I went to an Apple Store near my house last weekend to spent some time playing around with Apple’s latest products: Apple Watch and the new retina MacBook with single USB-C port. I have read countless articles on these products, but actually seeing them physically and spent some time to play around usually give me better understanding latest products. This post is written based on my limited time with those devices.
Apple Watch
Without a doubt, Apple has spent significant amount of money to advertise this product. I am a smartwatch user myself, even though my choice so far went to Pebble, a smartwatch from Kickstarter project that could work with both iOS and Android.
So, is Apple Watch really worth the hype?
My first impression: it looks nice, but not particularly outstanding design. Even the larger 42mm model looks smaller than what I imagined.
The overall build of the watch seems solid. The screen is impressive. The digital crown does help with better interaction because our finger does not need to cover part of the tiny screen. Typical aspects of Apple design are clearly noticeable.
However, I can’t help but thinking that despite its premium pricing, it does NOT have the feel of a luxurious product. Somehow the design still scream “I’m a tech product” instead of “I’m a luxurious fashion product.”
And I find this a big deal.
The fact that this watch does not always tell time makes it a bit worse. Apple Watch’s screen goes blank when not in use to save battery power and it will detect our movement to predict when we need to use it. That movement-based prediction worked most of the time, but not always.
As a fashion product, the look n feel of the cheapest sport models are somehow aligned with things I would expect from $70-$90 products. The middle tier models with metal bands feel like $100-$150 watches and the top “Edition” models feel like $150-$300 watches. For each tier, Apple set much higher prices for the same technology pieces inside.
I consider myself an Apple enthusiast. I use iPhone, iPad, Mac mini and Macbook Pro as my primary computing devices. I clearly understand that Apple positions itself as a company making premium products. So naturally the price would be higher. However, in most of their other products, I usually felt that their product design did look premium, to some point I would not mind paying their premium price. I did not get the same feeling with Apple Watch.
Now let’s move to software part. Watch OS does show me some smart interaction designs. I like how they place app icons. It looks appealing and easy to use. Some of the choices in user interface do impress me more than others. For example, for weather app, it display the hourly temperature of the day in the form of analog clock, and with one tap it changes to small icons of sunny/cloudy/showers/etc. It might seem simple, but this design choice actually make it faster for me to interpret the weather forecast for the next few hours because most people are so used seeing the circle form of analog clock. Our brains are well trained to associate the location of clock numbers with the actual time.
I still feel that the menu structure is a bit confusing and not very intuitive. But I believe people who own the watch should be able to learn it better since they would have more time to learn and figure things out using the real device. So it might be okay after a bit of learning curve.
Moving on to the next feature that got me interested: force touch. Apple Watch could detect two types of touch. Normal touch would produce the usual interaction just like what we usually do with our smartphones and tablets. Harder touch (with a bit of force) will trigger something else.
It took me less than one minute to get it right. Indeed it feels convenient to have more interaction choices in such a small screen. Having said that, I generally dislike doing force touch because it brings slight discomfort to my finger. Well, force touch is basically bumping our finger to a hard screen with some force, on purpose. It is probably okay for occasional action. But is an app implement it for something that needs to be done frequently, I would avoid that app unless I have no other choice.
Overall, Apple Watch is an interesting start of a new product category. At its current state, it is not worth my money, especially with the super premium price. On the bright side, its great screen and some interesting user interactions design are good enough to make me keeping my eyes on the future iterations of this product. Maybe one day an upgraded iteration would finally justify the expectations vs. price ratio for me.
The new MacBook (2015)
This new MacBook from Apple quickly made the news for all the good and bad reasons. The good part, this laptop is incredibly thin and lightweight. In fact, when I actually tried to lift a unit, it felt lighter than what I originally imagined. Having a laptop of this super compact form factor is awesome, especially that it has great retina display screen. If it is not because of the crazy price tag and mediocre processor, I would probably consider to replace my MacBook Pro retina with this one.
I can’t express enough how much I love the design & look of this new MacBook. It is available in silver, gold and space grey, but I think my choice would still be the silver model. My wife immediately loved the gold model though. It is a bit sad knowing that future MacBooks will not have glowing Apple logo anymore. But it that’s the sacrifice for such a slim beauty, I would gladly bid farewell to glowing logo.
The bad aspects of this laptop are the price level, the mediocre processor power and the fact that it only has ONE single port. A new USB-C port (also called USB type-C) is used for everything, including to charge the laptop. So when we charge this laptop, we can’t possibly use the port for anything else unless we also purchase an adapter that allow us to have more ports, including normal USB ports. For me, having an additional accessory that we have to carry around everywhere kinda beats the very first reason to use super compact laptop.
The keyboard of this laptop is different from the keyboard we usually get from other MacBooks. It features the new “butterfly” keyboard designed by Apple. Basically what we will experience is a super thin keyboard, almost flat, yet still give us some tactile feedback for quick typing. It will surely take time to get used to this new keyboard, but I reckon it is certainly manageable after some adjusting period.
Last but not least, the force touch technology from Apple Watch is also available for this new MacBook’s trackpad. While having force touch for tiny screen in Apple Watch makes sense, having to tap with force on a reasonably wide area of trackpad does not really make sense to me. I might be wrong, there could be some apps in the future that could implement this new hardware feature for better user experience. But for now, this feature does not really improve my experience in using the new MacBook 2015.
Overall, MacBook 2015 feels more like proof of concept rather than actual mass-product. It simply shows us that building such a thin and beautiful laptop is possible. It shows us that the new reversible USB-C is the future, whether we like it or not, we need to get ready to leave the current physical form of USB connectors we know and love for more than two decades. It shows us new type of keyboard. It shows us new type of touch interaction. However, as a product, I do not think I am ready to commit its premium price for a laptop with mediocre processor and one single port for everything. Maybe in the future everything will be wireless. Maybe in the future our usage pattern will be different. But it is certainly not a laptop for today.
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