Concept image: Stephen Olmstead
You can’t get much sketchier than a Chinese Economic Daily report cited by DigiTimes, but the former is citing supply chain sources in claiming that Apple plans to release the iWatch in the third quarter of this year, and that the company expects to ship 65M units this year.
The iWatch will be manufactured by Quanta Computer, while Taiwan-based chip design house Richtek has also entered the supply chain. The device’s touch panel will be supplied by TPK, the paper noted. [With Samsung making the processor to Apple’s design.]
The original story says that suppliers have been asked to meet an August delivery date.
The China Times has previously suggested that TPK would make the touch panel, but this isn’t a particularly notable consistency: the company has in the past been a key panel supplier to Apple, while Quanta is a long-time Mac assembler, mostly in Asia but more recently in the USA also.
Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis, quoted in AppleInsider, is suggesting that the iWatch may include a UV sensor, measuring exposure to sunlight. While Curtis believes that the purpose of the rumored sensor is to prevent excessive exposure to sunlight, it’s possible that for some of us it might be more usefully employed to do the opposite …
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Will iOS Developers be able to use the iWatch for their app?
Dude your guess is as good as ou…wait…our guess is maybe.
TIMEFRAME. GET IT
That’s even funnier than the thought that Apple would make a watch.
It would make sense, even if it is a sketchy rumor. I wouldn’t doubt it if Apple is looking to introduce it alongside iPhone 6 to play up the fitness aspects of both devices working in tandem.
I’m sure the plan is to launch this as an iPhone accessory at the time of the iPhone 6 launch, and have it in store at the same time….Come in to buy an iPhone 6, pick up an iWatch as one of your accessories. They’ll sell a lot more that way if its billed as such and newly available in that way. It just can’t be astronomically expensive. $79 would be a good middle ground. iPad cases come in around $79, so as an iOS device accessory I think its acceptable.
And technically speaking, the iWatch should be an iDevice accessory for any device that runs iOS 8 and has the Healthbook App….
Somehow I imagine these features to be limited to the newest generation of iOS devices, which contain the necessary sensors….or is it just the opposite….the iWatch will contain all the necessary modern sensors, and all iOS 8 compatible devices (at least all with Bluetooth 4.0) will have Healthbook and take advantage of it.
An 80 dollar iwatch sounds extremely unlikely to me. The higher end smart watches out today, for example Adidas smart watch, are around 300, and with all the supposed technologies, r&d and effort going into this product, I expect it to be in the 250 to 350 price range.
I agree, I can’t see it for less than $200
Indeed, it’s Apple: it’s not going to be cheap.
It’s not going to be cheap, and it shouldn’t be cheap. If it were. $79 I literally wouldn’t buy it, if it is $299 I’ll buy it inmediately. This device is going to be incredible, and the start of a changing future for health.
How soon we get iPhone with ECG patches to get heart scan ECG and send it to our doctor??
32.75° angle. This will make sense soon. :)