Apple Watch



  • I gave up my watch when I got my first smartphone. But now Apple is trying to bring it back.

    There's a decent pro-aWatch (yes it's called Apple Watch, not iWatch) video here:

    Funny cons / parody video:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yioL7MRQvHM

    My thoughts:

    • Why do I need a watch when I already have a phone?
    • Sounds like something cooked up by butthurt businessmen who want to keep showing off their male jewlery without feeling out of the loop
    • No mention of battery life. Translation: get ready to charge it every night
    • Microsoft Watch announcement expected soon

    Thoughts? Is Sidebar the right category? Or are you too busy standing in line hoping to buy one?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @cartman82 said:

    No mention of battery life. Translation: get ready to charge it every night

    My father in law (NB, wedding ring is the only jewelry I have or desire to have) has a programmable watch (Timex, I think?). They don't make them any more (and he bought several spares before they stopped), but there is a very rabid community, apparently. When the whole smart watch thing became a thing, they apparently lambasted the presumed battery life of a smart watch, as their batteries last...uh...months? Years?

    Granted, these things have relatively simple LCD displays, but there's apparently a lot you can do with them.

    I remember he had one that you programmed from your computer via seizure causing screen flashes. Reminded me of good old FOR I = 0 TO 15 : POKE 53281, I : NEXT I.


  • ♿ (Parody)



  • @cartman82 said:

    Why do I need a watch when I already have a phone?

    Dual screen goodness?

    @cartman82 said:

    butthurt businessmen who want to keep showing off their male jewlery

    You're supposed to put it on your wrist, not your penis.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @cartman82 said:

    No mention of battery life. Translation: get ready to charge it every night

    My watch works by leeching power from my movements. No manual charging in 20 years of daily use.

    Is there any prospect of getting a smartwatch like that?



  • Oh god, it has a tiny CRT TV and needlepoint keys and even a tiny floppy with hole in the middle. Priceless.



  • @cartman82 said:

    tiny floppy with hole in the middle

    Can we stop talking about penises?



  • @Keith said:

    You're supposed to put it on your wrist, not your penis.

    Hmm... that's why no one liked me showing it off back in the day...



  • I've noticed a pattern. Every time I say "penis", @boomzilla likes my post.



  • @boomzilla said:

    When the whole smart watch thing became a thing, they apparently lambasted the presumed battery life of a smart watch, as their batteries last...uh...months? Years?

    Granted, these things have relatively simple LCD displays, but there's apparently a lot you can do with them.

    Yeah. Putting a fancy, full-color, active-matrix, backlit, battery-hogging display on a watch is TRWTF. Never mind having what I can only presume is a full-on ARM Cortex-A SoC behind it to hog battery futher.

    Pair a suitably low power processor (such as a MSP430FR5969 if you're feeling bleeding edge, or a STM32L0 family part if you want something that's both a bit more mainstream and a bit heavier-duty computing-power-wise) with one of Sharp's memory LCDs, though, and I think you could come up with a programmable watch that'd actually both be capable enough to appease more than just rabid gadget freaks, and low-power enough to not freak people out. (You'd also want some very low-power nonvolatile storage, but that is a thing these days as well.)



  • @dkf said:

    My watch works by leeching power from my movements. No manual charging in 20 years of daily use.

    Is there any prospect of getting a smartwatch like that?

    I heard about these. Think about it. You can power a regular watch for a year using a tiny plan battery. Apple watch will probably be on the same charging cycle with iPhone. Unless you can fly by propelling your arm around, I don't think kinetic charging will work.



  • Even something low-power like a Pebble is probably too demanding for kinetic charging.



  • @Keith said:

    I've noticed a pattern. Every time I say "penis", @boomzilla likes my post.

    Hey he's not the one making three penis posts in a row, buddy. :-)



  • @cartman82 said:

    Why do I need a watch when I already have a phone?

    I have a watch and a phone, so I don’t have to take the phone out of my pocket every time I want to see what time it is. It’s also useful when the phone is charging.

    I have no real interest in a smartwatch, though. A dumbwatch suits me just fine (I know I was saying the same thing about smartphones, but this time it will be different, I swear!).
    In any case, Apple is not the first on the smartwatch market, so I guess there are people who are interested...

    The “No mention of battery life” surprises me. It’s probably indicated somewhere...

    @Keith said:

    I've noticed a pattern. Every time I say "penis", @boomzilla likes my post.

    Maybe he’s programming a bot...



  • @VinDuv said:

    I have a watch and a phone, so I don’t have to take the phone out of my pocket every time I want to see what time it is. It’s also useful when the phone is charging.

    I suppose that's useful for businessmen or people who are constantly running from meeting to meeting. Not my use case.



  • @VinDuv said:

    Maybe he’s programming a bot...

    The last time my penis was involved with a bot, it didn't end well.


  • BINNED

    @Keith said:

    it didn't end well.

    Better water proof the bot next time.



  • I have a watch precisely because it's both accurate and the battery lasts for years. If I forget to charge my smartphone and it's dead the next day, I still have a watch to tell me time and get me where I'm supposed to be.

    I don't see how a smartwatch would fit into my life. Maybe, maybe, if it had a year-long battery life, otherwise looked like a normal watch, and could integrate with my Outlook calendar I could see using that. But I see absolutely no reason to text or play Angry Birds from my watch.


  • :belt_onion:

    @mott555 said:

    But I see absolutely no reason to text or play Angry Birds from my watch.

    I feel the same way about phones.
    I have a watch and a 7" tablet. The watch is a smaller profile GPS watch that doubles as my running watch; the tablet has a 4g data plan and is properly phabletified so that I can make/receive phone calls on it if I really want. Who wants to play "angry birds" on some dinky ass 4-5" screen.



  • I've actually never played Angry Birds, I simply use it as an example of a mobile game because everyone else in the world knows what it is.

    I play a few word games on my phone (Wordament and derivatives) if I'm out-and-about but waiting. Otherwise it's not for gaming either.



  • Who wants to hold up a 7" tablet to their face to make a call.

    Apparently you.

    Your complaint saying you use headphones with a mic is 🛅 🔄 ↕ that way



  • @dkf said:

    My watch works by leeching power from my movements. No manual charging in 20 years of daily use.

    Yeah but you'll be eating those words when you're dead lying in a gutter and your watch no longer works.


  • :belt_onion:

    @mott555 said:

    I've actually never played Angry Birds, I simply use it as an example of a mobile game because everyone else in the world knows what it is.

    that's why i put it in quotes, i didn't figure anyone actually meant that specific game.


  • :belt_onion:

    @JazzyJosh said:

    Who wants to hold up a 7" tablet to their face to make a call.

    you hold your phone up to your face? or use headphones? you should get a silly BT earpiece so no one knows who teh hell you're talking to and it just looks like you're crazy ;)

    Like I said, "If I really want." I almost never call anyone, I only text.



  • @mott555 said:

    I have a watch precisely because it's both accurate and the battery lasts for years. If I forget to charge my smartphone and it's dead the next day, I still have a watch to tell me time and get me where I'm supposed to be.

    I don't see how a smartwatch would fit into my life. Maybe, maybe, if it had a year-long battery life, otherwise looked like a normal watch, and could integrate with my Outlook calendar I could see using that. But I see absolutely no reason to text or play Angry Birds from my watch.

    This. In order for a smartwatch to fit into my life, it'd have to have:

    1. WWVB/equivalent reception the world 'round, so that it'd actually know what time it is.
    2. A minimum of one year of battery life, with three to five years preferable, so that it would work when I wanted it to.
    3. Calendar integration, so that it could tell you if you're about to run late to a meeting.
    4. A rugged, water- and chemical-resistant case (is IP67 overkill?), so that it'll still work in pouring rain, or even if you have to fish it out of a fryer or plating bath after dropping it in there from three stories up. (Or if the sewer treatment plant operator sends it back to you after fishing out of the plant debris screen because it was flushed down the toilet.)
    5. Alarms, stopwatch, and timer functionality (because a watch isn't a watch without 'em).
    6. And, if there's any sort of fancy function that would be a 'killer app' for a smartwatch, it'd be mass transit/scheduled transport integration.

  • ♿ (Parody)

    I've seen at least a couple of people in my FB feed saying that they want to get one. I don't know them well enough (or follow the resulting conversations) to know if they were being sarcastic.

    It seems like the heartrate stuff might be valuable to some people. If they could hook it up with, say blood sugar monitoring or something like that it might be useful for some others. Most of the purchasers are simply demonstrating the continued existence of the RDF.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Yeah but you'll be eating those words when you're dead lying in a gutter and your watch no longer works.

    Sounds like a threat.


    Filed under: "How'd he die?" "Dang watch leeched all his power..."


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    The things I use my phone for would go well in a watch -- I use the Google Now cards often, and I integrated my calendar, so it warns me when it's time to leave, warns me when there's an accident and I'll be delayed so I can leave earlier, sets reminders via voice communication, et cetera. A watch would be convenient when I don't wear a shirt with a breast pocket, so I could leave the handset in my purse and still feel vibrations when it's on mute.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Yeah but you'll be eating those words when you're dead lying in a gutter and your watch no longer works.

    But the CSI guys will analyze the battery to determine when he stopped moving. This will become critical, since it's midwinter, preventing body temperature based time of death analysis.



  • They can then run a VBA macro over their Excel spreadsheet of suspects to find out that the murderer was Santa Claus!



  • The worst thing about the concept of wristwatch: the sweat.

    Remember that sweaty acidic smell you get from wearing the damn thing 10 hours on a warm day? Now imagine that stench reeking off the Apple Watch after a long day at work, just as the battery alert is going off and you need to charge it through the same sweaty stinking surface that was just on your wrist.



  • That's why I quit using cloth wristbands. A few weeks of wearing one and they'd smell like rotten butt flesh, and they didn't last many washer/dryer cycles either.



  • I haven't had that problem since I replaced the (crappy plastic) Pebble band with a metal mesh one.



  • @darkmatter said:

    I have a watch and a 7" tablet. ... Who wants to play "angry birds" on some dinky ass 4-5" screen.

    What we need is a device that's small, but also has a large screen.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Yeah but you'll be eating those words when you're dead lying in a gutter and your watch no longer works.

    Technically not, because I'll be dead at that point (by precondition in your statement).



  • Even better: integrated beamer, so you can have a screen as big as you like. Will give you a good 10 minutes to watch a short youtube video.



  • @Bort said:

    What we need is a device that's small, but also has a large screen.

    I think Google Glass is a step in that direction.



  • @martijntje said:

    Even better: integrated beamer

    Yeah, powering that would really wear down the battery...



  • A quote that I find amusing from the website:

    Working with iPhone, Apple Watch continually checks against the definitive global time standard with the same precision found in GPS satellites

    GPS satellites have 4 atomic clocks, 2 rubidium, 2 cesium, providing time down to 50ns, and specialist equipment has existed for some time than can leverage this. iWatch only goes down to 50ms, and, unless it comes with $12000 worth of frequency standard, weighing somewhere north of 50lbs, it isn't going to be as accurate as the satellites are.



  • @mott555 said:

    I think Google Glass is a step in that direction.

    That's a smaller device with an even smaller screen!



  • @lushr said:

    GPS satellites have 4 atomic clocks, 2 rubidium, 2 cesium, providing time down to 50ns, and specialist equipment has existed for some time than can leverage this. iWatch only goes down to 50ms, and, unless it comes with $12000 worth of frequency standard, weighing somewhere north of 50lbs, it isn't going to be as accurate as the satellites are.

    RDF. Facts don't matter in the Apple world. Just the marketing team's rainbows and unicorns.

    @Bort said:

    That's a smaller device with an even smaller screen!

    But the screen can look huge and that's what counts.



  • @mott555 said:

    But the screen can look huge and that's what counts.

    Yeah, maybe to you. But how am I going to see it?



  • @lushr said:

    GPS satellites have 4 atomic clocks, 2 rubidium, 2 cesium, providing time down to 50ns, and specialist equipment has existed for some time than can leverage this. iWatch only goes down to 50ms

    To be fair, they might have 50ns precision. There's no claim about accuracy.



  • Now there's an idea: A watch with a built-in transporter buffer like Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force used to store your billion weapons, ammo, and items without taking up physical space!

    I wouldn't need a garage anymore, my truck and motorcycle would safely be stored in null space inside my watch!


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Your wrist might get heavy though.



  • Yeah, and what if you beamed yourself (and the watch) into the watch? How do you get out?


  • :belt_onion:

    I think you sweat too much.


  • :belt_onion:

    @Bort said:

    What we need is a device that's small, but also has a large screen.

    So... it's bigger on the outside?
    I'M SOLD



  • @darkmatter said:

    So... it's bigger on the outside?

    No, it would have to be the same size as when indoors. Changing sizes is confusing.



  • Not for Time Lords it isn't.


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