Even a year on from its launch, former Apple CEO John Sculley isn’t convinced the Apple Watch is a must-have Apple device just yet.
“I think the Apple Watch is beautiful, but it doesn’t have enough utility to be something that I feel I have to have at this point in time,” he says in a new interview with The Street, noting that it’s the only major Apple product he doesn’t use.
The Apple Watch is the first major new Apple product line to be launched under Tim Cook, but according to Apple analyst Tim Bajarin (who, unlike many Apple commentators, actually knows a lot of the people he writes about), it’s a product which owes a tremendous amount to Steve Jobs and his experiences.
Here’s how Bajarin explains it:
In a week in which we heard about the impending Apple Music refresh, Drake’s Views album proved a smash hit for Apple, and the LAPD revealed that it had successfully hacked the iPhone 5s as part of a high-profile murder investigation, some great new — and newly-updated — apps arrived in the App Store.
Check out our picks for the week’s best below. What better way to spend a lazy Sunday?
My biggest gripe with my Apple Watch is not the sluggish hardware, the lack of GPS nor the dependance on my iPhone. These are all problems to be sure. But it is the bad user interface design that often drives me so mad that my force-taps turn into force-thumps of frustration.
With an update to the Apple Watch operating system expected at the Worldwide Developers Conference next month, here’s my top 10 list of interface improvements I’d like to see in the upcoming watchOS 3. These essential changes would spare my wrist from future incidents of wrist rage.
Despite its focus on helping you get fit, Apple Watch is still no closer to knocking Fitbit off its throne.
The company’s much more affordable fitness trackers have helped it claim 61.7 percent of the U.S. wearables market so far, while Apple’s first smartwatch has grabbed just 6.8 percent since making its debut last April.
Jony Ive suggests that Apple is bound to make some missteps as it continues to explore wearable devices, and offers some vague, tantalizing hints about Apple’s plans for the Apple Watch in a new interview.
“Regardless of whether we declare an interest in fashion or not, we are making products that are more and more personal, products that you wear and you wear every day,” he told Business of Fashion ahead of the Apple-sponsored Met Gala. “We’ve not done that before and we’ve got a lot to learn.”
The Apple Watch may have out-earned Rolex to the tune of $1.5 billion last year, but according to Fitbit CEO’s James Park, Apple’s pursuing the wrong direction with its wearable devices.
“We look at it from a consumer point of view,” Park said, noting that the Apple Watch, “is a computing platform [instead, and] that’s really the wrong way to approach this category from the very beginning.”
Apple’s executive team is optimistic about the company’s future, despite a bleak earnings call. And why wouldn’t they be? Apple’s slump brought in more money than most other tech companies out there.
Read all about the positive spin in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, along with a trick to making your iOS folders look round with no jailbreak required, a frank appraisal of the Apple Watch one year in, 8 killer Instagram tips, the world’s biggest Apple Museum and much, much more.
Here are the top stories for this week.
We’ve seen a lot of people do a lot of things with Apple’s debut wearable, but one hacker wasn’t satisfied merely to summon the ghosts of ancient first-party mobile and desktop operating systems. No, hacker Nick Lee set himself the goal of putting the venerable Windows 95 on Apple Watch.
Lee set out on the project out of nostalgia for the computer he grew up with in the ’90s (oh, kids), and he succeeded by patching some files in the native WatchKit development framework to sneak in his own app. In this case, that app was the 20-year-old disk image. And it works, provided you have a bit of time to wait for the new system to boot up.
Seriously, it takes a while. See it in action in the video below.
For something as personal and prominent in everyday life as our smartwatch, tossing it onto a tabletop or shoving it in a drawer to charge seems a bit…crude. Nomad has a couple alternatives, two ways to give your Apple Watch a place of privilege that’s fitting in style and function.
What a magical world we live in. We can lift our Apple Watch up to listen to music, talk to our friends, and (yes) even tell the time.
If you’re an Apple TV user, you can send your Apple Watch tunes to the big screen, and you can even control your Apple TV right from your wrist.
Simply magical. Here’s how to control your Apple TV with your Apple Watch.
A new quarterly report by research firm Strategy Analytics has Apple’s share of the smartwatch market falling to just over 52 percent in the first three months of 2016. It’s the latest drop in a week full of disappointing news of the iPhone maker making way fewer billions of dollars than investors expect.
Apple head Tim Cook briefly addressed the Apple Watch “problem” during the company’s earnings call yesterday, but that’s probably not going to stop the cries of doom.
Going back at least as far the iPhone 5c, some Apple products pick up unfair reputations as “flops” — despite the fact that they are selling in quantities that would make other companies (and my Samsung-loving Cult of Android colleague Killian Bell) turn green with envy.
The Apple Watch, which celebrated its first birthday this week, is just such a product. How much of an impact did the Apple Watch make in its debut year? Enough to bring in $1.5 billion more than Rolex did in 2015.
And more than one-quarter of all Swiss watch exports combined for the past year, just to hammer the point home!
I’ve decided to take a step back and take a good, hard look at what I’ve been wearing on my wrist for an entire year. It feels like it was just yesterday the Apple Watch was revealed to the public, and everyone wanted one.
Has it become an essential bit of kit on my wrist, or is it another gadget for the junk drawer, left to gather dust?
Here’s my take on the year I’ve spent with Apple’s magical wrist computer.
Faster processors, speedier memory, longer battery life and a rose gold finish — what more do we need from a new MacBook? We love Apple gear, but it’s possible we’re getting addicted to the “wow” factor.
Add that to Prince’s untimely death, and the dearth of streaming options for listening to his music, and we’ve got a lot to talk about. It’s all in this week’s free Cult of Mac Magazine, along with reviews of Amazon’s new Echo smart speakers and 12 awesome Apple Watch tricks that prove Cupertino’s wearable doesn’t need a “killer app.”
Here are this week’s top stories.
The Apple Watch celebrated its first birthday on Sunday and, while Apple has yet to publicly disclose sales figures, it seems that the company’s debut wearable device had quite the impressive debut year!
According to analysts, Apple likely sold around 12 million Apple Watches over the past year: around twice the number of iPhones it sold in the first twelve months of Apple’s breakthrough smartphone.
Most fitness apps seem obsessed with calories. Go for a run, and your Apple Watch tells you how many calories you burned. Scan a barcode and MyFitnessPal tells you how many calories are in the food you are about to eat.
So what exactly are calories, and does counting them really help you achieve your fitness goals?
Cupertino is about to crack down on non-native Apple Watch apps.
The company posted a new requirement on its developer site that says that in the near future, all new apps must run natively on the device and originate in the watchOS 2 development kit. This new policy could finally get us some Apple Watch apps that work as well as we’d like them to.
You know, instead of some of the ones we have no, which kind of don’t.
Apple’s most recent keynotes have been a little… boring. Even die-hard fans have been left disappointed by the lack of action and surprises, but with WWDC 2016 right around the corner, many have high hopes that Apple’s about to buck that trend.
Apple’s keynote will offer our first sneak peeks at iOS 10 and the next big upgrades to OS X, watchOS, and tvOS — plus possible refreshes for Apple Watch and various Macs. Will these things make up for the lack of excitement?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we talk about (argue over) all things WWDC!
The Apple Watch doesn’t need to prove itself to you. And contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t need a “killer app” to make it indispensable.
In fact, the Apple Watch is an awesome device all on its own, with a ton of tricks up its sleeve, like controlling your big screen TV and finding your iPhone, even in the dark.
Here are 13 killer things you can do with an Apple Watch that prove it’s worthy of a place on your wrist.
Members of Apple’s public beta testing program can now get their hands on all the new software updates Apple dropped on developers yesterday.
New betas for iOS, tvOS, watchOS and OS X have been seeded to the public, bringing a bunch of bug fixes for every Apple platform, as well as some new features on iPhone.
I’m willing to bet that you’ve misplaced your iPhone around the house before. I know I have; almost once a week I’m wondering where I set down that magical device. Is it in the bedroom? The kitchen? The (gasp) bathroom?
If you’ve got an Apple Watch, though, you can use its ping feature to find your iPhone with an audible sound, and even a flashing LED if you need it.
Here’s how.
A fresh new batch of Apple beta software is now available for developers two weeks after the company dropped its last big set of new software.
New beta builds of iOS 9.3.2, watchOS 2.2.1, tvOS 9.2.1 and OS X 10.11.5 can be found in the Apple developer center, bringing a bunch of new bug fixes, and hopefully some feature improvements as well.
No need to let those new MacBooks hog all of the attention today — now, you can buy one of those super-luxe Hermès Apple Watch bands separately from the device.
This is, of course, assuming you already have an Apple Watch and enough scratch to bring home one of these things, which are as fabulous as they are ridiculously expensive. But along with their newfound independent retail status, the straps are premiering some new colors so that you can coordinate appropriately.
Here’s how the pricing and options break down.
This tip won’t help everyone, but it should be a huge timesaver for multilingual users: You can change your Apple Watch language for Messages with just a couple quick taps. And you can do it directly on the device without having to go into the companion app on your phone.
Here’s how to make it happen.