“When Apple Inc. started developing its smartwatch, executives envisioned a state-of-the-art health-monitoring device that could measure blood pressure, heart activity and stress levels, among other things, according to people familiar with the matter,” Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“But none of those technologies made it into the much-anticipated Apple Watch, due in April. Some didn’t work reliably. Others proved too complex,” Wakabayashi reports. “And still others could have prompted unwanted regulatory oversight, these people said.”
“That left Apple executives struggling to define the purpose of the smartwatch and wrestling with why a consumer would need or want such a device. Their answer, for now, is a little bit of everything: displaying a fashion accessory; glancing at information nuggets more easily than reaching for a phone; buying with Apple Pay; communicating in new ways through remote taps, swapped heartbeats or drawings; and tracking daily activity,” Wakabayashi reports. “Apple’s ability to lure millions of users to a new type of device will help prod software developers to create the types of enticing apps that boosted the appeal of the iPhone and iPad. That eases the burden of conceiving and delivering a killer feature from the get-go. ‘This whole notion that there needs to be a killer app in an Apple product just isn’t true,’ said J.P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research. ‘For different people, different things will pop.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote of Apple Watch at the end of last year:
Apple Pay alone will sell the device.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]