“Like millions of people, Tim Cook stopped wearing a watch a while back. The Apple boss no longer needed one: his iPhone told the time just fine. There was just one problem, as he readily acknowledges in his interview with The Telegraph: glancing at one’s wrist can be a very useful way to find out information. It is less rude and less intrusive,” Allister Heath reports for The Telegraph. “So Apple now wants to pull off something that no company has ever managed before: it wants to reverse a cultural trend that it had created itself. It wants us to start wearing a watch again.”
“The big event on 9 March will showcase the Apple Watch; and it will be launched to consumers in April. Cook, needless to say, is already wearing his new Apple Watch. He couldn’t even contemplate living without it anymore, he says. ‘I’m now so used to getting all my notifications and all my messages,’ he says. ‘It’s so incredible just to do this,'” Heath reports. “Cook expects an explosion of new apps for the Apple Watch. One of the Apple Watch’s great missions will be to harness new technology to help improve users’ health. The Apple Watch will of course be able to monitor heart rates, Cook says; but it will be far more sophisticated than that. It is bad for people’s health to sit too much; so the watch will gently tap people’s wrist every hour to remind them to stand up and go for a walk if they haven’t had enough exercise. Even more intriguingly, the Watch will operate a special rewards system: users will get credits if they exercise enough. They will also be encouraged to increase their metabolic targets if they meet their exercise targets consistently.”
“There will be lots of other potentially revolutionary uses. The watch is designed to be able to replace car keys and the clumsy, large fobs that are now used by many vehicles, Cook told The Telegraph. This could be a major development and will reinforce the view that Apple is circling the automotive market,” Heath reports. “Another major application will be for paying: the Watch will be able to serve as a very usable credit card, courtesy of Apple Pay.”
“Staff rarely choose to leave Apple of their own volition: in many cases, they work there for years. The company enjoys extremely high levels of employee retention and loyalty – and from the scene in the Covent Garden store on Friday morning, where shop floor staff treated their CEO like a visiting guru, it’s not difficult to see why,” Heath reports. “Cook and The Telegraph entered a rear entrance; nobody at the store bar the manager knew of the visit. I have witnessed many shop, office and factory visits before, with bosses being received in a variety of ways. In some cases, they were welcome but often they were met with indifference or, of course, outright hostility. But the reaction at the Covent Garden store was off the charts: the staff gasped, and then burst into spontaneous, loud applause as soon as they spotted Cook, who walked in behind them.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote in January:
All phones are cumbersome to the same degree. They have to be pulled out, woken up, and poked at… Apple created… a world of iPhone/iPhone knockoff addicts. Apple will change the world again with Apple Watch, replacing iPhone zombies and iPhones on and under dining tables and everywhere else (you know, the stuff the older set complain about: “People nowadays, always looking at their gizmos, nobody can even have a conversation”) with quick glances of the wrist – like in the days of yore….
With iPhone, Apple changed the fabric of our everyday lives: All around the world today, you see people constantly pulling phones from pockets and staring at them. With Apple Watch, Apple will change behavior worldwide once again. A quick glance at your Watch and you’re off. No more smartphone zombies. Watch and see.