If you’re in the market for an Apple Watch, and you live in London, Paris or Tokyo, consider yourself in luck: Apple will be opening mini store-within-store kiosks in luxury local department stores, dedicated to selling its eagerly-anticipated smartwatch.
The pop-up stores are planned to open Friday, April 10, when the Apple Watch first goes on preorder, which means you can be among the first to see the Apple Watch in person.
Steve Wozniak seems to have a complex relationship with both modern-day Apple and, particularly, the Apple Watch. In an interview at the Automate/Promat Show in Chicago yesterday, Apple’s co-founder said Apple’s foray into high-end wearables marks a very different turn for the company he helped to found.
“It didn’t seem like the company we started,” he said. “That’s not the Apple that moved the world forward.”
Apple Stores won’t have the Apple Watch on display for a few weeks, but anyone eager to see what the world of wrist apps will offer can already download them to their iPhone.
The first wave of Apple Watch-supported apps started hitting iTunes today, with big names like Target, Evernote, WeChat and Expedia being some of the first out of the gate. You can’t actually use the Apple Watch functionality on the apps yet (unless Tim Cook hooked you up with an early unit), but you can get an early glimpse of how some apps will dramatically change your life.
Here are some of the first Apple Watch apps you can download and their features:
The beautiful Apple Watch spokesperson Christy Turlington-Burns has been running a blog on Apple.com for the past three weeks, detailing how the Apple Watch has helped her train for the London Marathon.
It’s mostly puff stuff, but her latest entry has one interesting tidbit: the Apple Watch can apparently track many of your fitness levels even without an iPhone in range. She goes into more detail about how.
Starting April 10th you’ll finally be able to go into an Apple Store and try on Jony Ive’s first wearable, as long as you have an appointment. Those shopping for the regular Apple Watch and Sport models will get up-to 15 minutes of hands-on time at the Apple Store, but if you’re looking at the Apple Watch Edition, you’ll get to play with it twice as long.
You can’t get an Apple Watch until April 24th. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pretend to have its fine metals rubbing your naked wrist right now.
By printing out a tiny piece of paper and downloading an app, a horrible render of the Apple Watch will appear on your wrist like magic.
We’re just weeks away from the Apple Watch’s launch, but maybe you’re not as excited about it as some of us are. It’s understandable; not everyone needs a $550 watch that offers many of the same capabilities your phone already does (albeit more conveniently).
If you’re in the market for a cool new watch and don’t need all the smart features and gadgetiness of Apple’s offering, here are a few less-shiny options you could check out. And they are, in fact, far less shiny than the Apple Watch. Because they’re made of wood.
Tech pioneers like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk have warned humanity of the dangers of AI for years, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s finally a beliver in the doomsday scenarios.
“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Woz told the Australian Financial Review in a recent interview from his US home.
The man who sparked the personal computer revolution with the invention of the Apple II says ‘the future is scary and very bad for people’ because computers will eventually get faster than us and wipe us out.
Apple may not sell close to the number of Apple Watches it wants to in the coming months — and it’ll have nothing to do with lack of demand on the part of customers.
According to a new report, Apple’s plans to manufacture between 2.5 and 3 million smartwatches every month could be cut by as much as half thanks to supplier yield problems, which mean that only 1.25 – 1.5 million watches are being churned out every four weeks.
Ahead of the April 24 launch of the Apple Watch, Cupertino’s debut wearable continues its world tour with a new style guide in Australia’s Elle magazine — advising on how Apple’s smartwatch can be used as a chic wearable everywhere from cocktail parties to the workplace.
For a cocktail party, for instance, the magazine suggests that you might want to pair it with a “tuxedo suit and sexy heels (think Le Smoking Saint Laurent style with Alexander Wang black heels), or if you have the legs for it, a killer cocktail dress.” For the weekend, meanwhile, you can “Wear it with trackies, your boyfriend’s shirt (worn cuffed and loose) and a chic cashmere overcoat.”
The tech world is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Apple Watch and Siri, it seems, isn’t any different. With the launch of Apple’s debut wearable just a month away, the iOS virtual assistant is apparently just as obsessed with the device as we are — as a simple “What are you doing now, Siri?” question will attest.
Check out some of the amusingly geeky responses below.
We’re all looking forward to the Apple Watch, but there’s one thing I’m definitely not looking forward to: the ability to answer phone calls on my wrist. And this clever video shows exactly why.
With high development costs and uncertain prospects, now is a risky time to build Apple Watch apps. But like many other indie developers, I’m working on one anyway.
The Apple Watch gold rush is about more than money.
Apple rarely gives tours of its facilities, but it showed ABC News the inner workings of its top secret health lab for the purpose of hyping the upcoming Apple Watch.
Located in an unassuming lot near its Cupertino headquarters on 1 Infinite Loop, Apple employees have been working out for years in secret to collect valuable health and fitness data.
Developers are making a mad dash to finish their first Apple Watch apps before the wearable goes on sale in April. Yahoo is among those looking to make a big splash with must-have apps, and when it comes to bringing you the news, the company is hoping you’ll want it in bite-size chunks.
Yahoo’s Nick D’Aloisio sat down with Bloomberg today to talk about how digesting the news is going to change once you slap a tiny Apple Watch screen to your wrist. To bring long-form news to wearers, D’Aloisio says Yahoo Digest will focus on giving you the most salient pieces of a story, accompanied by little visual elements called atoms.
Watch Nick explain the news revolution Yahoo plans to unleash:
One of the biggest questions surrounding the Apple Watch is how well its value will stand the test of time. Will Apple offer some sort of upgrade program for the opulent 10K Edition model? Will the tech-laden timepiece on your wrist be obsolete in two years?
Gazelle is banking on there being a thriving market for used Apple Watches as early adopters upgrade, much like there already is for used iPhones and iPads. The company announced its new trade-in program today ahead of the Watch’s April release.
Tim Cook touted Apple Watch’s supreme timekeeping capabilities at last week’s Spring Forward event, but Rehabstudio plans to give wearers a unique look on time — by counting down to their death.
Life Clock is an upcoming Apple Watch app that’s like the reverse of an activity tracker. Rather than giving you a readout of actions you did in the past, Life Clock tracks all the positive and negative actions you take throughout the day to calculate when you’re going to kick the bucket.
Are you still trying to work out how to scrape together enough money to buy a $349 Apple Watch, let alone a $10,000-plus Apple Watch Edition? If so, an answer could be the neat solution dreamed up by Chris McVeigh: Build one out of Lego.
Rather than waiting until April 24, by following master builder McVeigh’s instructions you can have the joy of building a Lego Apple Watch from the privacy of your own home, even putting up “Do Not Enter” signs and making your spouse sign nondisclosure agreements to achieve that fully authentic Apple effect.
Check out the details below:
We got our first look at Apple Watch knockoffs at CES earlier this year, and while those junky devices were about as basic as they could be, more advanced knockoffs have hit the market since.
From right out of China, behold this shameless Apple Watch clone running Android:
An Australian indie developer who was flown to Cupertino by Apple to work on an Apple Watch app alongside giants like Twitter and BMW has come under fire for reportedly falsifying a story about suffering from terminal cancer.
Created by healthy-living proponent Belle Gibson, iPhone food app The Whole Pantry has been pulled from the App Store, while an accompanying Apple Watch app has vanished from Apple’s list of “coming soon” apps for its upcoming wearable.
It seemed like it took accessory makers forever to make battery pack cases for the iPhone, but companies are wasting no time with Apple Watch accessories, and the first portable battery for Apple’s wearable is already here.
Nomad introduced its answer for the Apple Watch’s battery woes with the Pod, a small portable power station for your Apple Watch that will keep it ticking well past the 18 hour battery life Tim Cook promised.
You know that old saying about buses: you wait ages for one and then several turn up at the same time? Well, according to analyst Timothy Arcuri from Cowen & Co, the same is about to prove true of Apple Watches.
In a new note to clients, Arcuri claims that an Apple Watch version 2.0 will turn up later this year and that, unlike its predecessor, it won’t require an iPhone to be tethered to it in order to work. Arcuri also thinks this will be Apple’s first device to boast an OLED screen exclusively supplied by Samsung.
Apple might have just leaked some packaging for the upcoming Apple Watch.
The Apple Jobs website received a nice update today — including a new image of what appears to be some of the Apple Watch packaging that will hit Apple Store shelves April 24. The boxes look too thin to hold the Apple Watch and its inductive charger, so they’re more likely just for bands, but we couldn’t help but notice they look just like Swatch’s iconic boxes.
Here’s a comparison shot:
Considering that the Apple Watch goes on sale in a little over one month, Apple has still provided relatively few details about how exactly it’s going to be selling its upscale wearable devices.
Some images posted by Japanese Apple blog Macotakara offer a few hints, however. The photos show an Apple Watch booth or mini-store at the upmarket Isetan department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The sign reads “WATCH: Coming Soon.”
Having spent more than a year throwing smartwatch concepts a wall, only to discover that very few of them stick, Samsung’s taking a bit of a break from the wearables game.
But a newly-unearthed patent suggests that the South Korean tech giant could come back with a vengeance, thanks to a ripoff Apple concept bold new interface design based around an iPod-style rotating bezel. The idea would be that this rotating bezel could allow users to scroll through different apps, lists and menus without having to obscure the miniature display with their finger.
So, yeah, it’s basically the Apple Watch’s digital crown idea — only “different” enough to not be a direct analog.