Apple’s Best Hope for New Headset: a Smartwatch-Like Trajectory

Anecdotally I was in a similar mindset about the Apple Watch for a while after the novelty wore off. I found the notification functionality (my main use case when I first got it) incredibly distracting, and having to remember to charge it constantly annoying. So I stopped actively wearing it for a period of time.

It was only once I started using it for its health tracking capabilities and turned off many of the annoying notifications that I started regularly wearing it.

Is it as essentially as having my phone with me when I leave the house? Ultimately, no, and it does require more thought about how to squeeze the most utility out of it (when compared to a smartphone) but I think the reason it’s so popular is the flexibility it affords:

- Sport tracking watches are great at tracking everything down to a fine detail BUT you wouldn’t want to be seen wearing them out to a dinner

- Traditional (non-smart) watches look very nice as a fashion accessory BUT are useless for fitness and integrating other data into the faster-to-read watch form factor

I was super-skeptical about the Apple Watch.

Particularly as it didn't show the time. (Initial versions didn't have enough power to keep the display on all the time).

Apple finally got me by fixing that and by making their phones too large to carry around while running. Grrr. But glad they did.

It's been eye-opening. The fitness and sleep tracking are fantastic, and if you are having issues in that area, potentially life-changing.

I was also resisting contactless payment, being a typical German "cash is good" guy. And I still think cash is good. But during the pandemic everything went contactless, and Apply Pay with the watch is just super convenient. Always there, no PIN to enter or signature to verify, ever.

Life-saver when my wallet got stolen on holiday.

And of course super-comfy listening to podcasts, books or music while exercising or on public transport.

Since I got it with the cell radio, I nowadays often just leave my phone at home. Who needs to carry that around? And no phone, no social media :-)

As someone who really does enjoy being terminally online, but who also enjoys being out in the world, I have to say I'm kind of excited about the possibility here.

The whole wearable & ubiquitous computing dream greatly motivated me as a grade schooler. The idea was compelling then & still interesting/hopeful now. Given the specs (below) of the hallmark display, the p4 Private Eye (1989), I am excited to see what we can do. And Apple's general competency at hardware will be interesting to see at play as we go-forth-again:

> Mounted on a pair of glasses, with a 720 x 280 pixel red monochrome screen in a 8.89 x 3.81 x 3.18mm casing, the actual display measured 1.25-inches diagonally but appeared as though you were viewing a 15-inch monitor from 18-inches away.

The possibility of me owning an Apple product is up from 0%.

Apple has come a long way from the time when not even the engineering team working on a product would know what it really was until Steve Jobs unveiled it on stage. Now everything gets leaked like at every other company.

Did Apple even have a hundred executives in 2008?