Apple kicked off its Apple Watch showcase today at Milan’s Salone Del Mobile Design Fair in Italy and on hand at the event were Apple executives including marketing chief Phil Schiller and designer Marc Newson.
We learned earlier this week that Apple planned to showcase the Watch at the event in Milan today, although Italy is not included in the initial 9 launch countries and availability for the region has not yet been announced.
Macitynet.it managed to get the photo above of Phil Schiller smiling into the camera, and a reader attending the event, which is one of many boutiques and pop-up stores showing off the device, sent in the rest.
The image below of Marc Newson comes from igen.fr — Newson was also spotted at the event sporting a stainless steel Apple Watch with black Sport band:
The famed designer joined the company last year to work on the design team with best bud Jony Ive.
Apple is holding similar pop-up store events in Paris, London, and Tokyo, many of which are stores within larger popular fashion boutiques that originally planned to also sell the device. It’s unclear if Apple’s new online only plan for the initial Apple Watch launch, however, will also extend to these locations when the device launches on April 24th.
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Pardon my rudeness, and this comes form a post0middle age man, but someone needs to tell Mr. Schiller he is way past the age for untucked shirts and overly-stone washed jeans. He is NOT rockin-it.
Let the guy be that way if he wants to. If anything, Jobs had a strange outfit, but that never stood in the way of his genius.
thats because Jobs was a “genius” … Schiller is just very smart…
Schiller invented the click wheel. I’m not joking.
I think Schiller’s stance is “I retired, then they asked me to come back…so I’m here, and I’ll take the millions in salary a year…but I’m still kind of retired”. Makes sense.
What are you smoking? Your confusing Schiller with Bob Mansfield.
What ? I’m 72 going on 73 and still use the same kind of untucked shirt and green washed jeans – I “do not go gently —-” Age is only a number, not a sentence !
Schiller is great.
By the way I know it’s completely off topic here. Is Schiller Jewish or German or both ?
True, completely off topic.
I am a massive fan of apple products. What I have seen of the watch does nothing to change this. However I find myself really struggling with justifying the prices for band or straps as we call them here in Scotland. £379 for the link strap; £209 for the modern buckle and £129 for the milanese loop. Are these things made from gold dust or something. I often find myself defending apple products easily because of the quality, but in no way can I possibly defend these prices for lets be honest a watch strap. Am I missing something? Please enlighten me.
They’re a hair expensive, but they are very nice and very well made. I’d say there’s a $25 (USD) or so premium on them just because they’re from Apple. But a nice leather watch strap can run $80 to $150 USD pretty easily. Then again, you can buy leather straps for $20, so no doubt they’re positioning these as premium.
There are already solutions on Kickstarter for adapters that work with standard watch straps, so I imagine that the strap economy around these will grow a good bit. Anybody making cases will probably jump into both the charging stand game, and the band game.
The Chinese are even now making “copies” of the most expensive bands – just wait a few more weeks and all will be well.