Apple will very likely dominate the wearables market the same way it dominated music players, but on a much larger scale. Other companies can try to compete, but I doubt engineering-led companies can even identify the factors critical for success in wearables.
I mean, Apple is now a trillion-dollar company, and I can count the number of times I see design being acknowledged as the main reason for success in one hand.
Nor will most tech companies have the culture necessary to make wearables work (they need to be willing to give power to designers at the expense of engineering).
Basically, the irony here is that everything the critics claimed would doom Apple has been instrumental to making the Apple Watch as successful as it has.
I look forward to the day when there is no longer a smartwatch market, only the Apple Watch market. First pebble, now Fitbit, maybe the Swiss watch industry next, perhaps the smartwatch and even tablet market in the future? By the time the Apple watch’s strategic advantage becomes clear, it will be too late for companies to catch up.
Design is, of course, important, but so is being willing to undertake a LONG-term plan.
DED's current series on the design of the first Apple SoCs (
https://roughlydrafted.de ) is a reminder of what Apple was doing in the years just before 2010, compared to what other companies (Samsung "who needs a fast GPU?", Qualcomm "who needs 64 bit?") were doing at the time. The core that went into the Apple Watch probably started its design at the same time as the original Apple Watch Series 0 was being shipped.
And Apple's supposed observers mostly STILL don't get it. Apple did everything the could to tell us this year (as opposed to previous years) that they had dramatically changed the circuit design methodology for their SoCs (perhaps for the first time since the A6?) The focus this year was not on performance but all about just how dramatically they've restructured everything for power; and if you compare the numbers they gave (number of separate clock domains, number of power isolation transistors) to, say, Intel, you'll see how dramatic this is.
This is all hard boring work that doesn't even have an immediate payoff -- this year's core is nicely faster and nicely lower power than last year's, but doesn't seem to be THAT different. But creating a solid foundation means they now have something they can build upon aggressively for the next five years...
Same thing at the OS level. Apple has been making changes for years to the lowest levels of the OS to increase modularization. Changes to scheduling, XPC (ie changes to IPC), this years drivers moved into user-mode. What's the point of all this? To me it looks like a long slow effort to undo all the most problematic parts of UNIX (and thus FINALLY realize the true promise of Mach). Some of this improves security (by not having everything in the kernel), some improves robustness (by not having a fault in the kernel, caused by a driver or bad IO, collapse the entire world), some improves utilization of cores, so that the OS (OS proper AND frameworks and user apps) operates better on many many cores.
But again it's unexciting work that isn't understood or appreciated by outsiders (though my guess is that MS gets it --- much of this work parallels what MS has also been doing).
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A Rolex keeps its functionality and value for decades. An Apple Watch for months.
They compete for space on your wrist, but one is an investment and the other is disposable.
The desire to show off never goes away.
BUT the way people show off changes every decade. You do realize there's a reason that computer billionaires don't wear suits? And it's not because they can't afford them...
In ten years the people who aggressively insists on showing off wealth via wearing an old-style watch rather than a smart device aren't going to be someone we're all jealous of, they're going to be the subject of "Old man yells at cloud" meme's and jokes. Like the way normal people roll their eyes when someone starts ranting about how their ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
