Seems like the Watch, whatever its ultimate potential, may be something better purchased in its second iteration:
> Let’s just get this out of the way: the Apple Watch, as I reviewed it for the past week and a half, is kind of slow. There’s no getting around it, no way to talk about all of its interface ideas and obvious potential and hints of genius without noting that sometimes it stutters loading notifications. Sometimes pulling location information and data from your iPhone over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi takes a long time. Sometimes apps take forever to load, and sometimes third-party apps never really load at all. Sometimes it’s just unresponsive for a few seconds while it thinks and then it comes back.
Data transfer between the phone and watch should be something that feels as seamless as magic...else, what's the point of getting the watch?
I get the impression a lot of this is due to the lack of native apps -- since every app is just running on the phone, it's guaranteed to be slower than the speed of your phone. (And, as the author here points out, that adds a significant incentive to just pull out your phone instead of using the watch.)
I wonder when Apple plans to add native support to the WatchKit SDK -- in a few months? A year? Or maybe they'll just wait for the second generation.
> unless I have an iPhone, I couldn't even use an Apple Watch
That's the case with everything the watch can do, I believe. I know it can only receive notifications from iOS devices, and I'm pretty sure that, similar the original iPhone, it won't even tell the time without first pairing to an iPhone. (The original iPhone wouldn't do anything without first being connected to iTunes).
There's so much about this that reminds me of the first iPhone. Even the aesthetics are similar, and it's nearly as thick (10.5mm vs 11.6mm, as compared to the 6.9mm iPhone 6).
Both the iPhone and the iPad became dramatically thinner and faster within two or three generations. They're dealing with tighter constraints here, but I fully expect a similar trajectory. The watch is going to look enormous and slow in a year or two.
So, brand new battery, one day of use, and he was at 10% by 7pm and was "hyper-aware" about how little battery life he had left, triggering a "wave of anxiety." According to one analysis (http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-lap...), Apple battery capacity can decay by 15% in a year. This means that by next year, his watch could be at 10% by 5pm. No. No way. Heck no. Not happening. Really regretting that I didn't get in on the Pebble Time Kickstarter now.
Gruber's review has it anywhere from 30-50% with moderate use at the end of the day. Only time it got below 10% was when he was doing "heavy testing". http://daringfireball.net/2015/04/the_apple_watch
At 3:10pm, this reviewer's update says, "It’s well after lunch. I’ve had this thing on my wrist for something like six hours now, and the truth is that I’ve barely used it."
That assumes they don't improve the battery life in software over the next year, which they probably will. But it also leaves you much less slack to install new and interesting apps on your watch. My original pebble used to last a longer than it does now, even though newer versions of the software have improved life dramatically. It's just so much more useful than version 1.0 that I use it more. It's OK for the battery life to drop from 6 days to 4; it's not OK to drop from 18 to 14...
Anything reasonably under a full 24 hour day precludes sleep tracking. That's extremely short compared to the Pebbles that get the better part of a week and can be used for sleep tracking without issue.
Squabbling over 16 vs 18 vs 20 hours doesn't matter.
Comparing battery life with other wristbands that have very different functionality doesn't mean much. By that measure, Android wear devices have infinitesimal battery life compared to a Rolex Oyster perpetual.
For what it is, the Apple watch has a much longer battery life than most people expected. Calling it 'extremely short'is misrepresentative.
>Comparing battery life with other wristbands that have very different functionality doesn't mean much. By that measure, Android wear devices have infinitesimal battery life compared to a Rolex Oyster perpetual.
An electric flying car with a two mile range may have drastically different functionality than an old diesel hatchback with a 15 gallon tank, but that doesn't mean that the electric flying car has sufficient range to meet the needs of more people.
See? I can do hyperbole, too.
>For what it is, the Apple watch has a much longer battery life than most people expected.
The fact that expectations were low doesn't change the fact that the battery life is still very limited.
I think smartwatches have potential to be highly useful devices. I think that usefulness is also significantly curtailed by current battery life. The fact that the Apple Watch can't be relied on to remain useful for even a single 24 hour day would lead me to call the battery life extremely short regardless of other wearables are doing. The fact that it's being outpaced by those other options just exacerbates it.
Actually you've walked back some of your hyperbole.
The fact is that battery life that satisfies the needs of the vast majority of users cannot reasonably be called 'extremely short'.
The Apple watch can clearly be relied on to remain useful for a single 24 hour day. Your statement to the contrary is flatly false, and is contradicted by both Apple's testing and reviewers experience.
I am not convinced at all that not supporting sleep tracking is a valid reason for wanting longer battery life for the Apple watch. It has to be charged at some point, so what happens then?
Sleep tracking is certainly valuable, but why is the watch the right hardware for that? Many people don't like wearing watches in bed, and sleep tracking can be done with much simpler hardware than the Apple Watch. Why not do it using a $30 headless sensor instead?
Apple themselves only rate the watch for 18 hours. So you're contending that Apple is intentionally listing a battery 50% lower than what the device can actually do?
....or it can't be relied to remain useful for a continuous 24 hour period.
So where's the flatly false statement here?
>Sleep tracking is certainly valuable, but why is the watch the right hardware for that? Many people don't like wearing watches in bed, and sleep tracking can be done with much simpler hardware than the Apple Watch. Why not do it using a $30 headless sensor instead?
Sleep tracking is just a single, obvious use where it makes a difference now.
What I'm contending is that wearables that require the use to actively think about battery life aren't going to live up to the potential of the devices as a class.
I went absurd with the flying car thing because I feel like you're being kind of ridiculous here, but electric cars actually do highlight exactly what I'm talking about. Electric cars didn't become viable for the vast majority of people until ranges got to the point that they could easily exceed the distances people travel on a regular basis.
And because you still don't seem to understand what I mean by "extremely short" and want to keep harping on it - if the rumor mill thought an electric car was going to launch with a 5 mile range and it launched with a 10 mile range, it might be exceeding expectations, but I'd still call that "extremely short" and feel it worthy of criticism. It may be better than what people were expecting and it may even do things its competitors don't, but it's still a fundamental problem.
I will say this again: I'm interested in wearables, I think they have a ton of potential, and I think you're insane if you don't think 18 hours of battery life drastically limits their realistic utility.
> The fact that the Apple Watch can't be relied on to remain useful for even a single 24 hour day...
This statement is false. Apple's 18 hour battery claim clearly supports that, because the vast majority of humans sleep for 6 hours or more.
In your reply you added the word 'continuous' to your earlier statement to create: "...or it can't be relied on to remain useful for a continuous 24 hour period."
That's not what you originally stated, and it's irrelevant anyway because humans don't need 24 hours of continuous use from devices.
Charging a device every night while you sleep requires you to actively think about battery life less than a device that only needs to be on some nights because for those devices you have to think about whether to charge them or not. Of course you can always mitigate this by charging every night.
Therefore, if not having to think about battery life is an important criterion, the Apple watch does live up to the potential of the devices as a class every bit as much as a device with longer battery life.
Of course a device with longer battery life does have advantages - e.g. Going camping away from power for a few days, etc. but this just illustrates the point that longer battery life supports less common use cases, and is without question not a 'fundamental problem'.
Lack of support for uncommon use cases cannot be reasonably said to 'drastically limit realistic utility'.
Like I said, I agree that longer battery life provides an improvement, but it is a marginal one.
Claims like 'extremely short' and 'drastically limited' are exaggerations.
>Charging a device every night while you sleep requires you to actively think about battery life less than a device that only needs to be on some nights because for those devices you have to think about whether to charge them or not. Of course you can always mitigate this by charging every night.
>Therefore, if not having to think about battery life is an important criterion, the Apple watch does live up to the potential of the devices as a class every bit as much as a device with longer battery life.
Okay, I concede. You win the mental olympics gymnastics competition.
> That assumes they don't improve the battery life in software over the next year, which they probably will.
Honestly, they might.
But I'd urge caution. If you drop down $350 on the "basic" version of this thing, then you're paying for what is on offer right now today. You cannot then complain if Apple didn't substantially improve the experience over the next year (rather than just releasing 2.0 and leaving 1.0 people $350 poorer with a device which they can barely even resell).
All I am saying is, if you're happy with the Apple Watch as it exists on the day you buy it then you have nothing to lose. If you know you're going to be unhappy with it and will sit around waiting for Apple to fix it, then maybe instead just wait and buy it when it is actually good (or 2.0, whichever comes first).
I wouldn't worry that you didn't get in on the Kickstarter. You could've saved like $20 on the final price, but I don't think that's a big deal when the Pebble Time finally comes to market.
The Apple Watch marks a new stage in consumerism in that it is effectively a gift FOR your iPhone. It doesn't work without an iPhone but it makes the iPhone's workload a little easier. It's also precious, expensive and intimate. What better way to show affection to your beloved iDevice.
Is there some way to get rid of the background animations in this article? I'm sure it seemed real neat in the design meeting, but it's very distracting. I couldn't finish the article.
I thought they were kinda painful, too. Please don't make my browser stutter, websites that are just trying to display an article whose whole point is the text.
It's the typical overly "rich" parallax-scrolling-images-behind-the-text stuff, though now some of them are videos, too, and sometimes they stay anchored for a while, and sometimes they play at the speed you are scrolling the text, for some reason.
Agree, yes it might 'wow' you at first, but when you see this used more and more on other sites, the novelty is gone.
What does it really add, other than slowing down your scrolling (my laptop: i7, discrete gfx) and briefly distracting you while you focused on the text.
>Paying for coffee at The Café Grind in Manhattan involved nothing more than double-clicking the communications button on the Watch and holding my wrist over the terminal; it beeped and the payment processed instantly.
That's what makes this review great. Following the author around for the day while he uses the watch gives us a much better impression of what the watch can do and what it's useful for than a more typical technical review.
> Let’s just get this out of the way: the Apple Watch, as I reviewed it for the past week and a half, is kind of slow. There’s no getting around it, no way to talk about all of its interface ideas and obvious potential and hints of genius without noting that sometimes it stutters loading notifications. Sometimes pulling location information and data from your iPhone over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi takes a long time. Sometimes apps take forever to load, and sometimes third-party apps never really load at all. Sometimes it’s just unresponsive for a few seconds while it thinks and then it comes back.
Data transfer between the phone and watch should be something that feels as seamless as magic...else, what's the point of getting the watch?