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Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

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Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#11

Post by graeme »

cozzyd wrote: post #7
flyinglizard wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get why battery life is important beyond 24h. I just put the watch on its charger at night. Only downside is during traveling, one more thing to carry and possibly the watch won’t make it through excruciating international travel. So it won’t matter to me if the watch lasts a day or a week, it’s off my wrist when I sleep and goes on it’s charger.

If you want to track your sleep that doesn't work so well

Everyone says this without trying it. I wear my Apple Watch to sleep. In the morning I shower and charge it. It is fully charged and lasts till next morning.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#12

Post by valine »

jpm_sd wrote: post #8

Google put a ton of R&D effort into gesture sensing with short range radar (Soli) but it doesn't seem to have gone much of anywhere as yet. I don't think this type of interface is as important as the author claims. https://atap.google.com/soli/

Google's gesture sensing went nowhere because it was laughably bad. It routinely failed to recognize gestures, was poorly integrated into the OS, and couldn't even be sold in several countries because of its use of radar.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#13

Post by judge2020 »

jpm_sd wrote: post #8

Google put a ton of R&D effort into gesture sensing with short range radar (Soli) but it doesn't seem to have gone much of anywhere as yet. I don't think this type of interface is as important as the author claims. https://atap.google.com/soli/

It was such a gimmick on the Pixel 4, probably because it required you position your hand over your phone. However, if you can just make the gesture of turning a knob regardless of your hand position (which a wearable probably could do), that seems like it'd have a use case.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#14

Post by emsy »

lettergram wrote: post #4

Pebble IMO was and still is the best wearable watch. I don’t think anything worked better largely due to the long battery life and generally the e-ink design. Had they added different wrist bands with smart tech in it, it would have gone even further. I don’t really think apple has a decade lead, what they do have is minimal innovation they’re competing with. AND more importantly, a brand and ecosystem. That being sa…

I had several pebbles (2 b/w and the colored one) and now have an apple watch. You don’t know what you’re talking about, the tech in the apple watch is years ahead. There’s much to criticize about the apple watch but it does the important things just so much better than the competition. I also never understood the focus on battery life. I put my watch on the charger whenever I go to sleep. If I forget it either still has more than 50% charge or I can charge it quickly. I don’t care for edge cases (camping etc.)

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#15

Post by handrous »

usaphp wrote: post #9
cozzyd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to track your sleep that doesn't work so well

I never understood the point of tracking your sleep or even steps. It’s not like knowing that I had N hours of deep sleep will somehow change my sleep the following night. Same with steps, it’s pretty easy to understand without a tracker when you were active and when you weren’t.

I think people use them to: 1) figure out what's affecting their sleep quality, not necessarily just duration, and 2) trigger alarms within a window, rather than at a specific time, when the device registers that they're between REM sleep cycles so waking up to the alarm is less shocking and unpleasant, and 3) have an alarm or pager-duty-type alert that doesn't bother anyone in the bed with them.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#17

Post by least »

I'm pretty skeptical that Apple has a decade-long lead on any of the other big players in the market. Any innovations that one company can make can be more quickly adopted than new innovations occur and there's nothing as far as software goes that Apple is uniquely positioned to create. The other factors mentioned such as silicon tech being years ahead of the competition is one that is hardly a factor for the smart watch category.

On the other hand this is always the case and Apple's been the best at creating a general consumer wearable that appeals to the masses. Its integration into the apple ecosystem is a big selling point and that's probably the biggest factor that is basically impossible for competitors to replicate.

On a tangential note, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the amount of work that Apple has put into its accessibility features. Assistive Touch on the apple watch will probably serve a remarkably small portion of the user base and perhaps costs more to develop than the return they'll ever see on it. Still, year after year Apple keeps advancing accessibility features in all of its products. This is definitely an area where big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft excel at.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#19

Post by kentlyons »

flyinglizard wrote: post #6
lettergram wrote: post #4

Pebble IMO was and still is the best wearable watch. I don’t think anything worked better largely due to the long battery life and generally the e-ink design. Had they added different wrist bands with smart tech in it, it would have gone even further. I don’t really think apple has a decade lead, what they do have is minimal innovation they’re competing with. AND more importantly, a brand and ecosystem. That being sa…

I don’t get why battery life is important beyond 24h. I just put the watch on its charger at night. Only downside is during traveling, one more thing to carry and possibly the watch won’t make it through excruciating international travel. So it won’t matter to me if the watch lasts a day or a week, it’s off my wrist when I sleep and goes on it’s charger.

Several years ago I did some research (published paper here: http://kentlyons.net/pubs/dumbwatch-iswc15.pdf) and one of the findings I thought was interesting was there were 3 groups of people that implied different battery needs. One seemed similar to what you describe: people that took their watch off at night (so could charge it then). Another group wore their watch 24/7. And the final group which I wasn't expecting, but made sense in retrospect, was people that only wore their watch when out of the house. When they got home they'd take it off like setting down their keys.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#20

Post by drewg123 »

lettergram wrote: post #4

Pebble IMO was and still is the best wearable watch. I don’t think anything worked better largely due to the long battery life and generally the e-ink design. Had they added different wrist bands with smart tech in it, it would have gone even further. I don’t really think apple has a decade lead, what they do have is minimal innovation they’re competing with. AND more importantly, a brand and ecosystem. That being sa…

You should look at Garmin. They have models with battery life measured in weeks, not hours like the Apple watch. My 3+ year old 645 still gets 6 days of battery life.
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