The Apple Watch launch is fraught with expectation and desire in a way no other new product from the company ever has been before.
All images: Apple
There's a fascinating moment in the New Yorker's recent profile of Jonathan Ive. On the cusp of the Apple Watch announcement, he describes the odd sensation of the before and after moment, when everything changes:
He spoke of soon arriving at "this rarest of times—when we're done, and we get to talk about it." He added, "It's pretty strange. Where we're standing, right now, we haven't talked about it, and we can stand here in a couple of hours, and millions and millions of people will know." He went on, "You go from something that you feel very protective of, and you feel great ownership of, and suddenly it's not yours anymore, and it's everybody else's. And it's a very—I think the word 'traumatic' is probably overstated, but it's a really significant point in time." He smiled. "These are very poignant points in time. It's so digital. It's so binary."
This in-between moment is the moment we are all living in now. The Apple Watch was announced, but none of us (outside of Apple at least) has experienced it. Right now, we are all in Jony Ive's waiting room. This is something unique. Maybe even something to savor: the world as it is, not as it will be.
Although we know what the Apple Watch will look like, and what many of its core features are, thanks to the announcement last September, we don't know how well all the pieces will come together. Or how real people actually choose to use those pieces. We don't know if it's going to be useful.
Put another way: We don't know if it's going to change things.
Hell, we don't even know if people will want it — and really anyone pretending to know with certainty whether or not people will want to buy it is already wrong about at least one thing. That's because the only thing capable of selling the Apple Watch is...the Apple Watch. And all the preconceived notions about it in the world — good and bad — will melt away as it hits the street.
Consider the sea change in attitudes that took place between the time when Apple announced the iPhone, on Jan. 9, 2007, (at someone else's event, no less! Can you imagine that now? Apple letting another company control its product launch?) when many analysts, journalists, and existing manufacturers scoffed at this buttonless phone, versus where it was just over a year after its actual release, when it had sold six million of them. Or consider just last quarter when it sold 74.5 million of them — 74.5 million in the quarter!
And it wasn't just the iPhone. The iPod, too, was largely dismissed when it was announced. Slashdot, the vox populi of its day, famously sniffed, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Remember the Nomad? Of course you don't.
These two devices, the iPod and iPhone, both derided by people who pretended to know better, would go on to become the iconic bookending products of the first decade of the 21st century.
via on BuzzFeed
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