Apple Watch technology is not exactly impressive
Last week’s news conference to formally announce the company’s first major product since the death of Steve Jobs four years ago seemed, to me at least, to carry an air of sophisticated desperation.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and his supporting cast spent way too much time showcasing the shiny metals and multiplicity of bands that Apple hopes will make its smart watch more than just a gizmo unable to do much of anything without an iPhone connected to it, like a dummy to a ventriloquist.
Cook emphasized that the three versions of the new watch come in aluminum (or “aluminium,” as Apple’s British designer Jony Ives eloquently intoned in his narration of a video about it), stainless steel that the company says is “cold-forged to make it up to 80 percent harder” and 18-karat gold that’s “twice as hard as standard gold.”
Even if the gold was forged in the fires of Mount Doom, as one online commenter quipped, it would add maybe $3,000 to the price (making it still 10 times more expensive than the $349 entry-level Sport version).
Cook also boasted about the Sport version’s fluoroelastomer band, which sounds exotic but turns out to be synthetic rubber that has been used for more than half a century for seals and O-rings in car engines and other machines.
A number of smart watches running the Android Wear system have the same key features, like notifications of incoming calls and texts so you can ignore them.
[...] new models coming from the likes of Samsung, Sony, LG and especially Pebble (whose watches work with both iPhones and Android phones) should match and even overtake the capabilities of the Apple Watch.
Having concluded that its first-generation watch isn’t going to wow people with its technology, the company is positioning it as the must-have fashion accessory of 2015.
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