Following on from a great weekend for its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets, Apple has been named the coolest brand in Britain for the third year running.
The CoolBrands list is voted for by 2,000 consumers, alongside a panel of 37 people described as “key influencers” — including models Sophie Dahl and Jodie Kidd, and the fashion designer Julien Macdonald.
Voters are asked to consider a brand’s style, innovation, originality, authenticity, desirability and uniqueness when making their choices.
Just 11 percent of respondees to a survey about new Apple products plan to buy an Apple Watch, according to 6,000 people quizzed by Canadian investment bank, RBC Capital Markets.
A further 24 percent said they were uncertain. Given that Apple Watch is Apple’s first major new product category since the iPad this is bad news if it carries through to the tech-buying customer base at large.
While it’s far from good for Apple, however, it’s also not entirely unsurprising. The smart watch/wearables industry has remained relatively niche up until now, with other rival products like the Samsung Galaxy Gear proving to be flops in the market place.
For a certain subset of Apple fans, the only thing more exciting than Cupertino unleashing a new device upon the world is the box they choose to unleash it in. Apple is famous for its sexy, minimalist packaging design, and when the Apple Watch hits the market in 2015, we are expecting it to come in a box worthy of its luxury watch status.
Of course, what that box will actually look like is anyone’s guess. But Evelio Mattos of Design Packaging has released a stunning Apple Watch concept that isn’t just sexy, but has a killer hidden feature: the box doubles as an iPhone dock!
Apple is reportedly aiming to sell upwards of 50 million Apple Watches in 2015.
The news comes via a new report from Digitimes, which claims that Apple has placed orders for shipments of up to five million AMOLED panels per month throughout the year. These screens will be used as the innovative touch-sensitive display for Apple’s wearables debut.
Motoring experts in the UK have warned that individuals using their Apple Watch while driving will face the same penalties as those caught using a mobile phone.
The words of caution come from road safety charity the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM), reportedly backed up by the country’s Department of Transport.
In the United Kingdom, this would mean that a driver caught using their Apple Watch while driving faces a £100 ($163) fine and three penalty points on their license.
“An Apple Watch has the potential to be just as distracting as any other smartphone device, indeed more so if you have to take you hand off the wheel to interact with it,” an IAM spokesperson told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
While cellphones have come a long way in a very short time — from the Wall Street bricks of the 1980s, to the gorgeous iPhone 6 devices of today — a new article from Wired argues that innovation takes place much more slowly in watch land: something that could spell trouble for Apple.
With insights from watch and clock historian Alexis McCrossen, the article notes that attempts to reinvent the watch have historically proven difficult, with a key example being the world’s very first electronic watch: the $2,100 Pulsar 1 from 1972.
Despite there being “very similar hopes to those swirling around the Apple Watch” the article points out that “a decade later, most watch-buyers were still expecting the same kind of analog features they’d wanted for years.”
The Apple Watch isn’t coming out for months, but that isn’t stopping rumors from surfacing about future hardware iterations. Apple has plans for tracking much more about your health than what its Watch can do currently.
While the rest of us were celebrating the unveiling of Apple’s much-anticipated smart watch on Tuesday, Apple’s European legal team was busy rushing to file six trademark applications for the name “Apple Watch.”
Of these applications, four featured the Apple logo in front of the word “Watch,” while the other two referred to the two words “Apple Watch.”
Apple’s legal firm filed the trademarks under a total of 11 International Classes for protection and clarification, covering areas including financial transactions, fitness and wellness sensors, and more.
Like clockwork, along with Apple’s new product announcements came a protest against them. The Free Software Foundation’s anti-DRM campaign took a timely if predictable potshot against the Apple Watch and Apple Pay after the products were unveiled Tuesday.
“It is astonishing to see so much of the technology press acting as Apple’s marketing arm,” said FSF executive director John Sullivan in a statement Tuesday after Cupertino’s big Apple Watch reveal. “What’s on display today is widespread complicity in hiding the most newsworthy aspect of the announcement — Apple’s continuing war on individual computer user freedom, and by extension, free speech, free commerce, free association, privacy, and technological innovation.”
Apple started introducing gold variants of its devices with the “champagne” iPhone 5s in 2013. Given the unexpected popularity of that device, it was only natural that Apple would keep the color scheme going for future devices — which now includes the Apple Watch, as unveiled yesterday.
While Tim Cook didn’t dwell on too many details regarding the individual Apple Watch models during his keynote, technology journalist David Pogue does have some additional information about the 18-karat gold Edition variant of the Apple Watch, which he claims will come in a “gorgeous jewelry box” that doubles as a charger.