hill overlooking the lights of the city and ends with the tag line ‘low-light camera on iPhone 7’ followed by ‘practically magic.’

Each of the three ads does a good job focusing on the personal side of the new features of Apple Watch Series 2 and the iPhone 7. The ads don’t focus on specs; instead they emphasize how the advancements of each device expand their utility in everyday scenarios.

You can watch each of the ads after the break.

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watchOS 3: The MacStories Review

This month will mark the two-year point since the Apple Watch was first unveiled to the world, and nearly a year and a half since the product first made its way into the hands of consumers. Two years is a long time in technology in general, but particularly so for Apple. In this time the Apple Watch has gone from a product developed in secret, deep within Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, to the most popular smartwatch in the world. Millions of units have been sold, and surveys have pegged customer sat as extremely high.

Yet despite these positives, the Apple Watch has spent its first two years of existence as a flawed product. This is not due to the Watch’s hardware, which was beautifully designed, decently powered, and boasts enough battery life to easily last a day. Rather, the Achilles’ heel of the Apple Watch has been its software.

watchOS has had problems from the start. Apple shipped its first version in an incomplete state, in which third-party applications were purportedly supported, but unable to run natively on the Watch itself. Instead, the logic of each app was executed on the connected iPhone, and the Watch was used as a dumb display for the results. This method was astoundingly slow in practice, not to mention that it rendered the Watch incapable of nearly anything beyond telling the time when disconnected from its iPhone.

It’s not surprising then, that only two months after the Watch’s release to consumers in April 2015, Apple introduced the first iteration on its operating system, watchOS 2. As I discussed in my review of watchOS 2 last year, version 2 did not significantly change any visual designs or interfaces. Rather, it was a foundational update meant to create the base of a more mature operating system, establishing important building blocks that could be iterated upon in the future.

The foundation created by watchOS 2 seems to be paying off, as this year’s major update to the system, watchOS 3, does indeed build up from that base. However, many of the other aspects of watchOS 2 turned out to be failures, and a year in the wild has proved the update unable to fulfill many of the promises Apple made about it.

There were two standout watchOS 2 features which did not hold true. First, the data surfaced by watchOS 2 apps was supposed to be updated more frequently in the background so as to keep them consistently relevant. Second, the move from running app logic on the iPhone to running it on the Watch itself was supposed to make watchOS apps more responsive and fast.

Perhaps when compared to the incomplete and unacceptable performance of watchOS 1, it could be argued that these goals succeeded, but I would disagree. After a year of using watchOS 2 with my Apple Watch strapped to my wrist nearly every single day, I can say unequivocally that apps were not fast enough to cross the threshold of “useable”, nor was data ever updated consistently enough for me to trust that it was not stale.

In lieu of these and other letdowns in watchOS 2, and after over a year of Apple Watches being in consumers’ hands, the next update to Apple’s smartwatch operating system had a lot riding on its shoulders. Would it double down on the sins of its predecessors, adding more interfaces like the spinning circles of friends and the whimsical yet impractical honeycomb Home screen? Would Apple try even harder to achieve the impossible goal (for current hardware, at least) of all apps running as smoothly as iOS apps and updating consistently?

Thankfully, while the rest of us spent the last year debating Apple’s intentions, Apple spent it hard at work.

For this year’s update, Apple took a hard look at the state of its smartwatch operating system, and it found many features wanting. Showing an uplifting ability to admit when they were wrong, Apple did not shy away from tearing out anything that wasn’t working, including features that were emphasized and promoted in announcements and marketing just last year.

watchOS 3 is still the same watchOS that you know, but its changes have cut deeply and ruthlessly at its origins. Apple is stripping away the cruft and honing watchOS down to a purer form. The strong system foundation of watchOS 2 and general design language of watchOS 1 are still present, but this year’s improvements have made both far more effective.

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    Studio Neat Introduces the Material Dock

    Just in time for the new iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2, Studio Neat has introduced two handsome docks that integrate with charging cables that you supply. Called the Material Dock, one dock has a rounded rectangular base and charges the iPhone. The other model is circular and can charge an iPhone and an Apple Watch.

    The Material Dock is made from natural, recyclable materials. The base of each dock is cut from a block of walnut features a soft matte finish. The iPhone and Apple Watch are supported by pieces of cork while charging. Small adjustments to the cork support allow the Material Dock to be used with or without a case on your iPhone, which is a nice touch that not all docks have. The bottom of the dock has non-slip strips of micro-suction material to keep it secure on a nightstand, desk, or other flat surface.

    On the iPhone/Apple Watch model, the Apple Watch sits in front of the iPhone, which blocks the Home button. This probably wouldn’t be an issue in under most scenarios that I would use the Material Dock, but if you expect you might want to use your iPhone while it and the Apple Watch are docked, it’s worth keeping in mind.

    I haven’t tried the Material Dock, but I have used many of Studio Neat’s other products in the past and all have been well-built from high-quality materials. If you want to tame your cables and charge in style, the Material Dock looks like a good choice.

    The Material Dock is available on Studio Neat’s website. The iPhone-only version is $45 and the iPhone/Apple Watch version is $70.

    An Inside Look at the Apple Watch’s Development→

    Fast Company spoke to Bob Messerschmidt, who worked on the heart rate sensor for the Apple Watch after his startup was acquired by Apple in 2010, about the lessons he learned during his time at Apple. Some of the most interesting bits were Messerschmidt’s description of how designers and engineers interact on a product like the Apple Watch:

    One great example is [when] I went to a meeting and said I’m going to put sensors in the watch but I’m going to put them down here (he points to the underside of the Apple Watch band he’s wearing) because I can get a more accurate reading on the bottom of the wrist than I can get on the top of the wrist. They (the Industrial Design group) said very quickly that “that’s not the design trend; that’s not the fashion trend. We want to have interchangeable bands so we don’t want to have any sensors in the band.”

    Like many before him, Messerschmidt was also impressed by Apple’s focus on products over technology:

    At Apple I learned that design and user experience is everything when it comes to consumer products. It’s not so much the technology. It’s the design of the product that creates that sense of happiness in the user.

    If you look at products like the iPhone or the iPad there aren’t too many totally new technologies included in those products. The real elegance and differentiation doesn’t have a lot to do with the technology idea itself; it’s about the packaging and the value add it gives to people. Those big (new technology) ideas generally happen elsewhere, and they happen earlier.

    Messerschmidt’s interview is particularly notable because it’s not often we get a perspective on the interplay between Jony Ive’s design team and Apple’s engineers.

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    watchOS 3 and Wheelchair Users→

    John Brownlee, writing for Fast Company on support for wheelchair users in watchOS 3:

    Each test subject was allowed to use their own wheelchair, which they fitted with special wheel sensors. In addition, many were outfitted with server-grade geographical information systems, which collected extremely precise data on their movements through the world. The number of calories burned, meanwhile, were determined by fitting test subjects with oxygen masks, and precisely measuring their caloric expenditure as they pushed.

    In the end, Apple collected more than 3,500 hours of data from more than 700 wheelchair users across all walks of life, from regular athletes to the chronically sedentary, in their natural environments: whether track or trail, carpet or asphalt. From this data, they learned how to adjust watchOS 3’s algorithms to track wheelchair users.

    This is the kind of work that truly makes an impact on how people live their lives.

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    Jobs, Healthcare, and the Apple Watch→

    Tim Bajarin, writing for TIME:

    I recently spent time with Apple executives involved with the Watch. I asked them to explain the real motivation for creating the device. Although Apple has made fashion and design a key cornerstone of its existence, it turns out that this was not at the heart of why they created this product.

    The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs developed pancreatic cancer in 2004. He then spent a great deal of time with doctors and the healthcare system until his death in 2011. While that personal health journey had a great impact on Jobs personally, it turns out that it affected Apple’s top management, too. During this time, Jobs discovered how disjointed the healthcare system can be. He took on the task of trying to bring some digital order to various aspects of the healthcare system, especially the connection between patients, their data, and their healthcare providers.

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    A Watch That Makes You Wait

    It’s hard for me to disagree with the premise of Nilay Patel’s piece on Circuit Breaker about the Apple Watch: it’s slow.

    If Apple believes the Watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch’s processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves.

    I know what you’re thinking – you’re using the Apple Watch primarily for notifications and workouts, and it works well. I get that. But when something is presented as the next major app platform for developers and then every single app I try takes seconds to load (if it loads at all), you can understand why enthusiasm is not high on my list of Apple Watch feelings.

    I didn’t buy the Watch for notifications. I bought it with the belief that in the future we’re going to have computers on our wrist. Patel is right here: the slowness of the Apple Watch is undeniable and it dampens the excitement for the Watch as the next big Apple platform.

    I disagree, however, with his idea for another “choice” for Apple:

    The other choice is to pare the Watch down, to reduce its ambitions, and make it less of a computer and more of a clever extension of your phone. Most of the people I see with smartwatches use them as a convenient way to get notifications and perhaps some health tracking, not for anything else. (And health tracking is pretty specialized; Fitbit seems to be doing just fine serving a devoted customer base.)

    I’ve seen similar comments elsewhere lately. Even with the flaws of the first model, I think you’d be seriously misguided to think Apple would backtrack and decide to make the Apple Watch 2 a fancier Fitbit.

    I still believe that, a few years from now, a tiny computer on our wrist will be the primary device we use to quickly interact with the outside world, stay in touch, glance at information, and stay active. All of these aspects are negatively impacted by the Watch 1.0’s hardware today. Looking ahead, though, what’s more likely – that Apple shipped a product a bit too early and then iterated on it, or that the entire idea of the Apple Watch is flawed and Apple should have made a dumber fitness tracker instead?

    If anything, Apple’s only choice is to continue to iterate on the original Watch idea: your most personal device. Faster, more sensors, faster apps, smarter apps, a lot more customization options. Gradually and then suddenly, we’ll realize the change has been dramatic.

    That, of course, doesn’t soften my disappointment for the state of the Apple Watch as an app platform today. But knowing how Apple rolls, it makes me optimistic for its future.

    All New watchOS Apps to Be Native Starting June 1→

    During the weekend, Apple announced that, starting June 1, all new watchOS app submissions will have to be native – written with the watchOS 2 SDK.

    This, of course, doesn’t enforce existing watchOS 1.0 apps (built with the first SDK) to be updated for watchOS 2, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple will handle developers who launched a watchOS app last year, saw a muted response, and then ignored watchOS 2 due to a lack of incentives.

    In my experience, the performance of watchOS 2 apps has only been marginally better than old watchOS 1.0 ones, and I haven’t heard of developers rushing to support watchOS 2 as a must-rewrite-everything effort. If I had to speculate, perhaps new iPhone apps for iOS 10 or later could only support watchOS 3 – but, again, that wouldn’t solve the issue for watchOS 1.0 apps currently on the App Store. Quite a curious conundrum.

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