Apple Announces Media Event

Apple watch? New Macbook airs? Music streaming service? Something we haven't even heard a rumour about? All/none of the above??

Gruber's guesses

God knows if his pricing will be on the mark exactly, but I do agree with one of his predictions - the Gold watch will be riotously expensive and everyone now pretty much expects that but the steel will be very expensive and people won't be expecting that, so that's what the shouting will be about after the event.

I know I've been idly considering getting one (my Pebble's now a bit bashed and the battery life isn't what it was, so it's either a Pebble Steel Time or an Apple Watch next) and I was wondering if I could stretch to a nice space grey Steel one rather than the base Sport. I suspect a lot of other people are thinking that too. If the Steel comes out at say £1500, there's going to be a lot of disappointed people because they won't be able to afford to buy the shiny thing they hoped they could. And they'll blame Apple for that.

I wonder if the gold one will be POA - if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

No, they're on the website, although Tim Cook said they'd only be on sale in certain Apple shops - Presumably Regent Street and maybe The Trafford Centre in the UK?

http://store.apple.com/uk/buy-watch/apple-watch-sport
http://store.apple.com/uk/buy-watch/apple-watch
http://store.apple.com/uk/buy-watch/apple-watch-edition

Cheapest sport watch is £299
Cheapest steel one is £479
Cheapest gold one is £8000 (like you'd buy a gold watch with a plastic strap...)
Most expensive one is £13,500.

The one I was most looking at is £949 . I may have to settle for a black sport, which will look just like a Pebble. The steel bracelet strap on it's now is nearly £300! The Milanese loop version seems like the best option if you must have the steel watch.


I quite like the look of the new minimalist Macbook in space grey. However even Apple can't offer any thing to connect to it yet.

Everything needs a Type C connection before the utopia of wireless everything.

It needs interoperability first. I use a Windows Phone, an iPhone and an Android phone for different things - WP is private and I have to keep swapping between iPhone and Android for my work phone. If the watch doesn't work with all of them, then it is a waste of money.

Why?
I imagine Apple don't believe for a moment that they can manufacture a watch right now for every iPhone that'll support it. I'm sure they'd love to, but why bother diluting the experience when they probably don't expect to sell one to everybody with an iPhone, let alone other platforms.
Given there's a iOS update to go along with the watch - not just some new apps on the store - I think there's rather more to supporting it than just an app.
Be interesting to see what the MS Band offers, I note that's apparently platform agnostic.

I think Dave should get maybe into the habit of putting 'for me' at the end of each of his posts. There's a degree of generalisation in there that really isn't justified. Most people don't change phone platforms at a whim.


They can probably manufacture enough watches for about 1% of the iPhones currently in use (let alone in existence) and that's assuming a lot of people don't want the expensive ones which are expensive partly because they can be but partly also because some parts of them are hand-made.


You can certainly make a viable cross-platform smartwatch - Pebble have done quite a good job of that, although it wasn't at all true at launch - but there's absolutely zero incentive for Apple to do so. They're not attempting to make a new product segment, they're attempting to add value to their offering in an existing segment that is rapidly approaching commoditisation.

Jon

Microsoft's Band works across all platforms, and works well, according to reports. And the Pebble, one of, if not the, original smartwatches, works across all platforms.

That is why I don't understand the Android and Apple watches, they only work on one platform, and in most cases only on a very limited range of devices - the first Samsung Android watches only worked with the Galaxy S5 and the Note 3, IIRC.