“The tech industry has been buzzing in recent weeks about the sudden burst of announcements about wearable computing, and in particular about rumors that Apple is working on some kind of iWatch,” Chris O’Brien reports for The Los Angeles Times. “But in the view of some Apple fans, such a gadget wouldn’t be Apple’s first watch. As far as they’re concerned, Apple already released — and then withdrew — its first watch when it introduced the 6th generation of its iPod Nano in 2010.”
“Apple must have had some inkling that people might use the gadget this way. On the product description page, the company noted the options for different clock faces that ‘turn iPod Nano into a stylish timepiece,'” O’Brien reports. “Apple even used to sell several different wristbands from other companies through its website. ”
O’Brien reports, “Alas, Apple redesigned the Nano again last year, returning it to a rectangular shape for the 7th generation that is too awkward to wear on your wrist. Was this driven by natural design evolution? Or was this spontaneous watch market getting ahead of Apple’s official plans for a watch? Nobody knows for sure, of course. ‘We were obviously disappointed,’ [Chris Wilson, founder of LunaTik iPod nano watchband-maker] said. ‘You can never count on Apple not to change their product. When they did that, they either completely lost a product that was a vision of the future. Or, they have a plan up their sleeve.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s change of iPod nano from watch-like back to small PMP is by design.
As we wrote last September when the new iPod nano debuted:
We’re looking at a TIKTOK [watchband] with the iPod nano stuck in it sitting on the desk. Here’s the thing: We don’t wear watches. Here’s another thing: We don’t know anyone under 50 who wears a watch. Wristwatches are uncomfortable and redundant. They beg to die out, not to be reinvented. (In fact, wristwatches are dying out and have been for some time now. Wristwatch salesmen, have at it below.) If we want to know the time, we press the Home button on our iPhones or the button on our Nike+ FuelBands
. Two clocks, right there. We don’t need an anachronistic third digging into and impinging our wrists all day. We tried – so hard – to use the TIKTOK+iPod nano conglomeration as a runner’s watch. It’s absolutely great for music and absolutely horrible as a pace watch. The screen is just too small to see when you’re bouncing around and when you lift it to your face and stop naturally swinging your arm to look at it, the pace goes wonky. Sure it tracks the time and distance semi-acurately, but there are plenty of far better solutions for that sort of thing. It’s a wonderful iPod, a needless watch, and an absolutely horrid runner’s watch – which is probably why Apple made the smart move and turned it back into an iPod with a screen that’s big enough to actually use for something more than displaying 20 watch faces at the press of a button. The 6th generation iPod nano was too much of a “Super iPod shuffle” and not enough of an iPod nano. (We were kind of hoping the iPod nano was going to become the new iPod shuffle, but the economics – that damn touchscreen! – probably didn’t work for Apple).
The new 7th generation iPod nano looks to be much better for working out, now with Bluetooth 4.0, and you can still use it to show photos to grandma, but now she can actually see them! With a larger screen and the ability to play TV shows and movies, it’s a great thing for kids and less expensive than even last year’s iPod touch which Apple has kept as the entry-level touch ($149 vs. $199). Plus, it’s really, really, really thin at just 5.4mm!
Hey, who knows? Maybe right now Apple’s hard at work reinventing the wristwatch into something we’d actually want to strap to our wrists: FaceTime, Dick Tracy, etc. If so, bring it on, but it should be its own thing, “iWatch” or whatever, not an iPod nano stuck into a third-party strap sitting on the desk, not on our wrists.
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