14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s Watch got released a week ago and you don’t need to be an industry watcher to know the company was quite late to the party. Even as it is not out of the oven just yet (the Watch will start selling in early 2015), the Watch already faces avid competition from a slew of Android Wear and Tizen products.
But why did it take that long for Apple to make an entry in the smartwatch market? A new profile by Bloomberg Business reveals the company has been working on the Watch for quite some time.
Apple’s design chief Jony Ive himself shed some light on the design process, saying the company has started tackling the problem of an intelligent timepiece ever since Steve Jobs died (which is about three years ago).
Wearables came into the picture at Apple three years ago
This information reveals that the big brains at Apple were dancing around the wearable problem, sometime before the word even started to really mean something in the industry.
In the story, Ive confesses something that lots of us might have not imagined. He says the smartwatch was one of the most difficult projects he ever worked on. He highlights the design team had to come up with novel physical interactions between the wearable per se and the human body.
Before actually turning to their drawing tables and coming up with viable concepts and prototypes, the Cupertino team had to dig deep into history.
Before building the Watch, Apple had to understand the history of timekeeping
So they invited a bunch of watch historians (something new you learn today, there’s such a thing as a watch historian) to Cupertino to share their insights into the philosophy of instrument for measuring times.
Ive himself subjected himself to a crash course of “horological history” in order to get an ensemble view of how timepieces where transformed over time into the small gadgets one hangs around the wrist.
Apple’s design chief draws an interesting conclusion saying that watches took like forever (literally centuries) to find the wrist, but once they settled there they never left (with the exception of Steam punk watches you can wear around the neck).
At first, Ive and his team wanted to use the same pinch-and-zoom routine used by the iPhone, but they soon discovered the watch’s small screen didn’t allow for a seamless experience.
A year into the project, the first signs of Apple’s own wearable UI “the digital crown” started making an appearance. The crown was inspired by the knob used to set the time on traditional time pieces, so it brings a certain classical feel to the whole product.
But even after three years, Apple is not yet ready to launch the Watch, as the company has still some fine-tuning to do before the wearable is ready to hit the stores. Do you think that a Watch that took three years to be designed will be a successful affair?