> Agreed. The iPhone was groundbreaking. The iPad somewhat. Since then they've done some great work on their laptop line, but that's about it. They were even late to the game with smartwatches.
They were late to the game with smartphones (Palm, BlackBerry), tablets (Gates was pushing them in the 1990s), and MP3 players ('No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.'), too. Seems to be their MO.
I'd disagree. I had a smartphone before I got an iPhone and the difference was astounding. Every phone I had before had a wealth of options (a SNES emulator was my favourite) but was an utter mess. I could never have given one to my parents to use.
The iPhone was a triumph in proving that smartphone software can make a very real, very huge difference to a device, and that hardware does not rule all.
Because it was a featurephone with a fancy interface, not a smartphone. But media tried to claim that because you touched the screen to do stuff, it was a smartphone...
They're never the first but they've always been take huge leaps forward with their products. The iPod and iPhone were light-years ahead of the competition at release. The iPad was as well though to a lesser extent. The Apple Watch is the first big product they've announced that wasn't clearly better than the competition.
The weird thing with the Apple Watch is that they're pretty early to the game.
iPod, iPhone, and iPad all followed the same basic template. Lots of companies built products in some product category (MP3 players, smartphones, tablets). The technology got to the point where they were decent, and people recognized them as something desirable albeit niche, but nothing really appealed to the masses. Then Apple took what was out there, refined the crap out of it with an eye to making it useful for regular people, and sold boatloads.
Smartwatches, in contrast, are still very much in the early days. Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches. This is really unusual for them, and makes me wonder if they aren't seriously jumping the gun.
> Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches.
That's completely inaccurate.
Samsung has released tons of smartwatches, as has Sony, Acer, LG, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Toshiba. All before the Apple Watch was even announced, so unless you expect us to believe that none of these are "big companies" your point is provably and factually wrong.
This is yet another example of "Apple invented it" from Apple fans well after the industry had been well established and Apple jumped in late (see e-payments for another great example).
I mean for crying out loud the Samsung Gear 2 and Moto 360 have been out almost a year ahead of Apple's watch and one has a camera and the other actually has the same physical dimensions and shape of a traditional mechanical watch. It is absurd to ignore how far this sector has come.
I'll admit that this is vague, but I don't see those companies "pushing" smartwatches. They're making them, sure, but they're niche products out of the gate. None of them are trying to reach the masses the way Microsoft was trying to popularize tablets, Nokia was trying to popularize smartphones, or a number of companies were trying to popularize MP3 players.
Not really sure what you're looking for when it comes to "pushing", then. Beware the echochamber, maybe. All the android watches have been pushing out quite a few versions, ads on tv, I've even had one of the people at an AT&T store try to sell me on the samsung watch he happened to be wearing at the time and they conveniently had on sale.
I don't really know what I'm looking for either, I just know that these product categories looked like they had lots of companies that tried to make it big and failed (or somewhat succeeded in the case of companies like Blackberry, but not on an Apple scale), while watches look like they haven't really tried.
I saw almost nothing of smartwatches before Apple's. I think I saw one two or three times in the world, and always at technical conferences. MP3 players and tablets, while far from ubiquitous before Apple's entry, were things I saw at least semi-occasionally out in the world. Smartphones were relatively common, although of course nothing like how they ended up being after Apple came in.
Neither have I, but I haven't seen a single Apple watch commercial either. It is the media frenzy about anything Apple. Other OEMs cant compete with that even by making superior products. I guess this more than anything completely puts me off anything Apple.
I don't watch TV so I can't judge commercials, but I've seen friends I'd never peg as being Apple followers or hardcore techies ordering and wearing them.
I agree here. Apple is indeed early to the game with the Apple Watch, and they're putting more clout behind it than other OEMs.
Remember, Apple was incredibly late to market with the product that saved them from eventual bankruptcy: the iPod. There was no shortage of MP3 players when the iPod launched.
And there was Blackberry and Palm long before the iPhone.
So, yeah, Apple is early here even if a year late. And they're taking their smart watch more seriously than any of their competitors.
Samsung's watches reminded me of Steve Ballamer's conspicuous announcement of a Windows 7 HP tablet the week before the first iPad announcement: little more than a sad, technologically and culturally inept attempt to buy relevance. Sure, there was a ridiculously outsized ad campaign to tout their innovation, but everyone knew that the OS it ran (Tizen) was dead in the water. Did anyone really believe that Samsung was building a wearables platform that wouldn't be quickly usurped by Google and Apple?
Samsung was the only company that really made an attempt to push a smart watch -- i.e., they paid for a big ad campaign. The others are just also-ran nerd gear.
Huh? Sony back when it was still called SonyEricsson pushed at least two models of watches that look surprisingly similar to Android Watch in operation. Never mind that they also produced a number of analog watches with notification strips (the watch part ran on a separate battery).
You're setting up a straw man. Nobody is saying Apple invents these devices — instead, Apple typically reinvents them in ways that make them both more useful and more appealing to consumers.
I responded to a point they made verbatim. I even quoted that point from within their post. How is that "setting up a straw man?"
> Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches.
You're trying to redirect discussion away from what they actually said (in so many words) to some other point that has nothing to do with anything (invent Vs reinvent).
I would argue Samsung copied the Apple Watch before it even existed, considering the Apple Watch is a tiny iPhone and Android is just an iPhone rip-off. So Samsung made an inelegant copy of a yet to exist Apple product that everyone knew was coming already.
What Apple did truly do first in the space, however, is make a smartwatch that's as much a watch as it is a mobile device. The Gear does not compete in the watch space from a fashion perspective, whereas the Apple Watch clearly does.
You're right, but you may also be missing the OP's point. Nearly all the reviews of the Apple Watch -- even the ones that are rather conflicted (which is also nearly all of them) -- suggest that it's the best smartwatch on the market, and I suspect watchOS 2.0 is going to increase that lead. I suspect there's a very good chance that by the end of 2015, more Apple Watches will have been sold than all other smartwatches put together.
Complaining that Apple doesn't invent things is a red herring. They didn't make the first MP3 player or digital music store, but for practical purposes they created the market for them, along with the market for per-track/album digital downloads. They didn't make the first smartphone, but nearly every smartphone that came after the iPhone looks way more like an iPhone than like anything else. They didn't make the first tablet computer but they made the first tablet computer that had mass-market success, and again, it's impossible to look at Android tablets and the Surface and deny the iPad influence. They've been doing this for going on three decades now -- as much as the Mac was a relative failure in pure commercial terms, it set a template for How User Interfaces Work that we're still largely following today.
Last but least: yes, the Moto 360 is circular. Yes, that makes it look more like a watch. We get it. :) But it's not a watch. It's a smartwatch. You know what kind of thing smartwatches have to display an awful lot? Lists. You know what kind of shape is better for displaying lists than a circle? A rectangle.
You can extend that template ("... and make it not suck") back to the original Macintosh, arguably even to the Apple I/II. In the case of the Watch they do seem to be pushing the pace, jumping in before the hardware allows them to combine obvious usefulness and that perception of a no-compromises experience. (To an extent that happened with the Macintosh, and they paid the price for it.) Part of the issue for Apple is that they're running out of gadgets to apply the template to: it seems the only things left are TV and radio, VR/AR and maybe one or two other non-watch wearable devices. Then all that's left are things like DSLR cameras or automobiles: things that tend to have nasty UIs but haven't reached the point where hardware specs are largely secondary to UI.
they were the first to capitalize on the pretentious side of smart watches. the other manufacturers were trying to sell function in the form where as Apple put the function well behind the form. I figure once they did the gold iPhone all bets were off on how far they would exploit this audience
They were late to the game with smartphones (Palm, BlackBerry), tablets (Gates was pushing them in the 1990s), and MP3 players ('No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.'), too. Seems to be their MO.