Alex Washburn / WIRED
The biggest thing Apple showed off Tuesday wasn’t a product, or even a product line. It was the way all of Apple’s products—and thousands more from other developers, manufacturers and services—now mesh together. It is like a huge ubiquitous computer now, all around us, all the time. The interface is the very world we live in.
“The product isn’t just a collection of features,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said, announcing his company’s new iPhone, “it’s how it all works together.” And really, this is true of the entire Apple line, the entire Apple experience.
Tuesday’s announcements laid open the scope of Apple’s ambitions in making everything in your life work together. A computer on every desk? Chump change. With the new iPhones, Apple Watch, Apple Pay, HomeKit, HealthKit, iBeacon and even CarPlay, Apple is building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping.
A computer in your pocket. A computer on your body. A computer paying for all your purchases. A computer opening your hotel room door. A computer monitoring your movements as you walk though the mall. A computer watching you sleep. A computer controlling the devices in your home. A computer that tells you where you parked. A computer taking your pulse, telling you how many steps you took, how high you climbed and how many calories you burned—and sharing it all with your friends. A computer in your car. All of it the same computer: The computer in the sky that connects to the computer in your pocket and on your wrist and in your car, your office, and your home.
This is the new Apple ecosystem. Apple has turned our world into one big ubiquitous computer.
Imagine it is the morning, six months from now. You wake up as your Hue lights come alive, thanks to a setting in Apple’s HomeKit which also tells your Honeywell thermostat to turn on the heat. You want a quick breakfast, and head out for a run. Your Apple Watch tracks how far and fast you go, checks your pulse and counts your calories. It knows where you went, how many hills you climbed, and calculates how it measures up to your personalized fitness goals.
Apple CEO Tim Cook Alex Washburn / WIRED
Back home, you select a podcast of the morning’s news from iTunes, which starts playing over the Sonos hardware you’ve installed throughout your house. As you walk from room to room, iBeacons follow you, as does the audio. Just then, your boss calls. You answer, and the call audio is routed over your home Wi-Fi network. As you walk to your car, it swaps seamlessly to LTE. You turn the key, and suddenly the call is playing over the speakers. Hang up, and the podcast picks up again where it left off. As you pull out of the driveway, your lights switch off, as does the heat.
On the way to work, you notice your calves are sore from the run. You ask Siri for a drugstore, and she directs you to a nearby Walgreens where you grab some Advil. You tap your watch on a terminal at the counter and Apple Pay debits your credit card. That reminds you. You raise your wrist and the watch springs to life. You ask Siri if there are any good Thai places close to the office. There are! You make a reservation on OpenTable with your Apple Watch (later, you’ll use the same app to pay for your dinner, too).
When you get to the office, your watch makes a note of where you park your car. You step out and take a deep breath. Your heart rate picks up just a bit as you glance at your wrist to see what awaits you today. Your watch notices, and sends it all to HealthKit. Good morning. It’s 8 a.m.
What’s truly amazing about all of this is that every piece of this gigantic computing puzzle is almost here already. Got an iPhone? You’re already in the system. Ubiquitous computing happened while we were sleeping. Sensors have filled in the world around us. They are with us everywhere we go. Now, the sensors we keep on our our bodies and in our homes can talk to each other in new ways, enabling things never before possible.
This is what Tim Cook means when he talks about how it all works together now. It is the entire stack of devices working in concert. The Apple ecosystem is like a swamp. The more we interact with it, the deeper we are drawn into it.
Fortunately, it is a very lovely swamp.
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