The capacity for watch-computer hybrids has grown exponentially in the 20 years since the product fail of the Timex Data Link, though I still don’t have any interest in the iWatch or whatever Apple will brand its forthcoming wrist-worn device. Of course, my opinion means nothing. I think everyone knows that Beats by Dre isn’t the best headphones on the market, but that’s mattered little. Apple products and Beats (now an Apple product) are being purchased from the U.S. to China for reasons in addition to function. Regardless of the motivations, I’m pretty confident Angela Ahrendts will make new watch the most handsome mass-marketed wearable yet. From Rupert Neate of Guardian, a question about the item Tim Cook hopes will expand the Apple juggernaut beyond the iPhone:
Can it afford for the Apple Watch to fail?
It has been five years since Apple launched its latest truly new product – the iPad – in 2010. To live up to its name for innovation, and diversify revenues away from reliance on the iPhone, Apple needs the Apple Watch to be an unqualified success.
Cook announced that the watch would go on sale in April, giving the company a boost in its third quarter when it will not benefit from Christmas or the Chinese new year, which will have helped the previous two quarters. “We’re making great progress in the development of it,” he said.
Apple describes the new product – often referred to as the iWatch, although it has not been officially named – as the “most personal device ever” and it is thought it will be able to monitor its wearer’s health as well as connect to an iPhone to provide several other functions. Cook said app developers had already impressed him with “some incredible innovation”.
Carolina Milanesi at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech says the watch will help Apple extend its sales into a much wider market. “They have been very smart in pushing it as jewellery and design rather than how technologically smart it is,” she says. “They are concentrating more on impressing the design and fashion world than the tech bloggers.
“I think this will be a much more irrational buy than with an iPad. With an iPadyou wanted an iPad: this is going to be more of a fashion statement.”
She said the launch would benefit from the fashion and marketing skills of Angela Ahrendts, the former Burberry boss Apple hired last year on a $73m pay package as its head of retail.
Apple poached a string of big names from fashion and design to join its watch team, including Patrick Pruniaux, former vice-president of sales at Tag Heuer and former Yves Saint Laurent boss Paul Deneve, who is now Apple’s “vice president of special projects.”•
