More Apple Watch predictions

▼ Unless something really unexpected happens, Apple will further unveil the watch on Monday. I also think it's safe to assume the event will be streamed. If you're in Europe, remember that the time difference is an hour less than usual because the US will "spring forward" to daylight saving time this weekend while we'll be on winter time a few more weeks in Europe. So the event starts at 18:00 CET.

Here are some musings and predictions.

First of all, I'm pretty sure there's another shoe that has yet to drop. There will be something significant that hasn't been revealed yet. Another sensor? Maybe it'll support GPS after all? Less iPhone reliance than we currently assume? An additional cool use case? I don't know. But I'll be surprised if there isn't something.

I think pairing with an iPhone 6 or 6+ will happen through NFC: start the watch app, select "set up an watch", touch the two devices, and you're done. Pairing with an older iPhone will probably be more like regular bluetooth pairing.

I wouldn't be surprised if a software update will be needed out of the box. Apple is probably working on the software until the last minute while factories have been cranking out watches for some time. If that's the case, there's really no need for a staggered international release, so the watch could be available in a good number of countries from day one. (I can only hope.)

Battery life is a big unknown. The watch can do a lot of things that require a fair bit of power, so its tiny battery could easily run out during the day. On the other hand, most of the time the watch will be sleeping, doing nothing more than monitor the acceleration sensors and the bluetooth link, neither of which require much power. And I'm sure Apple realizes that having to charge the watch halfway through the day would be extremely problematic. With a phone, topping up the battery when you're around a power outlet isn't too big a deal. But with a watch, you'll have to take it off, so you can't really use it while it charges. The watch absolutely needs to be able to get through the day on a charge for nearly all users.

We know charging will happen through an inductive connection. What we don't know is what's on the other end of the charging cable. Maybe there won't even be a cable, and you'll have to use your existing lightning cable to charge the watch. That would suck big time, because then you can't charge your iPhone and the watch together overnight. Hopefully Apple won't be that cheap. The opposite would be that the watch comes with its own charger. That seems somewhat unlikely, too.

I remember people mentioning that the watch's inductive charging system uses a lightning cable, but I don't see that on Apple's website and it doesn't seem very likely. I think the inductor will have a cable attached.

What makes the most sense to me is that the watch's charging cable is plugged into an existing iPhone charger and allows the iPhone's lightning cable to be daisy chained, so the phone and the watch can be charged together from the same charger.

Then there's the price. People have been speculating about truly stratospheric prices. However, if Apple is going to sell watches for $20000 or more, this is likely going to alienate their regular customers to some degree. Also, even though the profit margin is enormous, the infrastructure required to sell such a super luxury product would be significant, and could very well be not worth it. Just like with the iPad, Apple is probably going to want to disrupt the high end watch market with relatively low prices for the gold watch. I stand by my earlier prediction:

I'm thinking just like Apple is dragging up the low end, they'll probably drag down the high end. $3500 sounds like a nice, round number that still quite a few people can afford. Maybe they'll go a bit higher, but I doubt they'll break the $10k barrier.

I mentioned a price range of 700 to 1000 dollars for the steel version. I'm hoping maybe it'll be 500 and then I'll consider that version, if it's not too heavy. However, $80 for bands seems on the low side now, looking at Apple's website it's obvious that they'll want to use the bands to be a differentiator, so those will get expensive fast. They may not even sell them separately, but if they do, expect to pay a lot except maybe for an extra sports band. I also wonder if we'll see third party bands, or if Apple has a way to keep those off the market.

I wonder if the 42 mm model will cost more than the 38 mm model. In the past, bigger devices have invariably been more expensive. I wouldn't put charging $350 for the 38 mm sports model and $400 for the 42 mm one past Apple. On the other hand, this is uncharted territory, so the old rules are out the window. It makes sense to me to sell the two sizes at the same price, except maybe for the gold models.

There's also the storage tiers that Apple has traditionally used to differentiate pricing. I doubt that they'll want to further confuse things; my guess is that all the watches will have 8 GB storage.

Permalink - posted 2015-03-05

A battery breakthrough would explain the Apple car

▼ The latest Apple rumor is that they're working on a car. A rumor that is easily dismissed:

The fantastic Apple Car is a fantasy.

But is it? What would it take for Apple to start making cars?

Cars are a huge market and they're very expensive. That's exactly the type of market Apple needs to enter if it wants to continue growing its already unprecedented profits. However, cars aren't very profitable for the companies that make them today. So Apple needs to bring something unique to the table to allow it to reach the margins it's grown accustomed to.

There are already very nice high-end cars, and there's just not that many people who can afford them; selling a better car for a higher price isn't going to give Apple the numbers that it needs. What Apple needs to do is make a better car cheaper, so it can be sold for a regular price but at an Apple-like margin.

The insides and outsides of a car are determined by its function and the fact that it must push through the air at a relatively high speed. There's not much that Apple can do here. Maybe Apple has come up with some new user (driver?) interface paradigm that will revolutionize driving, but somehow I doubt that.

Maybe an Apple car is going to be self-driving? Not impossible. But Google has been working on that for some time, and they use existing cars. Also, Google's driverless cars are described as "trains running on invisible tracks": they're not very autonomous, but rely on extremely detailed maps. Is Apple confident enough in its mapping abilities to think they can pull this off?

But maybe they just build a better car. Apple isn't going to improve the motors used in electric cars, simply because those are already pretty much perfect: they weigh a fraction of what an internal combustion engine weighs, run at 90% efficiency and they last pretty much forever with little or no maintenance. Most of the other electronic and mechanical parts are small potatoes.

However, there is one thing in an electric car that could be improved: the battery. A better battery that stores more energy for the same size/weight would be a big deal. Or that can be charged faster. Or lasts longer before it has to be replaced. Or is simply cheaper.

We read about research breakthroughs in battery technology all the time, but we rarely see those translate into real-world improvements. Obviously, Apple has been interested in batteries for a long time. So what if Apple has developed a significantly better battery? That's sure going to help the Apple Watch, and we could all use a bit more battery life in our iPhones.

But if you're looking to monetize a battery technology breakthrough, look no further than the electric car.

Permalink - posted 2015-02-16

Star Trek Voyager

▼ Twenty years ago, on January 16, 1995, the first episode of Star Trek Voyager was broadcast in the US. The series would be on the air for seven seasons. I'm not sure when I started watching, but I ended up buying all 172 episodes on VHS. Every Tuesday I would go to the Free Record Shop to buy a tape with two new episodes for ƒ 29,99, later € 13,61. So I must have spent 1170 euros on Voyager. I was actually about to buy that week's tape when my brother called me on my first Nokia cell phone to tell me an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

At about 250 grams a piece, this collection weighed in at 21.5 kilos, and I got rid of it when I moved to Spain. However, last week I re-bought Voyager, on DVD this time. The box set weighs 1.25 kilos and cost me € 105. At the time of this writing, you can get the Star Trek: Voyager - The Full Journey box set for £ 85 from Amazon UK, but in the US you'll have to shell out $271 for Star Trek Voyager: The Complete Series on Amazon.

I never really watched the original Star Trek series, which is 49 years old now. The few times I caught an episode, I had trouble suspending disbelief because the sets looked so improbable and the effects are terrible. I mean, they can't even get the space ship model to travel in the direction it's facing.

However, I was a loyal Star Trek The Next Generation viewer. I even recorded every episode on VHS tape, and I still have those tapes. (Well, I missed the last two episodes, but I got those on tape, too.) I think I re-watched them once, but now that ST:TNG is available in high definition on blu-ray, it's unlikely I'm going to revisit those home recordings. Also, TNG isn't that great. The the story lines tended to get repetitive and characters are fairly bland. I especially disliked Data.

I liked Voyager a lot better. First of all, there's a real mission: getting home from the delta quadrant—although they sure get side tracked a lot. But the great thing about this conceit is that Voyager actually gets to explore some unknown places, something that The Next Generation didn't really do much. The characters also work much better. Captain Janeway is a great character, warm, but also tough. Tuvok works much better than Spock or Data because the whole lack of emotions thing is no longer explored to death. And, emotions or not, he does have a sense of humor. The characters all have traits that propel stories forward organically. The desire get home before they die of old age allows them to do stupid things from time to time (as needed for the plot) for understandable reasons.

The biggest limitation of Voyager is that most episodes were written to allow for out-of-order watching. As such, the (life-changing) events in one episode are forgotten the next. However, there are some longer-running story lines where the crew has to deal with a certain adversary throughout a season or two. My favorite seasons are 3 - 5. Season 3 slowly leads up to the first encounter with the Borg, and then in season 4 Seven of Nine gets added to the crew. This shakes things up nicely until the writers start to spend too much time on Seven of Nine and the doctor.

Even though Voyager is pretty good TV, it's not great science fiction. The big problem with Star Trek is that they're just too powerful. The technology is basically magic and can do anything. Often, first half of the ship has to break before there's any sense of danger. It also makes things way too easy: scan a planet 20 light years away from signs of human life? No problem. Not only do most aliens look human, they also speak English (for all intents and purposes). I'd love to see a show that takes a more realistic approach to space exploration, where space is actually big and empty—even when navigating it faster than light speed—and visiting a new planet is a huge deal rather than something that's over and done with in 43 minutes.

In these days of widescreen high definition TV, it takes a little getting used to to watch Voyager in 4:3 narrow aspect ratio, and of course the image isn't super sharp. The live action parts aren't too bad, though, and it helps that Voyager predates the trend to make TV and movies super dark so you can't tell what's going on. The CGI doesn't fare so well: it tends to be noticeably soft.

Having to navigate through menus and being force fed unskippable disclaimers is pretty annoying. Then again, simply inserting the DVDs without having to worry about managing storage on my computers has its advantages, so I don't think I'm going to rip the entire series.

Time to watch some Star Trek Voyager!

Permalink - posted 2015-02-15