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I wonder about the Apple Watch, as I find it difficult to imagine what it will be good for. It has to make do with an extremely small output area, which means that it can only compete against the iPhone in cases where the interaction is so short that the convenience of having a 2 to 3 second faster access wins out against the much better experience you could provide with the iPhone, or the information that needs to be processed is so small that it can comfortably fit onto the watch.

These activities are pretty limited:

• Authentication is probably the killer app: it could replace all the keys and the credit cards you own with an inherently more secure solution. Ideally it would also replace our IDs, and it could replace all our computer logins.
• “What’s up?” is also an important task to master: seeing a reminder for your next appointment, for puplic transport times, the weather, or walking/cycling directions are quite helpful. For some seeing who is calling/texting might be essential, but for me it would be just annoying, while the reverse would be brilliant, having the watch figure out whether it is good time to interrupt me and tell my callers.
• Remote control for small things: controlling the TV, changing the temperature, preheating the car, …
• fitness tracking is an obvious point, including replacing the iPod as your music source during exercise. A smallish, but lucrative niche to get the watch of the ground, with some nice halo effect as well.
• And of course telling the time, and the other functions of the clock app.

It will be interesting to watch this evolve, as I feel there is a huge risk of providing too many small functions cluttering the interface, making access so slow that you’d rather use the phone. Also the interface itself looks quite limited: you have the touchscreen, with your thumb obscuring most of the screen, or the crown which is only one dimension and could be difficult to use when strapped on the wrist. It seems to me that having more than a dozen apps to choose from will be painfully slow. All of this points to a very restrained role the watch will be playing compared to the phone, a role which will only require quite limited hardware resources, and so see much longer upgrade cycles than the iPhone.

With the latest event, Apple has now provided us with its latest lineup. It is an interesting one:

• iPhone 6 Plus provides the paperback sized iPad experience, marketed as a phone with huge margins. Still surprised that it does not support the SD card reader.
• iPhone 6 is interesting in that the smaller 4" size has now been discontinued. I am still adjusting to this size, it is definitely less easy to use with one hand, but with some navigation changes in the software most of the problem could be overcome. Still hearing from people that it is too big and they went for the 5S instead.
• Retina iMac looks like a gorgeous and absolutely price competitive computer. Technically the most impressive advance.
• iPad has seen a small upgrade in the minis, lost the rotation lock on the Air, but gained a less reflective screen, and essentially provides Touch ID now. An incremental update, nothing you need to get, but a nice improvement if you had a pre A7 iPad. I am disappointed that the price for thinness seems to be the loss of rotation lock.

Overall it seems that with the new Watch, Apple is now willing to grow the surface of its devices, as the “glance and react/ignore” use case no longer needs to be so prominently served. The greatest advance this year is the better integration between the devices, making it much more seamless to move around work between the devices.

Coming from an iPhone 4S, the 6 is quite a big change. The screen is huge enough that it makes one handed operation more difficult, but at least for my hands it just remains possible if you lay the phone flat in the palm of your hand. And for this position I highly recommend a leather case, without a case I would worry that the phone would slip from my hand. And if you require a firmer grip, a double tap on the home button will work well enough to bring the elements into reach. The problem is ironically the lower far corner, which I can only just reach with my thumb. This means that if your hand is smaller than the average male hand, you really should check in person if the 6 is not too large for you.

The screen on the other hand sufficiently compensates for these problems: you can see a lot more ( or if your eyesight is fading, you can activate a scaling mode to have a permanent zoom mode). It especially makes writing easier, with the larger keyboard targets, and should enable even fat fingers to no longer need landscape mode. It is an adjustment to get used to the new spacing coming from a previous iPhone, but while you are learning, autocorrect works quite well in guessing what you actually meant to write. The larger screen is especially welcome for watching videos, where the improved brilliance and viewing angles of the display also get to shine.

Scaled and native app with keyboard

Even with the larger dimensions, the 6 is a tiny bit lighter than a 4S, and still fits most pockets easily: only specifically tailored phone pockets will be too small.

Others [1] have written extensively about the new phone, so here are just my highlights coming from a 4S:

• Touch ID is a great win for security and convenience. My recommendation is to let 1Password generate you pronounceable password of about 16 letters, use that password for about a month without the sensor so that you have properly learned it, and then activate Touch ID.
• the camera is brilliant, the new manual controls very welcome, and it is just so much faster to start up and to focus.
• I really like the improvements to typing: the suggestions in the bar above the keyboard are good often enough to improve typing speed, especially one-handed, and the speech recognition is a good deal better, and now supports Dutch as well.

It will be interesting to see how Apple will price the different editions of the Watch. We know the starting point of $349, and we will have additional points above them. I believe it will largely look like this:

The $499 for the Standard is quite likely, it is a very standard price point to cover. For the gold watch, we know that it will have a gold casing, but this casing will likely not weight more than 10g to 20g. Gold is currently $1250/oz, or $40/g, so the cost of the gold in the Watch will not exceed $500. Given the volatility of the gold price, Apple will charge a nice margin above that, so depending on the actual gold content we could have 1499 or 1999 as the starter price for the gold watch.