Apple Watch - page 96

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.

During last week’s Apple Watch event, Apple brought our 46-year-old Glamour supermodel Christy Turlington Burns to stand alongside Tim Cook and explain a little bit about how she’s using the Apple Watch to train.

After the event, Vogue caught up with Turlington Burns to talk to her in more detail about what it’s actually like to use the Apple Watch. And while there’s no new details, it’s still interesting to hear someone who is so influential in the fashion world have such a “gee whiz” moment about Apple’s new wearable.

This week: we break down all that we know (and still don’t!) about the Apple Watch, and Leander says why the $10,000+ gold editions are totally opposite Steve Jobs’ vision for the company he co-founded. Plus: Apple quietly kills their iconic glowing logo; what we love and don’t about the new Macbook, and why some are not thrilled with its new “butterfly” keyboard; and with HBO Now coming exclusively to Apple… could big AppleTV changes be on the horizon?

Our thanks for Freshbooks for supporting this episode. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. It also makes tax time a cinch. Get started now with a 30-day free trial.

Full show notes ahead!

No Apple fan is oblivious to the huge amount of science, technique, expertise and care that Apple puts into every product. Apple doesn’t design its products the way it does because it has to, but because it is compelled on a profoundly spiritual level to do so.

For the Apple Watch, Apple has taken that care to the next level. And if you want to see just how much artistry, skill, craft and passion has gone into creating the latest revolutionary Apple product, there’s no better way to spend the weekend than reading about the behind-the-scenes manufacturing process of the Apple Watch.

Amazon is in the business of making it as easy as possible to spend money in their online store. It should surprise no one, then, that Amazon is already developing an Apple Watch app, which will let customers search for products and purchase them with a single click, all from a user’s wrist.

Apple is placing a lot of its hopes for the future on the Apple Watch, but a new survey indicates Cupertino is looking at a big uphill battle.

More than 50 percent of Americans say they think smartwatches are a passing fad.

One of the biggest selling points of the Apple Watch might be that it will free you from the attention-sucking clutches of your iPhone. A new study by the Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham, UK, found that using your Apple Watch while driving is significantly more distracting that your iPhone 6.

Safety advocate firm SmartWitness is calling for a ban on smartwatches after the study discovered that drivers reading a text message on their smartwatch take more than a half second longer to respond to an emergency than someone reading on a smartphone.

Apple placed another app that can’t be deleted on everyone’s iPhones with the release of iOS 8.2. For now, the Apple Watch companion app is just a useless tease if you don’t have an Apple Watch yet, but iOS developer Hamza Sood has cracked it open and given us a preview of what the app will look like once you get your watch.

Sood tweeted some interesting tidbits about the app, revealing its beautiful dark theme along with details about the settings, how to add friends, mute notifications, and other interesting features.

Take a peek inside the app below:

It’s been a crazy, Apple Watch-filled week, with Apple’s Spring Forward event on Monday fueling quite a bit of energy both here at Cult of Mac an on the internet itself.

We’ve got our very own head man in charge, Leander Kahney, writing up four insightful op-eds on Cupertino’s latest foray into the luxury watch market with that stunningly high-priced Apple Watch Edition. Enjoy four long-form essays worth reading. In addition, we’ll check out what your favorite apps will look like, how the new ResearchKit may change medical research forever, what your Apple Watch purchase might get in the analog watch world, and the seven biggest shockers at the Spring Forward event itself.

All this, plus much more, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, available for your free download and no-cost subscription right now.

The Mickey Mouse face that ships with Apple Watch, and has twice been demonstrated by Apple at its Watch events, is now unofficially available on Android Wear — complete with moving hands and feet.

The Apple Watch isn’t available for preorder yet, but that hasn’t stopped accessory makers from proudly showcasing their wares for the upcoming device.

We still don’t know if Apple will let Apple Watch accessories connect directly into the smartwatch’s mysterious port, but there will be plenty of fancy stands and even some third-party bands.

Here are 12 Apple Watch accessories to trick out your fancy new wearable:

All week, it’s been reported that Apple is using a “new gold” in the gold Apple Watch Edition. According to Bloomberg, Slate, Gizmodo and many others, Apple has patented a new process to create a “metal matrix composite” by mixing gold with ceramic particles.

The composite supposedly allows Apple to save on the amount of gold it uses, while making the substance super-hard and adding other amazing properties.

But according to Atakan Peker, a materials scientist and one of the co-inventors of Liquidmetal, which Apple holds an exclusive license on, it’s extremely unlikely Apple is using any kind of “new gold” for its watches.

He knows this because Jony Ive says so.

It was only ever going to be so long until this happened! Less than a week after Apple announced its insanely expensive $10,000 Apple Watch Edition and already we have the first attempt to crowdfund one of Apple’s gold timepieces.

Does that mean you’ll get to share in its oh-so-expensive glory; perhaps borrowing it for your graduation or a random night on the town? Of course not, silly rabbit.

It’s taken all week, but I finally think I have a pretty good idea why Apple is selling a crazy-expensive, super-exclusive gold watch.

Initially, the very idea that Apple would make something for the one percent seemed abhorrent. What makes Apple great is that it sells affordable luxury to the masses.

Apple’s well-designed and well-made products should really only be for the rich, but they are generally affordable to the middle classes. Apple pulls off the miraculous, selling us BMWs at Kia prices.

This is what makes the gold Apple Watch Edition stand out. At first glance, it’s obviously not a product for us. But even though you and I will probably never own one, the $10,000 timepiece is actually kinda democratic, because it’s all about selling $350 watches to the masses.

After years of rumors, the Apple Watch is finally shipping next month, but according to a new report coming out of China, it’s not likely to be a relaxing month for Tim Cook and pals to spend clinking champagne flutes and celebrating a job well done.

That’s because Apple Watch manufacturer Quanta apparently continues to have yield problems with the debuting wearable device, causing a defect-free rate of less than 30 percent. In other words, really, really bad.

We all know that professional industry analysts often say the darndest things, but the Apple Watch has unleashed some truly muddleheaded commentary, especially from people who get paid to know better.

There are the customary and entirely predictable predictions that the Watch will fail — just as the pundits predicted the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad would bomb. This kind of commentary is so knee-jerk and silly, it’s best to just ignore. But then there’s a higher tier of analysis that says the Watch’s success depends on apps (duh, yeah) or the device’s potential for upgrades (completely wrong).

I’m interested in smarter takes on Apple’s strategy, pricing and marketing. Surprisingly, some of the most insightful commentary I’ve seen is on reddit — known generally as a salty hangout for spotty teens and weirdos. Here are some key points outlined by reddit users.

Lust for Apple’s latest must-have gadget can make you do crazy things!

In what sounds like a cross between Breaking Bad and an Apple ad that I would totally watch, a story coming out China’s government-run Guangzhou Daily newspaper recounts the plight of a 21-year-old accused of orchestrating a crystal meth deal so as to be able to pay for an Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch? It’s incredible.

The new MacBook? It’s unbelievable.

Apple’s team? Amazing!

Tim Cook is either the world’s most positive CEO or he possesses the world’s greatest poker face. Just watch the string of superlatives he unleashed during Apple’s “Spring Forward” event Monday, as rounded up in Cult of Mac’s supercut video below.

Tim Cook eased some of our worries about Apple Watch’s battery on Monday by revealing you’ll get at least 18 hours of use from it. But if you’d like a wearable that looks just as good, and comes without the battery problems, Hini Mizushima has the perfect creation for you.

The slow crafter Mizushima created a wonderful ‘Super Low-Tech’ Apple Watch engineered to keep up with an active lifestyle with snap fasteners. The ultralight wearable doesn’t actually tell time, but it’s sure to turn heads just as quickly as the gold Apple Watch Edition.

Take a closer look:

Apple is allegedly planning even more variations of its Watch, with up to three casings in the works for later this year.

Ahead of the Apple Watch going on sale April 24, the Chinese market is being flooded with fake versions of Apple’s wearable device — many of them bearing an uncanny likeness to Apple’s smartwatch, at a fraction of the cost.

Starting at less than $50, the “inspired by Apple” Apple Watch knockoffs are predominantly modelled on the cheaper Apple Watch Sport devices, but I’d be in no way surprised if we saw Apple Watch Edition replicas turn up at a later date, much as we routinely see fake Rolexes today.

As soon as Tim Cook announced that the Apple Watch Edition starts at $10,000, you could practically hear the scratch of jokes being written. This one, by YouTube’s CollegeHumor channel, is among the best so far. It describes the “groundbreaking” feature of letting wearers reveal with a single flash of the wrist that they have crazy amounts of money to spend.

Faux-Apple ads are well worn by now, to the point where they practically qualify as a comedy subgenre on their own. A few things made me chuckle about this one, however — from Jony Ive’s pronunciation of “aluminium,” to the foolproof method employed by the actor playing Tim Cook to check that he’s still rich.

Check out the video below.

One of the most difficult decisions you will need to make when choosing an Apple Watch is which case size to go for. But the Apple Store app for iPhone hopes to make the process easier by displaying both the 38mm and 42mm Watch cases at their actual size.

The tech world is completely aghast at the price of the gold Apple Watch Edition, which starts at $10,000 but is more likely to set buyers back $17,000 (plus tax!).

The pricing is baking everyone’s noodles. We can’t wrap our heads around a super-expensive watch that will soon be obsolete and is functionally identical to a $350 model. This is not how tech works.

But that’s the point. I wrote how the high-end Apple Watch winds me up — I argued that its very existence is antithetical to Apple’s democratic values. But after further research, it’s obvious that Apple knows exactly what it’s doing, and it’s very smart — even if I still don’t like the gold watch’s enormous price tag.

The Apple Watch Edition is a classic Veblen product. The outrageous price is the whole point. And the higher it gets, the more of them Apple will sell. It might even be priced too low.

A new report for Reuters says that app makers are struggling to come up with the kind of “killer app” that will be a winner for the Apple Watch in the way that Instagram or, more recently, Snapchat was for the iPhone. The report notes that Apple has blocked certain features of the Apple Watch, including its gyroscope and accelerometer, on the initial WatchKit developers’ kit, but won’t reveal exactly why this has been done.

Other aspects of the Apple Watch third-party developers can now yet tap into include the ability to wake up companion iOS apps, using the Taptic Engine, heart rate tracking, Force Touch, and a variety of other innovations.

“The limitations are discouraging,” one engineer, developing a Watch app to control a Tesla Model S, is quoted as saying.