Inspecting the new Apple iWatch. Alex Washburn / WIRED
The CEO isn’t quite new anymore, but he still has something to prove. He stands before an audience of passionate fans and promises a new digital device that, though not the first of its kind, will redefine its category so thoroughly that all predecessors will become irrelevant. The device even has a scroll wheel and costs a little less than $400.
That CEO was Steve Jobs, and the device was the first-generation iPod. Its launch would jumpstart Apple’s rise into the world’s most valuable company. But the scenario almost equally describes current Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiling the Apple Watch on Tuesday—except the room Jobs was in when he revealed Apple’s groundbreaking digital music player was much smaller. Also, during the long fallow period between the first Mac and the iPod, a new Apple product didn’t carry the expectation that its launch would force a fundamental rethinking of personal computing. Thanks to the iPod—and the iPhone and iPad—that’s the legacy the Apple Watch inherits, and the threshold for success it must match.
Fortunately, Apple’s earlier hits have created a reliable template for achieving world domination: don’t be the first, just be the best. Mediocre MP3 players existed before the iPod, just as mediocre smartwatches exist now. Apple achieved its current dominance by eviscerating that mediocrity to utterly own the categories in which it competes. With the Apple Watch, the company is returning to the same playbook. The question is whether it will succeed with a very different kind of device.
No One Has Found the Recipe
Back in 2001, Jobs described a competitive landscape for digital players that uncannily resembles the state of wearable tech in 2014. “In this whole new digital music revolution, there is no market leader,” Jobs said. Startups like Sonic Blue and Creative had their MP3 players, he said, as did gadget giants like Sony, but none had become hits. “No one has really found the recipe yet for digital music.”
Truer words were never spoken about the wearables market now. Device makers have yet to serve up a category-defining product, a gadget that makes plain why mass-market wearable tech should exist at all. Scrappy startups like Pebble and giants like Samsung and Motorola are trying. But the market is still so wide open that Apple could make everyone soon forget it didn’t invent the smartwatch all by itself.
A smartwatch’s reason for being isn’t so clear, especially since so much of what it can do requires being tied to a phone in the first place.
Certainly the iPod created that kind of amnesia. Who can name, or even picture, an MP3 player prior to the iPod? (I have dim memories of owning a portable CD player in the late 1990s with some kind of MP3 interface grafted on.) From the iTunes store to the click-wheel, the iPod finally got the digital music recipe right, and no one need bother to remember what came before.
The Apple Watch is clearly Apple’s attempt to be that definitive again, as evidenced—along with its deeply thought-out design, specs, and features—by just how long Apple took to launch it. Since taking over following Jobs’ death in 2011, Cook has been hammered by critics and by Wall Street for leading Apple through such a long stretch without releasing a new product, as opposed to updated products with new features. He could have rushed out a watch sooner to quell the angst, but that really wouldn’t have been the Apple way.
Instead, Apple took the time not just to build a better technology, but to interrogate the entire concept of “wearable.” And what the company came away with was the “personal.” “Apple Watch is the most personal device Apple has ever created,” Cook said. The watch is technology that literally touches you, and that, because it can always be seen, says something about you in a way that a phone that’s mostly in your pocket does not. Hence features ranging from “taptic” touch notifications against your skin to the range of customizable faces, bands, and materials. More than any other hardware it has made, Apple wants you to feel like the Apple Watch is “yours.”
A Different Kind of Device
The rub is that all this care still doesn’t quite answer the more basic question of what a smartwatch exists to do. That was not the case with the iPod.
The purpose and advantages of the iPod were easy to explain. “Music is a part of everyone’s life. Everyone. Music’s been around forever. It will always be around,” Jobs said in launching the thing. “This is not a speculative market.” The iPod was for playing music, and it holds 1,000 songs—an epic feat at the time. But a smartwatch’s reason for being isn’t so clear, especially since so much of what it can do requires being tied to a phone in the first place.
More than any other hardware it has made, Apple wants you to feel like the Apple Watch is ‘yours.’
At the same time, the criticism of the Apple Watch as a gratuitous change in form factor that doesn’t mean much on its own sounds a lot like the mockery of the iPad tablet when it first launched in 2010. It’s just a big iPhone, many of us said. It wasn’t until tablets became available on a mass scale that users started to figure out that tablets were better at some things—browsing, video, reading—than phones were. Smartwatches could turn out to be the same. They just haven’t been on enough wrists yet.
The Apple Watch also has so many features that it opens itself to charges of bloat, of lack of focus. But that same alphabet soup could be seen as an advantageous open-endedness. Perhaps Apple is tacitly acknowledging that no one quite knows what the killer use case is for wearables. Instead, it’s offering all kinds of options, all kinds of ways to use the watch. Once it’s out in the world, distributed at scale, all of us—Apple included—will get to see which uses stick.
Everyone Knows What A Watch Is
Another advantage working for Apple is that, compared to any other hardware the company has released, it doen’t have to teach people what a watch is. The global market for watches in 2013 came to about $62 billion, with purchases divided fairly evenly between budget ($1,000). By making a base version available for $349, Apple makes its watch a competitive option not just for would-be smartwatch buyers, but anyone shopping for a watch, period.
The Apple Watch’s appearance itself also reflects a reach for that broadest possible market. More than other smartwatches released to date, the Apple Watch looks like a watch, not a phone strapped to your wrist. It doesn’t appear to call attention to itself as a gadget. By making it less conspicuous, Apple is telegraphing that the Watch isn’t new tech you need to learn to live with but an extension of tech you already know. It’s sort of like a watch. It’s sort of like your iPhone. And its 100 percent Apple.
“We think not only can we find the recipe but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic, because people trust the Apple brand,” Jobs said shortly before showing off the iPod to the public for the first time. Whether that trust extends to tech that we wear on our wrists will define the future of Apple as a company, and of wearable technology itself.
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