You need to stop with the Apple Worship. They are NOT gods. They're men and women that can bleed and disappear, break a bone, get burnt out and quit, or suffer any other kind of vulnerability. Apple is NOT a person nor a religious entity. It's a company with a building. It's NOT the brand name or physical location, or that 'spit shiny' gloss white-out logo that makes the products good. It's the people inside that does.
I will stop when the unjustified doomsaying and negativity surrounding Apple stops.
Jawbone did'nt go out of business. They're shifting gears. READ the article. They're being smart about going the health/medical route which is the specialized focus. The day Timmy leaves Apple is when the Apple foolishness STOPS ( hopefully ). The Watch took up a lot of their R&D and time for about 4-5 years. This probably explains why one small product siphoned so much of the engineers' time away from other things like....iMac or Mac Pro for the last 5 years without any progressive change ( despite the little evolutionary spec bumps ).
Why would they shift gears, if not because the consumer market is not panning out for them? And the chief reason is that the Apple Watch is sucking all the profits out of the wearables market.
And one more thing: Fitbit is still here and kicking a$$. So are the other competitors such as Withings. The only way for Apple to stay competitive in the wearables is to BRING. THE. PRICE. DOWN. and cut back on overkill features, and beef up the battery life to more than 3 days. 12 hours is unacceptable. And NO, the crown should never be used for opening an app.
In short, do what Pebble did? For all the good that did them.
The Apple Watch lasts 2 days between charges.
Fitbit reported a dramatic drop in profits and recently laid off a bunch of their workforce. Their spare cash on hand is roughly equivalent to one year of operating costs. In short, this next year will be make or break for them.
Fitbit is in a more precarious position than people seem to realise here. I am betting they will be one of the next few companies to exit the wearables market.
What the hell happened to simplicity design? The watch OS is overkill with too many apps. It's trying to be everything for everyone which is not a good idea. All they do is cram, cram, cram everything into each product until it's become saturated where they can't stand out from the competition.
This is my current Apple Watch app layout.
Here's what I am currently doing on my Apple Watch.
1) Apple Pay.
2) Interacting with notifications. I love being able to triage incoming email and dictate short replies to messages from my wrist, especially when my phone is not on me.
3) Siri on the wrist can be handy. I am using it to calculate discounted prices of products in shopping malls (e.g. "What is 70% of $139”)
4) Use the workout app to track my runs. Loving the heart rate sensor as well (not sure how accurate it is though).
5) Have apps like 1Password and Authy saved to my dock. I can now retrieve passwords and 2FA codes directly from my wrist.
6) It's just an nice watch all round (albeit one I have to charge every 1-2 days).
I don't feel like my Apple Watch is unnecessarily bloated or needlessly complicated. I came from a pebble watch and I am loving the added functionality.
There are very good wearables out there besides the Apple Watch. And I got bad news for you. NONE of the active people I know in fencing class wear an Apple Watch. NONE. They wear Fitbit Charges. In fact, my coach's brother works for Fitbit which is how she got one for free. I've seen it in person and it's well built.
So Fitbit is supposedly doing well because they gave someone a free sample of their product (meaning, no revenue)?
Fitbit is experiencing declining sales, and what stock they did sell, they had to reduce prices to achieve those sales.
What I am seeing from my colleagues who wear fitbits are that they don't result last very long. 6-9 months on average, and most don't last a year. Compared to an Apple Watch which is projected to last 3 years on average and suddenly, the higher initial selling price of the Watch doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all.
Fitbit is in free fall, at a time when Apple Watch momentum is building. It's telling that Fitbit saw the need to purchase Pebble and enter the smartwatch market, precisely because Apple's renewed emphasis on health has impacted it gravely.
The price of the Apple Watch doesn't need to drop. Apple will do what it has always done. Taken an emerging product category with a frustrating user experience and delivered a polished product made possible by its control over both the hardware and software.
And in the process proceed to suck out all the profit from the industry, leaving only scraps behind for the rest of the competition to fight over.
