Apple Watch

The developers behind iOS news app Pipes have released an interactive Apple Watch demo online that allows users and developers to take parts of the interface for a test run before the device launches to the public.

The demo features a replica of the device’s home screen as well as the ability to launch any app you see listed. Many of the apps provide only a static image, but a few have more interactive bits, such as the Instagram mockup that allows you to swipe through a few photos, or the Music app that enables playback of Coldplay’s “A Sky Full of Stars.”

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Apple Watch at Colette

Apple has picked up a few new hires and advisors to assist its growing Watch team ahead of the Apple Watch launch currently on track for March. Among them, Apple has recently hired another executive from the fashion industry, this time from Louis Vuitton, in addition to two new hires from the medical industry.
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Apple is finishing up work on the Apple Watch’s software, and sources familiar with the product’s development say that the device is currently on track to ship in the United States by the end of March. Apple previously said that the wearable product will ship in “early 2015,” while Senior Vice President of Retail Angela Ahrendts got a bit more specific by telling employees that the launch will occur in the “spring,” after the Chinese New Year…

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While Apple is set to release its Watch sometime early this year, CES 2015 is already packed with smartwatches with a range of focuses including fitness, fashion, and utility. We already saw Withings show off its colorful and affordable Activité Pop smartwatch with 8 month battery life, and others including Misfit, Garmin, Magellan, First Alert and more also have something for your wrist to show off at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. Check out the latest below:
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…Time will tell…

As we begin 2015 — the year Apple has promised to release the Apple Watch it showed last September — there’s a somewhat comical debate underway in the media: how big of a success will the Watch actually be?

Although I’m not personally planning to buy an Apple Watch, three decades of using Apple products and over a decade of reviewing them have taught me that Apple now has only three types of launches: gigantic hits, hits, and near-hits. And those phrases are all relative.

Two of Apple’s “least popular” product families, the Apple TV and iPod, have sold in quantities most companies would kill for. These are devices that haven’t been meaningfully updated in several years, and many people have called the iPod “dead,” despite sales of 14 million units in the past year. Even as a semi-successful “hobby,” the Apple TV reached around 10 million customers in the last year, a larger group of users than the typical company can achieve in a whole lineup.

So it’s hard to call any modern Apple product a “flop,” but it’s also true that a few of its major releases — most notably the Apple TV — were particularly close to being misses in their first generations, requiring major price and/or feature changes before succeeding in the next generation. Where will the Apple Watch fit in Apple’s history? Today alone, we’ve seen predictions ranging from “2015 is the year of the Apple Watch” and “could change the way people live” to a somber prediction that it won’t be “the homerun product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.” Similar opinions have been circulating for months.

After reading both dire and overenthusiastic predictions, as well as measuring demand several months out from the release, my belief is somewhere in the middle: the Apple Watch will do better in its first year than the first-generation Apple TV, falling somewhere between the first-generation iPhone (6.1 million units, below Apple’s target of 10 million) and the original iPad (14.8 million units, wildly surpassing most estimates). The iPhone is huge now, but it wasn’t a “gigantic hit” in its first year, while the iPad roared out of the gate and has stayed pretty strong since then. Below, I’ll explain why I think the Apple Watch will wind up between them.

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In the months leading up to the launch of the Apple Watch next year, early opinions about the smartwatch have been quite mixed. While some believe that the Apple Watch will be as successful as iconic products released ahead of it, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac, others are more skeptical about how much of an impact the device will truly have.

While the wearables market is forecasted to become over a $5 billion industry by 2018, it hasn’t reached that point just yet. But T-Mobile CEO John Legere certainly thinks it will sooner than later, predicting that the Apple Watch launch in 2015 will be the turning point in which the wearables market goes from niche to mainstream.
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<em><a href="http://9to5mac.com/2014/09/09/apple-offering-new-u2-album-songs-of-innocence-for-free-on-itunes/">Tim Cook and U2 at this year’s iPhone 6 event</a></em>

Apple CEO Tim Cook ranked well on CNN Money’s list of best CEOs of 2014 taking the top spot of CEO of the year. The news organization said Cook has “arguably the toughest CEO job in America” as he battles critics skeptical of his performance running Apple without Steve Jobs and cited the company’s 40% stock climb this year as well as the debut of the iPhones 6 and Apple Pay ahead of the Apple Watch early next year.
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In addition to supporting WatchKit and the Apple Watch, the iOS 8.2 software update will re-introduce some previously removed features in Apple’s Health app on iOS 8 as well as provide some feature enhancements. As discovered in the latest iOS 8.2 beta for developers, Apple is reintroducing support for blood glucose tracking through the iOS 8 Health app after an issue with which unit of measurement the app defaulted to presenting problems for international users of the feature. The somewhat intimidating Health app is also getting a little smarter with brief descriptions for the various data points tracked by the app listed under each section.
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Apple today released the third iOS 8.2 beta to developers for testing. The first iOS 8.2 beta was previously released alongside WatchKit to allow developers to test app functionality ahead of the upcoming Apple Watch release while the second release went out last week. We’ll update with any significant changes found in the latest iOS 8.2 beta release.
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVwHCGAr_OE]

Google has put together its annual inspirational Year in Search video, and shared some of the trending searches across the year – with Apple making the charts for both the right and wrong reasons.

On the plus side, Apple took the #1 slot in consumer electronics searches, with the iPhone 6 ahead of rival smartphones from Samsung, Google, Motorola, LG and Nokia. Apple was also the only company to make three of the top-ten searches, with the Apple Watch at #8 and iPad Air at #10 … 
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The USPTO has today published an Apple patent application for a flexible display which deforms when touched to provide tactile feedback. Actuators beneath the display would create bumps or ridges in the display to simulate buttons and other virtual objects. The patent also describes a speaker and microphone that could work through the display, potentially making for sleeker and more water-resistant devices.

Electronic devices may be provided that contain flexible displays and internal components. An internal component may be positioned under the flexible display. The internal component may be an output device such as a speaker that transmits sound through the flexible display or an actuator that deforms the display in a way that is sensed by a user. The internal component may also be a microphone or pressure sensor that receives sound or pressure information through the flexible display. Structural components may be used to permanently or temporarily deform the flexible display to provide tactile feedback to a user of the device.

The display described would be sensitive to both touch and pressure … 
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A report by Taiwan’s United Daily News claims that Apple supplier Quanta will begin mass-production of the Apple Watch in January, echoing an earlier supply-chain rumor from September. It claims that the initial production run will be between three and five million units.

The report says that there have been ‘breakthroughs’ in yield issues, and that the company increased its production staffing from 3000 to 10,000 workers in the second half of the year, with further recruitment ongoing … 
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Apple has just released the second beta of iOS 8.2 to developers, for testing, as an over-the-air update.  The beta can also be downloaded from Apple’s developer site. iOS 8.2 includes WatchKit, so developers can create apps and Glances for Apple Watch. You can read about how such apps work with our previous coverage of the WatchKit APIs. Apple released the first beta of iOS 8.2 a few weeks ago.

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Apple Watch at Colette

We’ve already seen how Apple is presenting the upcoming Apple Watch, which it calls its most personal device yet, as not just another technology device but also a piece of jewelry that the fashion world will be proud to embrace.

9to5Mac has now learned from internal hiring documents that Apple is recruiting retail candidates this month with “a fashion or luxury background” suggesting Apple is preparing to deliver some changes to its retail stores in time for the Apple Watch’s early 2015 debut. With former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts leading Apple’s retail efforts and the Apple Watch set to transform the Apple Store into a jewelry store, what could a potential Apple Store makeover include?
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Tim Cook shows China’s top internet regulator Lu Wei the Apple Watch

Apple CEO Tim Cook alongside Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other tech executives recently met with China’s Cyberspace Administration ministerLu Wei while the government official was in the US, according to a report from China’s government-run china.com.cn (via Bloomberg).
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Apple has quietly refreshed its Apple Watch microsite with a few changes including more details about the upcoming wearable and newly added interactive images of the device. Previously Apple had a single ‘Features’ page for describing the functionality of the Apple Watch, but has replaced that page with expanded descriptions of the watch’s functions across the separate pages labeled “Timekeeping,” “New Ways to Connect,” and “Health & Fitness.” Each page goes a bit more in-depth into each category with additional details and interactive images.
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A new Bloomberg report indicates that Sony might be preparing to produce a smartwatch that uses an e-paper display rather than a traditional LCD display. Not only will the display be made of e-paper, the report continues, but the entire wrist band as well. Could such a device take on Apple’s own smartwatch, set for release early next year?

E-paper, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the same low-power “electronic paper” display used in devices like the Kindle. It allows a display to be legible, even in direct sunlight, by reflecting light rather than emitting it like a standard LCD display.

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