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Jony Ive's Design Team Nixed Apple Watch Band With Sensors
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Let's take a step back to where this began.
I have both the MS band and Apple Watch , the MS band is much more accurate....what part of that are you having trouble with?
Cause.....and this is the deal breaker, as per the article on this threat, HR monitors which monitor bottom of the wrist are found to be more accurate .....read the actual article!!
How does a video on a dead chicken relate to my own experiece ...... Given you don't own the MS band... And maybe not even an Apple Watch.... This is amusing at best.
Aka. What is your point ? Do you even read the articles ?
Not really a good comparison. The original telephone was a fixed device. A better comparison was to the later cordless phones...which had to be recharged. I actually owned a Microsoft cordless phone for some years.
The original cell phones looked like walkie talkies (brick like devices), which had to be recharged. As tech advanced, those evolved into smaller flip phones (mine was a Motorolo), and later still into smartphone devices like the iPhone. All has to be recharged. I actually tried to trademark the term "Smartphone" in the early 90s (for a non mobile product). The letter I got back from the US Trademark Office said Microsoft already owned the term.
I bought the watch when it came out and one for my wife some months later. Both are worn daily and both have only the original band, with no interest in a new band. I have yet to encounter anyone else, anywhere, wearing an Apple Watch. I know lots of folks with fitness bands, including a few relatives. Virtually everyone I know has an iPhone.
I've always been more of a function over form person, but that's just me. Most are probably more form based. I would welcome a thicker iPhone for more battery life. The most useful accessories I have purchased in the last year or so is a wireless chargeable case for the iPhone and an assortment of QI chargers including a car mounted one. They were very low cost, easy to use, and ended, literately overnight, my issues with battery life.
The future for AW is still a story not complete. We love ours, but it appears the public has a slightly different view based on the lack of seeing them anywhere. Maybe I'm just not in the right places, but that's our experience to date. My gym gear came from Amazon and is at home.
The AW OS has improved greatly and the user experience improved as a result. It's been a good combo of form and function and battery use has improved (at first when the AW hit the charger at night it was close to out, now it tends to be 30-40% left.)
The band/sensor story is interesting. Time, and consumer direction, will tell where it all goes.
What ****** calibration?
If you are referring to the apple support page on calibration.....wow have you got it wrong, that is advice how to improve activity tracking and not calibrating the device to improve HR accuracy.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204516
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Look Jony, we wish to fit a good quality desktop class GPU into your desktop iMac computers to give Apple users the best graphics speed and quality that's available on the market today to an average PC user.
In order to fit these, we need to increase the thickness of the rear of the iMac Desktop by 10 mm, and add into the aluminium casing at the rear custom cooling areas for some heat pipe and vent cooling.
Sorry, no that's not the design we are after, carry on with the low end laptop GPU's, overheating systems and shave another 1mm off the current desktop as THAT's what Apple users want "I HAVE DECIDED"
In order to fit these, we need to increase the thickness of the rear of the iMac Desktop by 10 mm, and add into the aluminium casing at the rear custom cooling areas for some heat pipe and vent cooling.
Sorry, no that's not the design we are after, carry on with the low end laptop GPU's, overheating systems and shave another 1mm off the current desktop as THAT's what Apple users want "I HAVE DECIDED"
Yet when they do listen - and increase iPhone screen size, for example - people here find a way to moan anyway!
But it is what I said. Design is mostly about subtraction, about taking the universe of possibilities and removing the parts that don't work. Consider the classic, "how do you carve a statue of an elephant?"
We've seen over and over again what happens when engineers drive this process. You get feature cram, bloatware, products that do a lot, but nothing very well. Apple doesn't do it this way, and it ticks off a lot of people. We see the complaints here daily about how Apple is totally losing it if they haven't added one or another pet geek feature to their products. Just wait until the next generation Apple Watch comes out. These boards will be full of comments such as, "why didn't they do that the first time?" and "why is it still not round?" The answers are actually pretty obvious, but not if you look at design as primarily an engineering exercise.
But you don't really need to wait. Just read the comments in this thread.
Steve Jobs liked the horrible transluscent iMacs. He proudly presented the execrable iBook, which was like the Windows XP Teletubbies interface made physical. He liked iPods with shiny aluminum backs that scratched if you breathed on them. Stop invoking Steve Jobs.
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And let's hire Angela for $100 million or whatever ridiculous figure it was.
What you may find "overpriced," others find reasonable. Watch bands sell well and the margins are great. Watch owners are happy getting what they want and Apple makes money - sounds good to me - a win-win. Why does that trouble you?
Similarly, some people purchase expensive jeans, cars, homes, meals, vacations, refrigerators, bicycles, paintings, purses, flashlights, skis, socks, pens, speakers, laptops, running shoes, watches, TVs, tools, smartphones, and on and on. And some people don't. The last thing that troubles me is what others do with their money.
Yes, I wouldn't like the news that I could buy a $129 band that added GPS functionality to my Apple Watch.
You need to slow your roll cause you're not making your case here or with countless others and definitely not making friends. You must be young... I hope you're young...
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Excellent read (the full article is worth a read). The only bit I disagree with is the end, where he effectively says Apple is doomed to fail without Steve Jobs. They're undeniably still learning to innovate without him, but the article itself is proof that they understand the basic concept: they push their engineers to improve form and general "pleasant usability" without sacrificing function. Apple's critics say they are all about form over function (and sometimes they slip up and that happens, like with the iPhone 4's "Antennagate") but I think the Apple magic is in understanding that they're not mutually exclusive and you can actually have both without those sacrifices if you push your engineers hard enough. Engineer types are naturally lazy and naturally seek out the easiest/quickest "good enough" solution, so it takes a leader who understands this and pushes for better. For all that we love and need them, if engineer types were left to their own devices, we'd still be pulling the antenna out the top of an iPhone to take a call.
A classic example is I've been looking at PC laptops in my impatience for the new MacBook Pro. The only thing that appears better than it on the surface (I've done a lot of searching) is the Dell XPS, but then you dig down past the professional 'reviews' and get to the end user experiences, and they're rubbish. Full of complaints, primarily about coil whine, with quite a few comments about the trackpads being unpleasant to use. This is exactly the sort of thing where Steve Jobs would've said "no, this is unacceptable, go away and come back when it doesn't whine any more and when I can use the trackpad for more than an hour without even noticing it, never mind hating it". And the designers would mutter something about coil whine being 'unavoidable', accidental trackpad touches being 'unpredictable' and go away inhaling through their teeth, but some time later they've done it. The end result is a notebook you enjoy using - not one that looks good on the shelf but after an hour of use your ears are ringing and your fingers are tripping over themselves trying to stop the cursor from flying off somewhere and accidentally dragging things.
Good leadership didn't die with Steve Jobs, and obviously it's hard to tell from outside the company but the fact I feel that even the "best" of the competing products don't hold a candle to a MacBook once people actually sit down and use them, proves to me that they still understand what it takes to make the best products of their class.
Whether that will continue to apply to the new MacBook Pro, will obviously be an interesting test, with it having new design elements to it.
A classic example is I've been looking at PC laptops in my impatience for the new MacBook Pro. The only thing that appears better than it on the surface (I've done a lot of searching) is the Dell XPS, but then you dig down past the professional 'reviews' and get to the end user experiences, and they're rubbish. Full of complaints, primarily about coil whine, with quite a few comments about the trackpads being unpleasant to use. This is exactly the sort of thing where Steve Jobs would've said "no, this is unacceptable, go away and come back when it doesn't whine any more and when I can use the trackpad for more than an hour without even noticing it, never mind hating it". And the designers would mutter something about coil whine being 'unavoidable', accidental trackpad touches being 'unpredictable' and go away inhaling through their teeth, but some time later they've done it. The end result is a notebook you enjoy using - not one that looks good on the shelf but after an hour of use your ears are ringing and your fingers are tripping over themselves trying to stop the cursor from flying off somewhere and accidentally dragging things.
Good leadership didn't die with Steve Jobs, and obviously it's hard to tell from outside the company but the fact I feel that even the "best" of the competing products don't hold a candle to a MacBook once people actually sit down and use them, proves to me that they still understand what it takes to make the best products of their class.
Whether that will continue to apply to the new MacBook Pro, will obviously be an interesting test, with it having new design elements to it.
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True, but people who wear watches generally set it down in the same place every night. Not much different.
I don't agree
Engineers get things done, and done right and well, designers often ponce around making things worse.
You think Pepsi bottles, light bulbs, razor blades, Chains, a million and one things are bad because engineers made the machines?
Design is the frilly fashion on the top of the engineers REAL work.
Engineers are extremely skilled and talented people we own the modern world to.
They can make a machine that does 1 task or a thousand tasks.
A lorry for hauling iron ore, or a watch with 1000 moving parts.
The look/design is someone playing at the end of things. And often making something WORSE simply for the look of it.
Some of us actually wear watches because of their looks as well.. To be honest if Apple had focused on making a Garmin competitor I might have bought it as well, but would never wear it every single day as I do today (with different bands almost daily)
Great point. First, I don't wear a Watch to bed. Second, Apple's inductive charging is so easy, it's seamless. lastly, the Apple Watch charges relatively quickly for those making an issue about battery life or charging in general.
If Apple had decided to make the world's most accurate and precise mechanical watch to rival Patek Phillipe, then I would probably pay thousands of USD for it.
As the Apple Watch currently is designed, I wouldn't wear it even if it were handed to me personally by Cook and autographed by him and Ive.
It doesn't matter to me how many different bands I can wear with a watch I dislike.
As the Apple Watch currently is designed, I wouldn't wear it even if it were handed to me personally by Cook and autographed by him and Ive.
It doesn't matter to me how many different bands I can wear with a watch I dislike.
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Right. As long as you don't wear your watch to sleep or can spare an hour in the morning to charge it's a seamless experience.
I thought the end part was the most interesting. This was the actual text for the end of the article:
You may remember that right after he died there was all this stuff about "can Apple go on?" Could anybody have the capacity to do that job (Jobs’s)? All I can say at this point is that the jury is still out, but so far I think the signs are kind of pointing to "No." It’s definitely not the same place.
I don't feel like he was saying that Apple is doomed, just that Apple was a very unique company with Steve Jobs in charge, and nobody will ever be able to replace him. Personally I feel that Apple has already peaked, and there's no way to recapture the past. But due to inertia Apple will be around for a very long time.
I also would like to get a new laptop to replace my Air, but it seems like every choice is a compromise. I can get another Macbook or an XPS but everything is a compromise in one way or another, so in the end I don't buy anything. I am looking at the XPS 15, it would be nice to have a 15" screen for half the price of a MBP
Our positions are reversed. I see no reason to go back to a mechanical watch when a smart watch offers more utility such as notifications. Apple can make the best non-smart watch in the world and I would probably still choose a pebble watch over it.
Now waiting to see what the Apple Watch 2 offers before pulling the trigger.
Kinda hard to get people to buy ugly items *cough*android*cough*
Realistically, the reason why you want "art" people in tech is because when left to their own designs, engineers don't care about that stuff, only the most complicated way to show off that they're smart.
You see this a lot in programming. Look at the absolute piles of jQuery cruft in a web application that runs poorly. Get a UI person to go "it needs to look like this" and a real engineer can do it without jQuery and it will run fast. A bad engineer will just go "I can do it faster with jQuery, so let's just use that", that is not to say that maybe jQuery is or isn't the best option (it's best use case is rapid-prototyping software, it's worst use case is HTML5 video games.)
That said, "art" people tend to not understand the complexity of things they demand half the time. When I work with art people I ask for the original photoshop file so I can see how the image was composited, but most of the time artists just pass me flattened files because it saved them disk space. It's like, look if you're not willing to show me how you made this, then I'm not going take the effort to implement all the fancy things in it because I would have just done the art myself.
I have not bought an Apple watch. I quit wearing watches when my last watch quit on me, probably more than 12 years ago. Ever since cell phones started having more than 4 days of standby charge, a watch has not been needed. But what would change that is actually having watch-like wristgear that replaces the cell phone and mp3 player parts, even if it's more of a just a "second screen" to a larger cellphone in a purse/bag. Conventional watch designs don't have batteries that last long enough to justify using as a watch, let alone anything else. Which is why yeah, I get why it appeals to some people, but it's not exactly an improvement over a watch as a time-keeping device. Even old mechanical watches last at least 40 hours. With such a tiny battery in a watch, you're lucky if you don't have to replace the battery every 15 months (300 charges = 40 hours = 500 days.)
That's a one-sided view, much like the opposing view from a design basis.
I design product and I design it from scratch with both considerations in mind. The size, shape, what's saleable comes first, the concept if you will - then you start making it work as best it can - IF a cosmetic design element is restricting the performance then you go back and re-appraise, alter, adjust or sometimes even redesign completely. Good design is mixing engineering, cosmetic design, form and function until they're all working cohesively as well as can be for the concept.
I don't, however, think Apple have been as good at all this recently as they once were. Many competitor's phones (ignoring the watch for now) are looking better, feeling better and offering more. Not just Samsung as the main competitor but even the Chinese copycat brands are starting to "out-Apple" Apple. -
Both of these from the main Chinese players (Huawei and Meizu) address the same issues as Apple with regard to "thinness", antenna bands and camera bumps (or lack of on the Huawei's dual lens offering) and do so in a similar (copycat) way - but arguably do a better job of it than the iP7 leaks have shown Apple to be doing.
The physical design of the once great iPhone 3G, 4 and 5 seems to have been lost in the 6 and proposed 7 for the purpose of thinness over all else, looking at the whole seems to be being overlooked for that one detail.
iOS is still just about slicker than Android but it's much closer than it was, iOS is starting to get more awkward and cluttered yet still not offering much user-adjustability into the bargain, Android has been getting far more refined.
I just think Apple need a kick up the backside somehow or they will start to suffer. Many a large company have let complacency be the death (or at least wounding) of them by thinking they can do no wrong and don't need to keep ahead of the game. That loyal fans will just buy anything with their logo...
If you end up not buying one because it's fugly then your health certainly won't benefit. Guaranteed.