Surely the most unlikely Apple product
rumor to be taken seriously by pundits in recent years, the idea of a smart
watch is neither new nor outlandish – several are already on sale from other
makers, including the highly successful Kickstarter project Pebble. But the
whole concept is fraught with compromise, and Apple hates compromise. Could it
get this right?
We worked with 3D artist Martin Hajek to
conceive, design and construct a plausible Apple watch. The brief we gave
ourselves was that it had to feel like something we could actually imagine
buying from an Apple Store. There’ve been some beautifully rendered suggestions
around the web, with features like integral bracelets and transparent screens,
but the last time Apple launched something that looked overtly futuristic was
in the 1990s. These days, it’s all about the product that feels natural and
right.
Hip
to be square: A 35mm screen (2in diagonal) is about as big as you could
comfortably wear. An ideal resolution would be 512x512, giving 372 pixels per
inch; the Retina iPhone has 326
That would surely go double for a product
as personal as a watch. A major objection to smart watches is that people don’t
buy watches for their features; they buy them for the statement they make. Some
of the world’s most famous brands are known for watches alone. So there’s bound
to be resistance to adapting a chronometer from a company that, while timelessly
cool in its own way, is not normally associated with high fashion.
We came to the conclusion that Apple’s most
likely play would be to keep its watch as conventional as possible, with the
feel of something classic rather than excitably innovative.
All of this ruled out the ‘slap wrap’
design featured in a recent Apple patent (1.usa.gov/Z8QYNG), which is
nonetheless interesting for its vision of watch that’s quick to put on and
connects to a host device automatically when it detects that it’s being worn.
One
at a time: We’ve imagined how some likely futures could be displayed keeping
details legible at a glance means not trying to pack too much in at once
We considered several other forms of
integral bracelet, with various components embedded, but in every case there
were objections of practicality or comfort. It was tempting to posit a clever
magnetic in your MacBook cord popping off cleanly if pulled, that’s not at all
what you want for your watch.
Instead, we came back to the classic
leather strap, something Apple could make wall - like the iPad Smart Cover. For
example – but for which third parties could also offer alternatives.
We based the body of the watch on the
iPhone 5, because its jewel-like beveled finish seemed ideally suited to a
device in the form of jewelry. Our design decisions were then dictated by what
we knew Apple wouldn’t do. An early version had lugs to attach the strap with a
pin; this is common among watches, but was too complex and flimsy for an Apple
product.
We knew the face had to be fully glazed,
but we spend a long time figuring out the shape of the screen. Logically, a
watch face should be landscape – wider than it’s tall – since your wrist
continues up your arm but has a finite breadth. In practice, a widescreen watch
looks and feels ridiculous, even before you try to button up your cuffs.
So the watch could be either square or
portrait. The fact that Apple is reported to be evaluating Corning’s new
flexible glass, along with the availability of curved LCD panels from several
suppliers, meant we knew it could curve around the wrist to make a larger face
more manageable.
But when we tried a tall screen – even 4:3
– it looked as if we were wearing a prop from Judge Dredd. The solution was to
make the face 4:3 but the display 1:1, leaving iPhone-like bars above and below
the screen. This would provide space for front-facing components such as a
microphone, which would otherwise be muffled by the wrist, and a FaceTime
camera.
We’re not convinced a webcam is essential
on a smart watch, so Apple might well leave it out in a first-generation
product, as it did with the iPad. But it could be a lot of fun.
Picture
this: Designed with the help of 3D mockup specialist Martin Hajek, MacUser’s
Apple watch concept features a portrait-shaped face with a square screen,
leaving room for a FaceTime camera
What would an Apple watch actually do?
First of all, it’s very unlikely to be designed as a standalone device. That
would mean packing many of the capabilities of an iPhone or iPad into a space
half the size of a three-pin plug. Even if the necessary processing power and
wireless data connections could be shoehorned in, the battery would die in an
hour.
Instead – like other recent smart watches,
such as the Pebble – we’d expect the iWatch to act as a handy interface to the
iOS device you already carry around with you. Connected via Bluetooth, which
works well over the kind of distance your watch would typically be from your
iPhone, and hooked directly into iOS (a quality the Pebble conspicuously lacks),
it could receive and display notifications, ten let you tap to open and read
your incoming messages. You could control the music on your iOS device from the
watch, and interact with third-party apps similarly, if their developers took
advantage of an Apple API to incorporate features.
The
strap is the only place an Apple logo will be visible to others; style counsel
Apple’s challenged will be to make a watch people want to wear. We’re not sure
a bracelet design, however snappy, will suit the majority of potential buyers
Replying to messages wouldn’t be so easy on
a tiny screen, but this could be an ideal task for Siri, which works on Apple’s
remote servers; your watch would simply transmit your speech to your iOS
device, which would fetch dictation results from the cloud and pass them back.
Since the watch would rely on its
low-powered Bluetooth connection for all its data, it wouldn’t need Wi-Fi,
which would reduce battery life, or a mobile data SIM – who wants a network
contract for their watch? Nor would it need a wired data port. It would,
however, need some way to charge, and although Apple has patents on inductive
charging technology, which would let you leave your watch in the vicinity of a
charging dock to get it topped up, it’s shown no sign of being ready to put
this kind of system into production. So we’d guess the iWatch would have a
Lightning port for charging.
Infinite
loop: But Esben Oxholm’s toroidal design has to be our favorite fantasy Apple
watch
A big issue for all watches with a proper
screen is that it can’t stay lit all the time, or the battery would go flat.
So, as with the very first LED digital watches, you have to press a button to
find out what time it is. Apple would surely find a nice solution: it has
numerous patents on motion and position sensors, and could come up with a way
of guessing when you’re going to look at your watch. A simpler solution might
be to formalize the wrist-twisting gesture that typically accompanies checking
the time.
