While you’re at work today, Tim Cook is enjoying croissants and chocolat chaud at a chic French eatery. Probably.
That’s because the Apple CEO is reportedly in Paris: most likely for the Apple Watch’s official public unveiling tomorrow at one of the city’s fanciest department stores, Galeries Lafayette Haussmann.
There are plenty of Apple Watch reviews out in the wild now, but we have yet to see a solid unboxing of the hottest new wearable in tech.
French newspaper Metronews did the honor, and here’s what opening an Apple Watch for the first time is like:
The first wave of Apple Watch reviews landed this morning with the consensus that Apple has created the best smartwatch ever. Now whether you actually need a smartwatch is still being heavily debated, but the early Apple Watch reviews have highlighted some pretty compelling cases.
Reviews from tech news sites have praised Apple Watch for its innovative UI and incredible design. After slogging through the first reviews though, the most interesting insights I found about Apple Watch came from non-tech sites. What will it be like for normal, non-tech nerds to use Apple’s timepiece?
Here’s everything new I learned about Apple Watch from reading all the reviews:
The Apple Watch isn’t available for preorder until this Friday, and it’s already looking like certain models won’t ship by April 24.
The first reactions to the Apple Watch are hot off the presses and, to be honest, they’re pretty much what I was expecting.
There are some nice revelations (battery life isn’t as bad as we feared), some areas to improve on (activating the screen carries a lag, although Apple promises it can fix it though software updates), praise for how easy it is to manage notifications, and a general sense of reviewers trying desperately to figure out what the hell a smartwatch should try and do.
And concluding that — despite being unclear about quite what that is — Apple has done it pretty well.
Check out the highlights of the early hands-on impressions from Re/Code, the Wall Street Journal, David Pogue, and the other people lucky enough to get an early review unit:
Instagram quietly enabled an option today that makes it super-easy to keep track of your favorite accounts.
You can now set up push notifications for whenever a specific account posts a new photo. The timing of the new feature makes perfect sense with the impending release of the Apple Watch.
Just three days before Apple’s smartwatch will be on display in stores around the world, new pictures have revealed what Apple Watch packaging will look like.
Images of the Apple Watch box, which doubles as a charging stand, were posted on Instagram today. With the first review units already out in the wild, we’re learning new details about the Apple Watch nearly every day, like how Apple Watch bands will be packaged.
Here’s a glimpse of the Apple Watch band boxes:
From pop-up kiosks in up-scale luxury department stores to focusing more on the fashion press than the tech pages, it’s been fascinating to watch the unorthodox way in which Apple is choosing to spread the word about its upcoming Apple Watch: attempting to make it into this summer’s must-have item.
During Monday’s episode of The Voice, the next step of this roll-out was revealed, as Pharrell Williams — acting as a judge on the show — was spotted wearing the device, without a supervising Apple engineer or PR bod in sight.
Hey, as fashion items go, it makes a change from giant hats, at least!
When the Apple Watch goes on sale April 24, one place it will be conspicuous in its absence is Switzerland: the spiritual home of the wristwatch, which Jony Ive famously (allegedly) said was “f**ked” due to the awesomeness of Apple’s upcoming wearable.
One possible reason? A trademark claim made by a company called Leonard Timepieces for a watch and watch parts carrying the image of an apple and the English word “APPLE.” First filed in 1985 — not too long after Apple originally launched the Mac — the 30-year trademark expires on December 5, 2015.
The Apple Watch may be good at telling you how healthy you are, tracking your steps, propelling you to move, and reminding you of upcoming appoints, but conventional wisdom says it’s rubbish for reading. The 38mm and 42mm screens are just too tiny to read anything more than a sentence or two long on, and certainly not any longreads.
So on paper (no pun intended), Instapaper for Apple Watch is a terrible idea. Amazingly, though, it looks like the Instapaper team at Betaworks has made it work.
This week on The CultCast: With Apple Watch apps now hitting the store, we discuss some of the most popular ones. And if you want an Apple Watch you absolutely need to preorder — we’ll tell you why and how. Plus: Periscope! Learn all about it and why it’s way better than Meerkat. All that and so. Much. More…
Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.
Full show notes ahead!
With Apple Watch about to become a reality, recent reports have questioned the benefits of fitness trackers, highlighting their inaccuracy and even claiming they make you fat.
So can wearables like Apple Watch really help you get fit? From my experience, what’s in your heart is more important than what’s on your wrist — but gadgets still have a role to play.
Apple Watch preorders don’t go on sale until April 10th at 12:01 AM, but you can get a virtual walkthrough of how to use one right now.
Apple has posted new guided tours online detailing specific features of the Watch in detail.
New details for the Apple Watch are beginning to surface ahead of its release this month, including the precise time you’ll be able to start preordering Apple’s first wearable.
Horological Machine No. 6 looks like something you’d see strapped to the wrist of an interstellar raider. Maybe that’s why Swiss watchmaker MB&F dubbed its lunatic $230,000 watch the “Space Pirate.”
The watch, which its maker says “has been designed to operate in the hostile environment of … the space on your wrist,” is one of just two timepieces to be awarded Red Dot design awards in the competition’s current round.
The other winner of the Red Dot Award for Product Design? Apple Watch, which seems like a modest piece of jewelry next to the MN6’s alien design. Just wait till you see the spinning turbines that make the Space Pirate watch tick.
Cheaters in school these days have it too easy. In my day, we had to program cheat sheets of formulas into our giant graphing calculators. Now that the Apple Watch is coming out, the cat and mouse game between students and teachers is about to change.
Mobixee’s educational suite of Apple Watch apps are giving students a faster/subtler way than ever to find “that formula” when you’re doing tests homework.
By bringing iMathematics, iPhysics, and iChemistry to Apple Watch, you won’t have to pull out your iPhone to search for formulas again. Just whisper a word to Siri like “derivative” and a list of formulas related to the topic will pop up.
Check it out:
Apple told us last month it would make AppleCare+ available for anybody who just knows they’re going to break Apple Watch’s display. Apple still hasn’t officially revealed pricing, but a leaked internal screenshot may have just revealed the extra cost of insuring your timepiece.
In her latest blog post on Apple’s website, supermodel and Apple Watch spokeswoman Christy Turlington reveals a few more interesting tidbits about the Apple wearable — such as the fact that you can use the device’s Force Touch tech to change the color of animated emoji.
The Apple Watch was created under crazy, sleep-deprived conditions, with its first working prototype being an iPhone strapped to the wrist with a Velcro strap, and the Digital Crown represented by a custom dongle plugged into the bottom of the phone via the headphone jack.
Those are a couple of the revelations from a new in-depth article, reporting on the creation of Apple’s eagerly anticipated wearable device.
April Fools’ is the day that a lot of tech companies announce fake products to get a laugh. Some are good, but most suck.
Tesla has arguably won April Fools’ Day this year with its spoof of the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch could be Apple’s next mass-market iPod-like product, but the company’s not quite ready to see it popping up everywhere yet.
With the Apple Watch launch just 24 days away, Apple has reportedly declined to supply the U.K.’s largest mobile phone retailer, Carphone Warehouse, with its debut wearable device.
“We would love to be able to stock the Apple Watch,” Carphone’s chief executive Graham Stapleton told The Telegraph newspaper. “I’ve got to be careful what I say but I think they are just going another way with it. We have not been given the opportunity.”
Apple today announced that all members of its Developer Program can now officially submit Watch apps to the App Store; potentially triggering a gold rush similar to that seen when devs were first able to create iPhone apps early on its lifecycle.
Developers are encouraged to submit their WatchKit app, icon, screenshots, and description for review by Apple’s testers.
What will the news of the future look like when we’re all busy staring at our tiny smartwatch screens instead of an iPhone or Mac? You’re not likely to scroll through long-form stories on your wrist, so The New York Times plans to roll out one-sentence news blasts to Apple Watch.
Okay, this is pretty cool: a 2.6x scale model of an Apple Watch built entirely out of Nanoblocks, the tiny building blocks made popular in Japan, but with a growing international following.
With the smallest brick being 4mm x 4mm x 5mm, creating this take on Apple’s eagerly-anticipated wearable device took more than 800 bricks. It was created by Christopher Tan, a well-known Nanoblock brick artist, who has previously built scale models of everything from the Great Wall of China to zombie dioramas.
You can check out more pictures of his Apple Watch below.
The Food and Drug Administration is in a tough spot when it comes to health-tracking wearables. As the U.S. government agency in charge of regulating medical devices, it can’t promote health-oriented technology that doesn’t do what it claims, but it also doesn’t want to stifle innovation at a time when Silicon Valley is finally turning its attention to the field.
That’s why, according to a new report, the FDA is giving the tech industry, and particularly tech giants like Apple, leeway to develop new products without aggressive regulation.