This is something that nobody seems to want to acknowledge in (for lack of a better word) the Apple fanclub.

If you look at the features of the Apple watch, they are basically the same as every other smartwatch released by Samsung and motorola (except for the NFC/Apple Pay stuff, which I am genuinly excited for).

People are trying really hard to differentiate Apple Watch from the Android watches, but it all sounds so absurd because they are so similar (apart from the home screen zoom-UI). Even Apple made their watch square!

And we know that Android Wear kind of sucks. So if they're not that different, Apple Watch will probably not be that great.

The "digital crown" input mechanism is interesting. The Watch seems to have a crisp (tiny) screen. And the wrist bands look cool. But unless there's going to be some crazy battery in there, there's nothing revolutionary about this, and its functionally the same as the 6 watches that Samsung has released, and will probably be almost as underwhelming.

"The Runwell" is a $600 Shinola watch which only tells the time.

The "nascent payment system" which is Apple Pay is better supported by the credit card companies than Google Wallet. It only remains to be seen how many retailers will switch to NFC. Just about everyone who does EFTPOS in Australia uses NFC now, I don't understand why the USA is such a (payment) technology backwater.

For the market of people who listen to their music on $500 headphones while walking around or catching the bus to work, the Apple Watch is obviously not going to replace their iPhone or iPod Touch/Nano/Shuffle/whatever.

For the market of people who currently use bluetooth headphones while running, jogging, cycling, etc, switching to the Apple Watch (or other bluetooth enabled small form factor personal music player) might be worth the money.

Another point to consider is that with the iPhone moving into the "digital surfboard" screen sizes, having a "wrist buddy" makes more sense. Do I want to be hauling my digital surfboard out just to check the time? Am I prepared to spend $500 on a watch ever? What about a watch that combines with my iPhone to do much more than a simple chronograph?

All that taken into account, I don't think the market for the Apple Watch is digital gadget geeks. I suspect the actual market for the Apple Watch is people invested in the Apple ecosystem (as opposed to say the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem), who already spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on fashion accessories such as gold watches.

The primary use of fancy chronographs is to look good on your wrist. As an incidental function they tell the time, phase of the moon, current date, provide stopwatch and timer functions, etc. Smart watches will even tell you the current weather (as opposed to simply having a thermometer and barometer gauge on the face of the watch).

IMHO the primary purpose of the Apple Watch isn't to be an extension to your iPhone, it's to be a fashion accessory which happens to be functional.

Just because it doesn't make sense to you at any price doesn't mean it won't make sense to someone who already has two $5,000 watches.

But Gruber says this:

> It has internal storage and Bluetooth, so you’ll be able to use it for music playback without taking your iPhone with you.

Is Gruber wrong about that? I admittedly don't know, but he sounds authoritative here that the Apple Watch has storage for tunes. That's pretty cool to me.

He is expecting developments between now and release (ie. more information) to demonstrate that this is not the case.

> If it actually doesn’t do much more, or allow much more, than what they demonstrated on stage last week, I am indeed going to be deeply disappointed, and I’ll be concerned about the entire direction of the company as a whole. But I get the impression that they’ve only shown us the tip of the functional iceberg, simply because they wanted to reveal the hardware — particularly the digital crown — on their own terms. The software they can keep secret longer, because it doesn’t enter the hands of the Asian supply chain.

He thinks Apple is holding some details close to the vest and he has a plausible reason for why. Say what you will about Gruber's Apple partisanship, but he's always been great at reading between the lines of Apple's publicity events.

But this...this was really a tough post to get through. I honestly felt like I was reading some long-winded justification article by a cult acolyte who just realized the apocalypse didn't occur last Thursday at 11:23am like he was promised and is vomiting justifications to account for it.

All that being said, it's one of the few Gruber articles I didn't flag because I was interested to see how he was going to eat his words.

The only saving grace of this entire post was this line "but I think Android Wear is simply the result of the rest of the industry trying to get out in front of Apple, out of fear of how far behind they were when the iPhone dropped in 2007." which I agree completely with. But agreeing with Gruber makes me a little angry and dead feeling on the inside.

But then I read this garbage "The digital crown feels amazing. It didn’t actually control anything on-screen on the demo watches I handled last week, but it has the most amazing feel of any analog controller I’ve ever used. Lubricious (in the second sense, if not the first as well) is the word that springs to mind." and I felt a little better. I mean geez, enough. Seriously. Just come out and say you want to make love to it. No Gruber, you really meant in the first sense.

I feel a little bit dirty though after dragging my eyeballs through this post.

Luxury mechanical watches need service too, it's a very standard thing in the industry. Apple can offer a CPU/screen/sensor improvement every two years for about a thousand dollars for the luxury models and owners would pay it as they pay the water seal replacement for their Omegas and Rolexes... only Apple's margins are going to be sky high because it may be an easy thing done by a grunt in a tech service shop, and luxury brands have to send your watch to highly skilled engineers sometimes in another country.

EDIT: I posted before finishing the article, Gruber thinks Apple may upgrade the electronics too, but for "hundreds" of dollars.

Given the cost of parts and assuming the chunk of gold accounts for more than 90% of the price, some sort of trade in system should cover this problem.

Also, Gruber correctly points out that the Osborne Effect might help them here - if the product seems promising enough, some people will postpone buying something else to wait for the Apple product. We should still expect subsequent versions return to the "you can buy this next week!" model.

The thing is, Gruber's mutant power is the ability to turntwist just about anything Apple does into a core Apple value and what defines them and makes them great.

In other words, what Gruber thinks and writes about basically doesn't matter, because Apple could do just about anything and he'd clap for it and stand in line.

That's exactly what I thought when I first saw it explained. Coming from the iPod and all this touch sensitive stuff (and then the "hard tap" being introduced here) a physical thingamabob to fiddle with seems really odd.

Before you continue on your criticism of the digital crown as an input method, why not actually try it?

Home automation.

This is a worthwhile point to make, since people will compare the watch to iThings, not Macs.

Even with the Apple Watch, some of them look beautiful imo: http://i.imgur.com/qGvqIqK.png

http://www.iphoneheat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/apple-w...

http://images.chinatopix.com/data/images/full/11317/apple-wa...

When it comes to watch design, circle != automatically good looking, in my personal opinion, the Moto 360 is very cool for being circular, but the casing itself looks like one of those $100 dirt cheap Movado-lookalikes that you can get from an outlet mall.

It has something to do with the combination of the thickness, and the specific rounding of the corners and sides, that I find off-putting aesthetically.

I want to wear a watch, not a gadget. So I want the technology to be submissive to the watch. When you look at what is on my wrist, I want you to see a watch, not an iPhone mini-mini posing as a watch. We're still a decade away from this being possible.

The Moto 360 is the only competitor in looks, and it does indeed look great in renders. The problem is that it actually looks horrible (IMHO) in person. It's huge -- really massive. Nobody with a small wrist can wear a Moto 360 without looking a bit dorky. The strap attaches to the watchface at the very bottom as well, and it's a very thick watch, so the thickness is just emphasized in a very bad way. It's a bug chunk of metal sitting on your wrist on an inelegant way.

Apple is trying to reinvent the watch, not the LCD. The Apple Watch is capable of so much more than a mechanical watch. Why would they needlessly adopt the limitations that would come with a round face?

For a company that wanted you to think difference, which I interpret to mean "don't be a square", all this squareness and market conformity is really disappointing.