Photos Reveal Secrets Behind Apple Watch Retail Display Units

[Mike MA]

I wonder how many teens go into the stores and try to shoot YouTube videos of themselves bending these display units.

My guess: None .

But it's really amazing too see the effort a new product rollout causes besides the classical R&D of the item itsself.

 

[Even Longer]

I have seen employees doing some kind of update through that port. They had a gray block, about 2x2 inches, with little contacts connected to the demo watches with their bands removed. Someone said the "demo loop" was being updated.

You're dead wrong! They weren't "doing some kind of update", - you witnessed a secret ritual of the Cult. Consider yourself lucky, not many people do...

 

[RickInHouston]

The depth of thinking by Apple and their execution just always amazes me.

I'm sure the depth of thinking in engineering is quite amazing.

and in architecture, dentistry, surgery, etc.

 

[kemal]

The watch was designed with its retail display in mind. Talk about OCD!

 

[powers74]

Super cool stuff

Everything article keeps calling this a diagnostics port. I can tell you from first hand experience that its not. My watch was experiencing issues with the gyro. When I took it to the genius bar, the Apple Genius connected my phone to the store wifi, entered something into his iPad, and all of a sudden my watch started running diagnostics through the store wireless. After seeing this, I believe that port was designed from the start simply for use in the store displays using that special band.

Cleareyes- if Apple only had the port there because of a few hundred display demo units, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be included in millions of retail units because they were too lazy to take it out.

Doesn't Apple use special software and cables during their keynote to display the iPad and iPhone on the screen? I'm pretty sure that port on the Apple Watch allows mirroring as well which only Apple can access.

I'm sure Apple had all three scenarios in mind during the three+ years of development.



Or who knows, maybe it was an afterthought /s

----------

The watch was designed with its retail display in mind. Talk about OCD!

exactly.

 

[Smartass]

WOW this changes EVERYTHING!

 

[Rocketman]

Those folks who collect all Apple hardware will have to wait a while to get their hands on this baby.

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

All the R&D that goes into those display units explains the ridiculously high cost of the Watch!

 

[CFreymarc]

Been told this is one of many, unreleased Lightning connector profiles that are internal to Apple only. Of those that are unreleased that could be useful:

* Wired 100Base-T Ethernet, never released to avoid networking support
* JTAG fully accessing the entire iOS ARM memory map, iOS dev only
* RS-4xx serial multi-drop protocol (mostly RS-485), again to avoid networking support
* MIDI controller
* 1-Wire interface, supposedly for Touch Memory interfaces
* SPI and I2C, mostly for IC evaluation

Wonder if the shipping iOS has these libraries as private APIs.

 

[CFreymarc]

This opens up the possibility of smart bands. Pebble was first to the punch on this. Who has the patents?

----------

All the R&D that goes into those display units explains the ridiculously high cost of the Watch!

Whatever price the market will bare.

----------

I have seen employees doing some kind of update through that port. They had a gray block, about 2x2 inches, with little contacts connected to the demo watches with their bands removed. Someone said the "demo loop" was being updated.

Most probably an internal firmware update putting the watch into demo mode with that "gray block" an internal JTAG interface updating the Flash RAM of the watch.

Not matter how Apple wants to slice the ********, the entire iOS line are nothing but very well packaged embedded systems with design techniques going back to the 80's avoiding booting off a hard disk and using Flash memory directly.

 

[CyBeRino]

Yeah but EDGE internet might be disabled by then. Even if you can make calls the internet won't work unless on wifi. Actually there was an article last year about ATT shutting down EDGE. As of now, it hasn't happened yet.

EDGE is just a faster version of GPRS. And GPRS works on just GSM and nothing more -- and all those m2m devices that are the reason GSM will be sticking around for a long time are using GPRS.

Now, that said: using the internet on GPRS is not fun.

 

[GoldeneyePhone]

Guesstimates of expected value one of these units?