Are you excited about the new Apple Watch? Michael S. Malone at The Wall Street Journal has found the reaction to the well publicized introduction to be “meh.” Perhaps the company has become better at creating publicity than technology.
Of course, Apple has always been good at generating publicity—a fact that lets it minimize what it spends on advertising. Coca Cola, for instance, spends about 7% of its revenues on ads, vs. less than 1% for Apple, according to Evan Horowitz in The Boston Globe. An Apple and Coke comparison might not be germane, but even tech companies like Microsoft, Samsung, and Dell targeting consumers spend much more on ads as a percent of sales than Apple. (Horowitz presents graphs of the companies’ advertising trends over the past few years.)
Speaking of Coca Cola, Will Oremus at Slate recalls an Andy Warhol quote to the effect that a rich person and a poor person drink the same concoction: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”
Oremus notes that the same is true of the iPhone—the entry level employee and the CEO have essentially the same device. This will not be true for the Apple Watch, for which wealthy people can spend $17,000. People who would be willing to spend $349 for a top-of-the-line watch may be less enthusiastic about paying the same amount for a bottom-of-the-line product.
Then there’s the problem of spending $17,000 on a consumer electronic gadget no matter how much money you have. As Malone puts it in the Journal, “…to suggest, as Apple has, that today’s owners will pass their Watches down to their grandchildren as cherished family heirlooms is absurd. People pass down Rolexes and Patek Philippes precisely because they aren’t subject to Moore’s Law; their hardware won’t be obsolete in three years because it has been obsolete for a hundred.”
As for the technology, writes Malone, “…the iWatch isn’t as revolutionary as it pretends to be. It is elegant and has some nice features, notably its health-monitoring applications. But it also exhibits a kind of technological inevitability: Apple, having attacked everything else, is going after the last screen left—even if proves to be a screen too far.”
To illustrate the less than stellar history of Silicon Valley watches, he juxtaposes photos of the Apple Watch and the 1977 Hewlett-Packard wrist instrument with calculator.
Specific tech issues raised already include battery life. Apple says the watch has an “all day battery”—which means 18 hours. But as Matt Burns at TechCrunch points out, that only applies if your workout doesn’t last more than 30 minutes—and you restrict other usage to 90 time checks, 90 notifications, and 45 minutes of app use.
But perhaps the forthcoming Apple Watch or its successors will be a big hit. It will be interesting to see how many people line up outside Apple stores on April 24.
