Jobs would have killed Apple Watch.

I doubt Jobs would have held out against smaller iPad sizes or larger iPhone sizes long. While, the man may have been prone to sweeping pronouncements he was also well known for swinging like a pendulum turning yesterdays unacceptable rubbish into tomorrow must have features.

But, one area in which he can be positively credited for not faltering is that once he had an idea of what made a good product he wouldn't tolerate anything less. And battery life was always a HUGE factor to both Jobs and consumers on what makes a quality product. Go to BestBuy and read reviews of virtually any electronic device. You won't have to read long to find praise or scorn over battery life.

So a watch that lasts 2.5-3 hours in "watch" mode would clearly not have been acceptable. And these the are the estimates that are leaking from Apple. The justification? The watch won't actually be in "watch" mode continually. They expect it to be in a lower power/sleep mode most of the time.

Wait! What?

Basically, while most smart watch makers are sacrificing smarts on the watch in favour of battery life. Apple is working towards a truly smart watch. But the battery tech isn't even at a passable level for that in my opinion. I would take a smart watch that doesn't have any extra smarts at all beyond showing time without a paired smartphone but gave me a week+ worth of battery life over one that doesn't actually show the time without manual interaction regardless of the battery life, but one that can't even last a full day telling you the time is sheer insanity.

And a processor that effectively matches the one in the iPhone 5? WTF?!?!?! For what purpose? The things which need more processor power on iPads and iPhones are games more often than not. And much that demand comes from serving up loads of graphical assets on their ludicrously hi res screens. But the watch resolution is lower and the screen is smaller. So fewer assets will fit and they won't be as well defined anyway... the power is beyond overkill and too costly on the battery. Whoever made that decision should be shot.

I'll be the first to agree... the watch is one of the most wasteful devices in terms of battery that humans have ever invented. Even watches with batteries that last years probably spend 99.9%+ of their time not being looked at. So, I really do understand from a pure engineering perspective why it might sound like a half decent trade-off. But even disregarding everything else it does, a time piece needs to display the time perpetually to be of use.

But it isn't JUST a watch and 2.5-4 hours isn't a lot of time when you consider the other things it does; answering phone calls, viewing and performing actions against phone alerts like texts, tweets, etc... and serving as playback controls for your iPhones music app. In other words... if you ever actually plan to use you Apple Watch, it won't make it through a full work day let alone a whole actual day.

Apparently Apple was made good by hiring people who only performed well when lorded over by a perfectionist a-hole. Without some jerk crushing their ideas and pushing them to their limits the company is pumping all sorts of mindless half baked non-sense. Toss this on the Apple Pay rubbish heap and move on.

Comments

Popular Posts