First, this is a website where people post their opinions and I have clearly threaded mine with plenty of "Personally", "IMO" and so on.
Oh, I noticed. Yours is definitely a milder form of the arrogance/narcissism/self-centeredness that characterizes AWatch-hater comments on this forum and many others. Most of your brethren don’t bother with the handful of “(for me anyway)” and “(to me anyway)” asides that you have thrown in—even if the actual function of many of those has actually been to pat yourself on the back for being such a genius as to have predicted that previous iDevices would succeed:
However, from my own perspective, I could see an obvious masses fit for iPod, iPhone and iPad. But I'm not seeing that same kind of "gamechanger" fit for this Watch.
Your continual emphasis on this point suggests that you think it’s not Apple’s hot streak we should be paying attention to, but yours.
Second, I am in the market research business and am usually quick to to jump on those- as you are doing with me here- who try to extrapolate personal opinions to being the opinions of the masses. I'm not trying to do that….
Well, in fact you are—in every single word you’ve written about “the masses” and what they think and want and will buy. But that’s not actually the main point of my critique; your placing your own ideas in “the masses’” minds (and then using Karl Marx’s term, over and over and over, for them!) is silly enough, but more to the point here is that you’re taking your own subjective perceptions and presenting them as
objective fact. Such as:
[The Apple Watch] may be the best product ever and move every single person on the planet to buy one but it has fundamental hurdles to leap that those other 3 did not... especially with the masses that are not here, nor were here posting in thread 500.
Right now, the uniquely elements are a few sensors not on the phone which yield an ability to do (gimmicky?) things like send your heartbeat to someone you know. … If we reach, we might spin "uniquely" into not having to involve our hands (to reach in our pocket to pull out the iPhone).
But it's hard to imagine much that can be uniquely done on the watch better than it can be done on an iPhone.
Relative to the "gamechanger" perception, it's easy to recognize very tangible "uniquely" benefits in iPod, iPhone and iPad. Each brought a very obvious, mainstream benefit(s) to the market (which is not just us here at MacRumors).
iPhone screen was too small, netbooks were selling pretty well as portable, mostly-consumption computers, etc. Enter iPad which made some things (reading a book or magazine, some website browsing, watching video, etc) that were hard to do well (or a tangibly lessor experience) on a 3.5" and 4" screen much more doable at 9.7". Combine the two and content consumers with light computing needs could reasonably think iPhone + iPad for most of their needs.
Yes, iPad was a big iPod Touch in most ways but the "big" was the tangible difference, and it brought useful benefits that the masses could appreciate. "Want to watch a movie on the go" does not seem equivalent to "want to watch my heartbeat" in terms of recurring utility.
There’s no concession in any of the above declarations of the overwhelming subjectivity and risk-of-blindness that went into them. (Indeed, the “If we reach” bit in particular goes even further: it declares that believing it “unique” or valuable to have smartphone functions available on one’s wrist
is clearly dubious.)
Third, good for you, basically doing exactly what you're accusing me of doing because you find great value in notifications on your Pebble watch.
Nonsense. Your argument and mine are very much
not equivalent, and your inability to see that is suggestive in itself.
In simple terms, it is far easier to prove a local positive (“AWatch function X has meaningful value to a number of people“) than it is to prove a general negative (“AWatch has no functions with meaningful value”). Your assertions, and especially your attempts to distinguish your AWatch forecast from the exactly analogous forecasts of doom that numerous pundits provided for the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, are attempts at the latter—and the support you’re providing for them is notably insufficient.
Have you surveyed the market to know that you are not the anomaly... that the masses will or will not also find great value as you do?
No, because nothing I have argued depends upon me not being an “anomaly,” nor have I said anything whatsoever about “the masses.” I am not even asserting, here, that the Apple Watch will succeed. I just submit that your personal inability to see the value proposition in the Apple Watch is neither here nor there, and it certainly doesn’t demonstrate that the product will fail.
Personally- and again this is my opinion- I'm not seeing the Watch to be a "gamechanger" on par with iPod, iPhone and iPad as suggested in the article that kicks off this thread.
Yes, I see that you’re clinging very fast to the “gamechanger” totem. In the short term, this is obviously a winning strategy: given that the Watch is, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, required to be tethered to an iPhone, it’s flatly impossible that the product will be a “gamechanger” on par with the phone, because the phone is absolutely guaranteed to sell more units. If the Watch changes the game, it will have to be generations and years down the line. In the interim, you can comfortably hide behind that word.
But, once again, that gets away from my point: your inability to see why (for example) having smartwatch functions on one’s wrist is valuable is nothing more than that—your inability to see why having smartwatch functions on one’s wrist is valuable. It certainly doesn’t mean that “the masses” (feh) will have as much trouble seeing it, especially when Apple Stores and their try-it-on process gets to work on them. It doesn’t mean that the product will sell poorly, even by the hightened standards to which (as your tired “iPoop” bit suggests) you’d prefer to hold the product.
What you’ve cited in this thread is one man’s inability to see the appeal of a tech product, rather than the Watch’s objective lack of “very obvious, mainstream benefit(s)” that previous iDevices possessed (when, in the actual history of iDevices, those benefits were not at all “obvious” or “mainstream” to a huge number of commentators).
I’ll take your word for it that you didn’t make the common mistakes involved in dismissing the potential (“gamechanger,” profit machine, successful product, whatever) of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. That hardly indicates that you’re not making those same mistakes now.
