I also own some Apple products,and one thing that is substantially different has been build quality and ease of use.
iPods were fun to use, iPhones had enough UI differentiation with things like blackberries to be "different".
the Apple Watch doesn't seem to have that. As a cousin post commented, Android Wear's UI almost seems more Apple than Apple's own UI.
Maybe the Zoom-UI and the crown are it. maybe this will tackle people's issues with usability. But there seems to be little differentiation. I won't argue about it being the best on the market (it might be), I just doubt this changes the marketplace as much as we might want.
This might end up being like the iPad. A lot of people ended up buying iPads, but unlike the iPhone, we didn't get a very large new tablet market from it.
> iPods were fun to use, iPhones had enough UI]
> differentiation with things like blackberries to be
> "different".
These things are true only in hindsight. When the iPod came out, how would it ever compare to the Nomad? How was a phone that had no keyboard going to compete with people's beloved Blackberrys?
> the Apple Watch doesn't seem to have that
I'm wrong a lot, but I'll be amazed if that's a comment you can stand by a month after it's in consumers' hands.
The ZoomUI looked terrible to me. After years of huge iPads with only 4 icons across on it, because that supposedly makes them easier to use, the tiny tight grocery fruit pack of the icons looks like a usability nightmare. Fiddling with the knob (it's not a crown, crowns have specific functions in watches) also looks like a terrible time with every interaction. There's so many other ways they could have gone with it, and it's like they chose the wrong way just to be different.
The thing that's really interesting to me is that there's a million different ways Apple could have gone with their watch, and instead they just arrived at an Apple version of what's been going on in Android land for a while now.
iPods were fun to use, iPhones had enough UI differentiation with things like blackberries to be "different".
the Apple Watch doesn't seem to have that. As a cousin post commented, Android Wear's UI almost seems more Apple than Apple's own UI.
Maybe the Zoom-UI and the crown are it. maybe this will tackle people's issues with usability. But there seems to be little differentiation. I won't argue about it being the best on the market (it might be), I just doubt this changes the marketplace as much as we might want.
This might end up being like the iPad. A lot of people ended up buying iPads, but unlike the iPhone, we didn't get a very large new tablet market from it.