“Apple’s mystery unveiling on Tuesday is expected to be a watershed moment for the California giant — and the entire tech industry,” Glenn Chapman reports for Agence France-Presse.
“Cook could help Apple establish its dominance in a new category with an “iWatch” at the event set in the very location where Jobs introduced the Macintosh computer 30 years ago,” Chapman reports. “Apple lovers have been eager for the company to seize a new gadget category the way it dominated smartphones, tablets, and MP3 players with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod respectively. ‘I don’t believe this project is a knee-jerk reaction to other smart watches,’ said Creative Strategies president Tim Bajarin. ‘While the roots go back to Steve Jobs, this product is Tim Cook and Jony Ive.'”
“The genesis of what is being referred to in the media as ‘iWatch’ stemmed from Jobs and his frustration with health care matters while battling illness that took his life, according to the analyst,” Chapman reports. “Bajarin spoke of sources telling him the Apple wearable computer has been in the works for seven years.”
Read more in the full article here.
“For those of us who have followed the life of Steve Jobs, we know most of the products he brought to market were ones he wanted to use himself,” Tim Bajarin writes for PC Magazine.
“I believe Apple’s next big thing comes out of his immense frustration in not being able to monitor his health in real time and in studying the bureaucratic world of healthcare — where data is not portable and effectively sharing data between doctors and other members of his healthcare team was near impossible,” Bajarin writes. “I believe this is at the heart of Apple’s Healthkit and will drive one of the last big things Steve Jobs personally created for Apple before his death.”
“I believe we will see this health wearable this year and it will be version 1.0 of Apple’s move into health,” Bajarin writes. “Over the next year, it will enhance HealthKit’s abilities and attract many more developers. Then, over time, that data will move to the cloud and eventually, once the legal issues are ironed out, the data will be made available to healthcare providers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “iWatch” has Steve Jobs’ fingerprints all over it.
Apple taking on the healthcare industry. That would be amazing. I’m on board with this, as the healthcare industry is run by idiots.
Health Care Industry is not run by idiots.
Apple is not run by idiots.
**I don’t speak for Apple.
Among many functions of the IWatch is an opportunity for users to help doctors & themselves to become more aware and active in their own health care.
When you become involved with something that will have impact on your heath or your financial picture – then you will research & understand why or how something is generating the impact to your health, etc.
And maybe the functioning of the Healthcare industry.
We Americans don’t do this – we just want the Health Care Industry to pay the bill – you take an interest in your car insurance – how rates are effected by you – do the same with your health your life.
The patients are the idiots and the primary driver of higher healthcare costs. As a doctor you simply don’t have the time or resources to collate a patient’s medical history from the 13 different ER’s and hospitals they have visited in the last year and can tell you nothing about.
I’m not fully making stuff up here.
1) Rx insurance is terrible. Unless you work for a good school, expect to have horrible copays. Even more than that, people still don’t understand “formulary vs non-formulary” and that stuff started 14 years ago (in full force).
2) Rx insurance tends to persuade and dissuade medications based on formulary (read: COST), rather than medication-effectiveness for an individual. I’ve worked for PBMs, so I know the nonsense.
3) Doctors — from pediatricians to primary care doctors, you — the patient — might as well be on an assembly line. In the door. Out the door. “Thanks for the copay!”
4) Nurses. I know WAY too many nurses who work with an amazing number of incompetent nurses. We’re talking about nurses who don’t understand the difference between mg of medications and mcg of medications. One “little slip up” with a medication like Coumadin and say goodbye to the patient. Hospitals have “incident reports” that can be written up on the nurses for these violations, but they rarely fire the nurses, thus keeping these idiots poisoning many more patients in the future.
While the iWhatever may never fix these particular problems, it does show the amount of idiocy in the healthcare industry (and that was with just 4 examples). We all know there’s plenty more.
Why is that the patients fault, when most everything the patient does in that regard is generated thru the whole “you have to see a specialist for this, that and the other”?
It seems no matter how many forms a patient signs concerning the sharing of patient information between the practitioners, little of it ever seems to be.
Historically it’s called a practice, and I for one would like doctors to stop practicing and get it right.
I agree, you must be your own health care coach and need to document your medications, Dr visits, medical tests and even do a lot of your own research so you can speak intelligently with your various health care providers.
The major emphasis right now in healthcare (20% of the US economy) is physician/patient connections with home monitoring and testing & lifestyle changes because it has been shown to be able to reduce ED & hospital visits by 73-79%.
2012 AJMC article, See summary: http://www.mdvip.com—study-proves-dramatic-reduction-in-hospitalizations-and-300-million-savings-for-mdvips-personalized-healthcare-model
Yes, I agree that lifestyle changes (even simple ones like dropping some weight) will do wonders for health in general.
To take MDN’s take further:
” APPLE has Steve Job’s fingerprints all over it”
One more step; Steve’s DNA runs through Apple.
The original Macintosh had the creators’ signatures molded inside the plastic case… Maybe the iWatch has Steve’s DNA pattern embedded in the ROM…
/creepy
Steve Jobs’ DNA had cancer in it. That’s why he’s no longer here.
And it’s just a beginning. The possibilities are endless for Apple. Those who fret over “What’s next?” are woefully unimaginative.
There are plenty of unimaginative people in high places out there. There are people who truly believe that Android One is the future of mobile computing because there are at least one billion people on the planet who can’t afford today’s smartphones. Android will have this entire category of people to sell smartphones to and Apple will have nothing to offer.
Wall Street sees this as a far bigger deal than Apple trying to take over the health care industry because Android can also do that. Apart from mobile payments I don’t think Apple is seen to having any advantage over Android. Things like quality, a unified OS and customer satisfaction doesn’t count for anything.
It all comes down to who has the major market share and Android is seen as the clear leader by Wall Street. What matters most to the mobile industry is who can sell the cheapest devices to the most people on the planet and Apple has no interest in doing such a thing.
What’s next for Apple? Whatever it is it won’t be seen as enough to satisfy investors. Practically everyone believes there’s nothing Apple can do to move its needle higher. True. Woefully unimaginative.
Well, how many people get to sit at the whiteboard and start the discussion with “Since we own the ecosystem for 300M devices and have a gazillion dollars to work with we could….”?
So, the new iWatch will alert you to occasionally eat foods other than apples and visit an actual doctor once in a while.
The real problem with the healthcare system is everybody uses Winblows. That is the travesty.