During his whirlwind tour of the Middle East and Europe, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been leaving little breadcrumbs of Apple Watch revelations.
There was the confirmation that the Watch will be showerproof in Germany, and now Cook has said it will eventually replace your car keys.
There is a pretty set pattern that happens whenever Apple enters a new industry: evidenced everywhere from iTunes to the iPhone to the (rumored) Apple Car.
First of all, the established old guard dismiss Apple as a tech company that knows nothing about their business, then starts to panic when it realizes what it’s in a fight it may well lose, and then finally follows Apple down whichever path it is going.
Having initially dismissed Apple’s debut timepiece, Swiss watchmakers are now squirming as the Apple Watch’s April launch date creeps ever closer. First off, TAG Heur admitted it was working on a smartwatch and now fellow Swiss watch company Mondaine has revealed it is doing much the same.
It may be a desperation move on the part of Mondaine but, hey, as desperation moves go, it’s a pretty gorgeous one!
Mark your calendars: Full details of the Apple Watch will be revealed March 9.
Invites were sent to the press today for a special Apple event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on that date. The only hint on the invite are two words: “Spring forward.”
Chances are that the majority of people reading this won’t be looking for a way to make the Apple Watch more expensive.
With a rumored price in excess of $10,000 for the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, most of us would have to take out a second mortgage on our house before we could dream of picking up the watches on the higher end of Apple’s wearable collection.
For some individuals, however, solid gold just isn’t enough — which is why luxury design company Brikk today announced its plans to increase the decadence by offering diamond-encrusted Apple Watches for sale. Somewhere, you just know that Kanye West is picking up his blinged-out iPhone 6 Plus and getting ready to make an order!
We’re still waiting for the final pricing details on the Apple Watch, but if recent reports that Apple plans to sell one million gold Edition units a month are true, Apple Watch could wreak havoc on gold prices and do who knows what to the global economy.
Josh Center at TidBits has done some math on Apple Watch and estimates that if production rumors are correct, Apple will be bidding for a third of the world’s annual gold supply to make enough gold watches to meet demand.
To put those numbers in perspective, Apple needs so much gold it could turn the all 7,000 metric tons of gold stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — you know, the one from the plot of Die Hard 3 — into gold watches in less than a decade.
Apple Watch still isn’t available for the masses, but Apple is ramping up its marketing efforts among fashionistas with a multipage spread in the March issue of Vogue.
Multiple versions of the Apple Watch are shown across the seven-page ad, which includes closeups of the watch bands as well as full-size pictures of the entire device to give readers a better idea about whether Jony Ive’s timepiece will fit in with their wardrobes.
Take a look at some of the other ads below:
The Apple Watch reveal back in September was big on excitement, but short on details. Among those things that Apple failed to mention was whether or not Cupertino’s new smartwatch will be able to withstand liquids — making it suitable for, say, swimming or washing the dishes.
While we still don’t have a final, definitive answer on what is and is not advisable with the Apple Watch, Tim Cook shed a bit of light on the mystery during a Q&A session with staff at the Kurfürstendamm Apple Store in Berlin, Germany, where he is currently visiting. Cook said that that he wears his Apple Watch “even in the shower.”
Call it Newton’s third law of Apple analysts: For every extreme reaction one way, there is an equally extreme reaction the other.
In this case, what that means is that while some doomsayers are happy to write off the Apple Watch as the worst thing Apple has done since building its own smartphone, taking on the music industry with iTunes, [insert actual bad decision], others go in totally the opposite direction and predict a landslide victory in Apple’s favor.
Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research falls somewhat into the latter category. His prediction? That the Apple Watch will have 100,000 apps ready to go when it launches in April, and that 42 million units will have sold by the end of December.
We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.
This week the Apple Car rumors have revved into fourth gear as a tsunami of reports from various outlets have claimed that not only is the iCar project real, but Apple is trying to get it onto highways by the end of the decade. While everyone’s focusing on the iCar, don’t forget about Apple Watch though. The rumor mill spit out five juicy rumors this week covering everything from pricing to customization.
Take a look at this week’s electrifying Apple rumors see which one’s are destined to come true:
Apple Watch isn’t just a techie gadget. It’s a fashion item.
To drill that point into everyone’s heads during launch, it looks like Apple is setting up a special booth at one of the fanciest high-end department stores in Paris: Galeries Lafayette Haussmann.
Construction on a special booth at Galeries Lafayette began a few weeks ago, according to Mac4Ever. There’s no official word that the structure is for the Apple Watch, but the timing, location and large white walls all point to Apple.
Take a look at the site:
Here’s a small detail you might have missed about the Apple Watch. In pictures for the Apple Watch Edition, the 18-karat solid gold version of Cupertino’s upcoming wearable, the Digital Crown has a small dot at the end that matches the color of the watch strap. But here’s a question for you: Is Apple going to allow users to customize the Digital Crown as easily as they can swap out Apple Watch wristbands?
Apple hasn’t yet announced prices for its 18-karat-gold Apple Watch Edition timepieces, but if you think the top-of-the-range wearable is going to cost anything under $5,000, you’ve got another thing coming.
Greg Koenig, co-founder of Luma Labs, recently performed a calculation to find out an approximate figure for the gold content of the forthcoming 42mm gold Apple Watch. While Koenig notes that his guess is a “very rough estimate,” it still makes for interesting eye-watering (iWatering?) reading.
His guess? 29.16 grams — which translates to $853.82 at today’s gold prices. And that’s without even taking the electronics into account.
After gracing the cover of Vogue China, it was only a matter of time before the Apple Watch started getting featured in U.S. magazines.
Self’s March issue features the Apple Watch modeled by Victoria’s Secret Angel Candice Swanepoel.
The Apple Watch Edition has perplexed many Apple fanboys with its ridiculously high price tag. We still don’t know how much the beautiful, high-end smartwatch will cost, but it’s expected be one of the most expensive Apple products ever, which has a lot of analysts wondering, how many is Apple going sell?
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that only 17 percent of the first 5 million Apple Watch orders were for the pricey gold Edition. That number sounds almost insignificant, but Daring Fireball’s John Gruber did some math and found that Apple is expecting to sell about 1 million of the exorbitantly expensive timepieces per quarter.
Hitting 1 million in sales for the super-expensive smartwatches in the first quarter would be an impressive feat. But what’s more surprising is that if Apple actually hits that number, the gold Edition Apple Watches would account for the most Apple Watch revenue, bringing in at least $5 billion per quarter.
Here’s why:
Apple may have sold 10 million+ handsets in the first weekend of the iPhone 6 going on sale, but don’t expect those kind of numbers for the Apple Watch.
Despite being eagerly-anticipated by both fans and the press, Apple has reportedly asked its suppliers in Asia to manufacture a total of 5-6 million units of its three Apple Watch models for the device’s upcoming launch in April. Of these, half are expected to be the entry-level Apple Watch Sport model, one third will likely be the mid-level device, and the remaining ones will be the ultra-luxurious models — including the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition.
The Apple Watch might have been four years in the making and the most Jony Ive-centric Apple product yet — but the company didn’t get everything it was wishing for from the device.
According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple originally wanted its smartwatch to focus far more prominently on health-related innovations, only to be forced to go in another direction midway through the project.
If Apple had had its way, the Apple Watch would have boasted smart sensors capable of tracking blood pressure, heart rate and even stress levels — but despite hiring top people from the biosensor industry, the technology didn’t work quite as well as had been hoped.
People are calling The New Yorker profile of Jony Ive the most important thing written about Apple in quite a while, and I’d have to concur.
Not only is it full of fascinating details, it puts Ive at the center of Apple, where he belongs. As the piece’s author, Ian Parker, writes: “More than ever, Ive is the company.”
This is something that’s been true for a couple decades, but still isn’t apparent to most people — even veteran Apple watchers. Such is the company’s secrecy, and the tendency of the public to equate everything Apple does with Steve Jobs, that the true story has yet to be told. Ive has not gotten the credit he deserves.
If there’s one thing today’s New Yorker profile of Jony Ive hammers home, it’s how important the Apple Watch is to Apple’s design guru. The 16,000-word story reveals how Ive pushed the Apple Watch as a project, shortly after Steve Jobs’ death, when Apple was under pressure to come up with its next insanely great idea.
Here’s all the ways
As rumors of an Apple car start to gain speed, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has run the figures to find out what kind of business proposition automobiles could be for a company that tends to steer clear of small or low-margin markets.
His verdict? If Apple cars were even a “moderate success,” Tim Cook and pals could be looking at an extra $50 billion per year in revenues. To put that figure in context, it would be an increase of 23 percent on top of the already impressive cash-generating machine that was Apple in 2015.
Remind us to remortgage our homes to buy AAPL stock!
Based on what Steve Wozniak has said in the past, it would be very easy to come to the conclusion that the Apple co-founder is far from excited about the Apple Watch. In an interview with CNNMoney late last year, Woz seemingly dismissed it as a “luxury fitness band,” and said that he had gotten “real negative on smartwatches.”
What a difference a few months makes. In a new interview for the BBC, Wozniak touches on everything from the new Steve Jobs movie, to rumors about an Apple car, to — yes — his thoughts on the Apple Watch.
And if he wasn’t enthusiastic before, he certainly is now!
If Apple really is working on a car, what would it look like? And what would we want it to look like and do?
The growing chorus of rumors about Apple’s possible automotive ambitions — and the hard facts about the car designers it’s already recruited — don’t prove Cupertino is working on a car. But if Apple is staffing up to transform the transportation industry, what features might it deliver in its human-transport device?
Here’s what we’d like to see in the very first iCar.
We still don’t know the exact date the Apple Watch will ship, but a new rumor claims you won’t be able to pick one up at BestBuy, Walmart, or other non-Apple Stores at launch.
Apple plans to make its timepiece an Apple Store exclusive, according to German distribution sources who claim resellers will be shut out so Cupertino can suck up as much Apple Watch profits in the first year as possible.
Becoming a supplier for an Apple product is big competition among Asia Pacific suppliers, but Apple will rely on just one supplier to make all of its Apple Watch displays this year, reports J.P. Morgan analyst J.J. Park.
LG Display will be the sole supplier of the p-OLED display for the Apple Watch, according to Park’s recent note to investors. His firm also predicts LG’s stock could jump as much as 25% because of the new deal.
Apple Watch will borrow a lot of tech from the iPhone when it ships in April, but according to a new rumor from supply chain sources in China, Apple is planning to bring one of its wearable’s coolest features to the next iPhone.
The Economic Daily News has reported that Apple is considering adding ‘3D touch’ technology to the iPhone 6s, similar to Apple Watch’s Force Touch. According to the sources, Apple’s is planning to tap US-based Avago Tech as the main supplier for the iPhone 6S 3D touch technology.
We still don’t know the exact launch date of the Apple Watch, but if you just can’t wait to load up on accessories for your Apple wearable, the first Apple Watch dock is already available on Kickstarter.
ChronosDock, a “luxury” bedside dock, is the first Apple Watch accessory we’ve seen launch so far. Its makers, Kickshark, say it’s “the most indulgent, opulent piece of docking jewelry” they could imagine. It only costs $99, but they insist it’s “excessive in the extreme” to satisfy all you high-end fashionistas.
We think it looks kind of boring, but take a look for yourself: