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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

#161

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #136
amelius wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's weakness is now their precarious position in bed with China, which will take decades to undo. But this holds for the entire world economy.

Kind of, but among the largest tech companies, Apple uniquely runs most of its revenue through the hardware category, and gets a lot of revenue from China. Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook all use hardware from China, but most of their revenue comes through software interactions. Google does not officially even operate in China. Amazon has a limited corporate footprint in China. I think it’s reasonable…

Both Google and Facebook have substantial proportions of their revenue from CN based advertisers.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#162

Post by sfblah »

I find the article’s mention of the “static smart speaker mirage” unconvincing. I use Amazon Echo at home and have found its voice recognition and capabilities vastly superior to those of Siri. In my opinion it’s fair to say this is an area where Apple is flat out losing to the competition. I too had assumed the watch or phone would provide all that functionality, but it appears I was mistaken.

I think the major lead Apple has in wearables has to do with ecosystem. I wear and Apple Watch because I want to listen to Apple Music while running. Doing so is clumsy with any other device.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#163

Post by smoldesu »

whynotminot wrote: post #123
least wrote: post #17

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 w…

> silicon tech being years ahead of the competition is one that is hardly a factor for the smart watch category. What? This doesn't even make sense. This is by far the most important lead Apple has. Their ability to put performant and efficient chips into tiny devices is why they have such a software edge. Other Android wearables suck because the underlying hardware is not able to power the experience without signifi…

I don't really agree. I've owned a Fossil Carlyle 5 smartwatch with WearOS and an Apple Watch 3, and Apple's lead is definitely on the software side of things. I actually really dislike the material build of the Apple watch. The screen is designed to expose as much of the surface area as possible to scuffs and scratches, while the body of the watch feels larger than any other smartwatch I've used. The Apple Watch got hotter than the Fossil, somehow, and the sensor bump is also much more pronounced.

Anyways, it's not like this is up for debate anyhow. Ask any analyst who's watched the industry for the last decade, they'll still tell you that Apple's advantage is in the software world. If iMessage and MacOS were available on other hardware, Apple would be selling two crazy handfuls of nothing to customers. The average consumer doesn't care if their laptop has faulty graphics, a keyboard failing en-masse or soldered storage. They just want the little blue bubble to pop up when they send a message from their computer. Recognizing that, Apple arguably makes more compromises than anyone else in the industry. Their concept of "iteration" really only involves bringing their product to the next most common denominator.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#164

Post by smoldesu »

908B64B197 wrote: post #94
jiggawatts wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the Apple Watch health features are blocked in Australia because they were literally too lazy to submit the paperwork to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)! All a competitor has to do is submit their paperwork and they won't get any competition from Apple. Easy!

> Most of the Apple Watch health features are blocked in Australia because they were literally too lazy to submit the paperwork to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)! Why duplicate all the work done by the FDA? Just use their certificate. Save the taxpayer some money.

Because the FDA doesn't really do any work in the first place.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#165

Post by doublepg23 »

lscotte wrote: post #99
least wrote: post #17

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 w…

I had an Android smartwatch years before Apple even came out with one. Typical Apple reality distortion field in effect.

I’ve had multiple wearOS watches and switched to the iOS platform in the last year. It’s frankly night and day, for the extra bulk in the wearOS watches you get worse battery life and dismal performance. A lot of the blame can be placed on Qualcomm’s back for not keeping pace with wearable processors. I’m wondering if Google’s Whitechapel and their cooperation with Samsung can improve this at all, but it’s currently a sad state of affairs. Dieter of The Verge and Linus of Linus Tech Tips have made all the same points scattered throughout this thread.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#166

Post by whynotminot »

smoldesu wrote: post #163
whynotminot wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> silicon tech being years ahead of the competition is one that is hardly a factor for the smart watch category. What? This doesn't even make sense. This is by far the most important lead Apple has. Their ability to put performant and efficient chips into tiny devices is why they have such a software edge. Other Android wearables suck because the underlying hardware is not able to power the experience without signifi…

I don't really agree. I've owned a Fossil Carlyle 5 smartwatch with WearOS and an Apple Watch 3, and Apple's lead is definitely on the software side of things. I actually really dislike the material build of the Apple watch. The screen is designed to expose as much of the surface area as possible to scuffs and scratches, while the body of the watch feels larger than any other smartwatch I've used. The Apple Watch got…

> I don't really agree. I've owned a Fossil Carlyle 5 smartwatch with WearOS and an Apple Watch 3, and Apple's lead is definitely on the software side of things.

I don't disagree that the lead is in software. I'm saying it's also in Hardware too. You're making comparisons to the Apple Watch 3--that came out more than three and a half years ago. It's not helping your point that you feel the hardware for your android watch is in the same ballpark as Apple's oldest supported piece.

> Ask any analyst who's watched the industry for the last decade, they'll still tell you that Apple's advantage is in the software world

Please don't willfully miss my point. I'm agreeing with you that Apple has a software advantage. I'm telling you the software advantage exists in no small part due to the hardware advantage. Apple's SoC prowess is a massive advantage.

>If iMessage and MacOS were available on other hardware, Apple would be selling two crazy handfuls of nothing to customers.

Are we talking about the watch or not?

>They just want the little blue bubble to pop up when they send a message from their computer.

Damnit. If you had started with this line I would have known to not bother reading more of your post.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#167

Post by MichaEiler »

pjmlp wrote: post #155
shados wrote: post #148

I know it's not quite the same and is a lot more complicated, but... What was Microsoft (PocketPC) and Palm's lead in hand held computing back in the days, right before Apple shit over everything they did in one announcement? Wearable as currently imagined kind of suck. Making them better while keeping the same concept is just gonna make something that sucks faster/lighter. Someone needs to come in and take the world…

In what concerns Microsoft, if they had doubled down on WP7 model (Silverlight + XNA) and just opened the C and C++ toolchain to app developers (NDK style), instead of rebooting the ecosystem multiple times, their stuff would probably still be around.

Thank you. I was wondering about this too. Breaking app compatibility between WP7 and WP8 was IMHO the death sentence for the platform...

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#168

Post by rubicon33 »

makecheck wrote: post #156

Apple’s lead seems to be more in tangential things that are very hard to replicate: Apple Pay, supporting the highly popular iMessage, etc. These can never work with any other device. There are definite flaws in the device. I find buttons unnecessarily hard to tap for instance (they should offer more vertical space), and the face is so sensitive that it routinely triggers unwanted actions. It is really annoying to st…

To start a timer, raise your watch to your mouth and simply say “start 1 hour timer”.

You don’t even need to say “hey Siri”. It starts listening on the gesture of raising it to your mouth. Genius.

Raise watch to mouth and try things…

“Text Danielle ____” “Open Pandora” “Open wallet”

There are also settings to disable active watch face unless it’s raised. I have that enabled and never have issues accidentally hitting it. Check your settings and let me know if that helps.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#169

Post by red_trumpet »

gnu8 wrote: post #124

The article seems to be saying that Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables over a list of companies that don't even make wearables. That is a clever trick for giving the article a bold title, but the result is a fairly uninteresting and uninformative Apple jerk-off piece. It is akin to saying "Quaker Oats has a 150-year lead in edibles" where Apple doesn't even make food.

Yeah, the Apple Watch isn't even 10 years old...

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#170

Post by MichaEiler »

snowwrestler wrote: post #134
gnu8 wrote: post #124

The article seems to be saying that Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables over a list of companies that don't even make wearables. That is a clever trick for giving the article a bold title, but the result is a fairly uninteresting and uninformative Apple jerk-off piece. It is akin to saying "Quaker Oats has a 150-year lead in edibles" where Apple doesn't even make food.

So who are the most capable competitors to Apple in wearables? Among my friends and colleagues, those who don’t buy Apple Watch often buy Garmin watches instead. In the area of fitness tracking watches, Garmin seems to be serious competition. It’s missing the full app ecosystem of Apple Watch but I think you can send messages and email to some Garmin watches over 4G, for example.

Around here (Austria/Switzerland, Country Side) people only wear smart watches for fitness purposes. Meaning most folks buy Garmin or Suunto devices. Another reason might be that the market share of Apple is lower in general compared to the US/UK.

Personally I love my Garmin Fenix watch. It lasts a week with light usage or up to 18 hours when using GPS. It also offers NFC payment. Notifications might be supported but I honestly don't need yet another device to bother me with messages and such... Meaning I disabled all of them ;).

On another note: Apple might simply be successful because of consistency. They've been iterating and improving on there smartwatch platform for years whiles others change their whole product every few years (samsung) or simply neglect it (google).

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