Apple Watch - page 97

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.

Nerds and regular folks across the globe paused yesterday while Tim Cook unveiled Apple’s newest products. While everyone else was busying talking about the Apple Watch and new MacBook, your favorite brands were trying to get in on the buzz with a tweetstorm of puns and jokes.

Makers of everything from Twinkies to Miller Lite were ready to go viral with their witty tweets. Most fell flat, but there were a couple clever ones mixed in with the noise.

Here are the hottest Apple Watch-related tweets from social media marketers looking to cash in on Apple’s cachet:

Actress Anna Kendrick can probably afford a $10,000 gold watch, but that didn’t stop her from taking a bite out of Apple after it flexed its wrist-computing power Monday.

Known for her brutal Twitter truths, Kendrick offered a sour evaluation of the high-end Apple Watch, which is made of 18-karat gold and comes with a matching luxury price tag.

“We should be thanking Apple for launching the $10,000 ‘apple watch’ as the new gold standard in douchebag detection,” wrote Kendrick.

Swatch may be just a couple of months from launching its own Apple Watch rival, but the 61-year old co-creator of the low cost Swatch wristwatch, Elmar Mock, isn’t being shy about describing the havoc he thinks Apple’s debut wearable device is going to wreak on the watch industry.

“Apple will succeed quickly,” Mock told Bloomberg. “It will put a lot of pressure on the traditional watch industry and jobs in Switzerland.”

Although other brands are now starting to investigate the possibilities of smartwatches, Mock thinks people are still selling the Apple Watch short, saying that the Apple Watch is going to bring about an “Ice Age” for makers of mid-priced Swiss watches when it ships in April.

One of the highlights of any Apple keynote is that it inevitably means another catchy jingle from YouTube songsmith and longtime Mac-fan, Jonathan Mann: a musician whose Apple-centric songs once made even Steve Jobs dance.

Frankly, it’s amazing that nothing short of amazing that Mann is able to create such entire songs, complete with music videos, so quickly after an Apple keynote is off the air, but somehow he does. Choosing a smooth jazz-synth sound and the vaguely-inappropriate title “It’s Not Just With You, It’s In You… I Mean On You,” Mann lovingly lampoons Apple’s “most personal device” with an earworm that, all things being equal, should tide you over until WWDC.

Check out the music video (and its lyrics) after the jump. You might even want to sing along…

Apple will consume 18 percent of global sapphire ingot output making the displays for the Apple Watch, according to a new report coming out of China’s supply chain. This adds up to a whopping 30.8 million millimetres of two-inch (diameter) sapphire ingots in total.

Assume, for a moment, you’ve always been an Android guy but yesterday’s spintastic Apple Watch presentation sent you over the edge.

Now you’re a freshly minted Apple fanboy with money to burn, and you want to go from zero to full-on Apple hero. How much is it going to set you back if you’re ready to go all in with the latest, greatest gear Cupertino has to offer?

The Apple Watch is a watch in as much as the iPhone is a phone: It bears a resemblance to its titular device, but does so much more as well. That said, Apple’s focus on inviting fashion and watch journalists to yesterday’s “Spring Forward” keynote shows that Cupertino does view its new wearable device as an alternative to analog watches.

Now that we finally have a price tag for all the Apple Watch models, we can compare a few classic alternatives you could strap on your wrist instead. You won’t get the apps, or the ability to beam your heartbeat to a loved one, but if it’s a stylish status symbol you’re after, these are the timepieces the Apple Watch needs to beat.

Check out our picks to see if Jony Ive’s proclamation that Swiss watchmakers are “f*cked” is really true.

With so many Apple Watch configurations to choose from, making your preorder before Apple’s initial stock sells out next month could be difficult if you leave it until the last minute.

But you can choose and save your favorite Watch configuration now for instant preordering later through the Apple’s online store.

When Steve jobs co-founded Apple, his vision was to democratize technology.

At the time, computers were for governments and rich corporations. Jobs wanted everyone to have their own computer — a crazy idea back in the ’70s. The slogan for the original Macintosh was “the computer for the rest of us.”

For the next 30 years, Jobs worked hard to realize that mission. Although Apple has never made the cheapest computers, in general, the trend has been cheaper and more accessible, from the Mac to the iPhone. For most people, Apple’s products are largely affordable.

This is why the gold Apple Watch Edition — which starts at $10,000 — bugs me. It’s not a watch for the rest of us. It’s a watch for everyone but us. It’s a watch for the one percent.

Apple blew us away today with its HBO Now partnership, sexy new MacBook, and ResearchKit. But the star of the show was Apple Watch, which has the potential to be either a game changer or massive flop.

For those who don’t remember, this was the second time Apple execs have taken the stage to talk Apple Watch. We got an initial preview of the Watch back in September, and today’s event was more for filling in the knowledge gaps.

While we already knew the Watch’s main selling points and the kinds of apps it would run, there was still some crucial information that needed answering. Luckily Apple did address the most important questions, but it also left certain aspects of the Watch in ambiguity.

The new MacBook is gorgeous, insanely thin, revolutionary and pressure-sensitive. It’s also missing one killer feature: a glowing Apple logo.

The shining bit of trade dress has been a pop culture icon ever since Apple released the PowerBook G3 in May 1999. However, it looks like Jony Ive’s design team is ready to sacrifice the glowing Apple beacon in the name of thinness. You’ll still find a light-up logo on the MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, but it was never meant to be on Apple’s new golden beauties.

Take a look at the back of the new 12-inch Retina MacBook: