As usual, the Apple Keynote at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) was done with great marketing aplomb. For two hours and 24 minutes, it was tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. They do it masterfully every time.
Also as usual, some financial analysts and journalists don’t seem to get the profound nature of the ecosphere that Apple is building. Apple makes their products easy to use, cherished by users, and accompanied with great customer support. Whenever I have an occasion to talk to Apple customer support, I get the feeling they really cared about my questions. One time a support rep did not know the answer to my question, and immediately asked if I would mind if they got a colleague with more experience on the particular question to take over the call. Can you even imagine a Comcast support rep doing that?
Meanwhile, Paul Boutros wrote in Barron’s the Apple Watch is not user-friendly. He said he did not find it intuitive and thinks when the novelty wears off, the watch sales will dry up. I see it quite differently. At the WWDC, Apple announced that developers will receive a toolkit to enable them to build native Apple Watch applications — independent of the iPhone. That changes everything, just like when Apple opened up the iPhone to developers. There will be a flood of new apps for the watch that will touch the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Monitoring your heart rate is the tip of the iceberg for what the watch will do for healthcare.
The watch moves the center of our personal computing life from the desktop and handhelds to our wrist. What could be more intuitive than pushing a button and turning your wrist to pay for your meal at Panera Bread or groceries at Trader Joe’s? A gentle tap on your wrist can highlight an incoming text message. You can look at it and tap reply and select from a list of canned replies or dictate a new one. You can take a phone call like Dick Tracy or check news headlines, stocks, and weather without reaching into your pocket. I find the watch to be an extension of the Apple ecosphere. The new Apple News and Apple Music services will work across all of your devices and, in many cases, the easiest way to change a song or scroll to a new headline will be a tap on the watch. The new toolkit will unleash amazing creativity of brilliant developers around the world. I believe the watch will generate many billions of dollars for Apple.
Read more about how mHealth will change healthcare in Health Attitude.
