In many ways, 2015’s Pebble Time was a misstep.

In many ways, 2015’s Pebble Time was a misstep. The original Pebble was conceived as a simple augmentation of the smart phone’s communicative functions, with a specific focus on offloading nofications to the user’s wrist in order to receive them instantly and discretely. Thus, it seemed like a natural enough next step to evolve the watch’s communications functionality by introducing Timeline for glancable calendar events and other time-sensitive information, and enabling voice-recognition for replies and interaction with the user-interface.

Although Timeline is a great idea, it still has a lot of untapped potential. And while quick access to time-sensitive information from calendars and other apps (ESPN for real-time sports scores stands out here) is extremely useful, notifications that take over the entire screen and don’t disappear until you hit the back button leaves a glaring privacy issue created by Pebble’s most stand-out feature: the always-on, low-power e-paper display. This may, perhaps, start to change with the introduction of the Pebble Time 2’s larger screen, and Pebble OS 4’s ability to display ‘pop-up’ event reminders on the watch face (it remains to be seen whether notifications will be able to make use of this ‘pop-up’ interface element).

Most importantly, Pebble missed the plot last year, with the Time. The Apple Watch, introduced to the world (but not released) at the end of 2014 (not long before Pebble stated its Kickstarter campaign) emphasized the its capacity as an integrated fitness wearable (with integration into the emerging Apple Health platform), which quickly became a necessary part of the smartwatch feature-set. Of course, Pebble caught up relatively quickly with the introduction of Pebble Health in December 2015, which also brought automatic sleep tracking made possible by its long battery life, but Pebble Health also made it much more obvious that a heart rate monitor was missing.

The Pebble 2 and the Time 2 seek, foremost, to remedy this oversight.

It is not impossible to read these hardware additions as a tacit admission that the smart strap idea was mostly a bad one.

Consequently, the heart rate monitor built into both the Time 2 and the Pebble 2 was pretty much inevitable, even if it has simultaneously obliterated any commerical viability that the TYLT VÜ Pulse hoped to have. Between-the-lines, it is not impossible to read the introduction of a built-in heart rate monitor (along with the GPS capabilities of the Pebble Core) as a tacit admission that the smart strap idea was mostly a bad one, or at least misguided as far as Pebble’s implementation was concerned. The Pebble Core, moreover, is a more elegant solution than a smartstrap with GPS functionality (especially given how ugly the GPS smartstrap contender is).

Meanwhile, the Pebble 2 really improves upon the Classic Pebble’s design by swapping its plastic front for a glass one, yet still nodding to Pebble’s iconic beginnings in a way that feels fresh. It’s a good fit for the lower end “Sport” tier, and is in line with, but sleeker than, some recent fitness wearables.With the introduction of the Core and built-in heart rate monitoring, that really leaves the Pageré FitPay as the only truly useful smartstrap. But, really, NFC should also be built into a watch like the Pebble and it no doubt will be at some point in the not-to-distant future, if Pebble lasts that long.

Apparently, the Retina display, TouchID, 3D Touch, the motion coprocessor, True Tone, and Apple’s yearly camera upgrades (that most recently introduced Live Photos) were not extraordinary hardware innovations that set the tone for required smartphone features.

While Samsung experiments with curved screens and bendable displays that lend very little practical value to their devices, Apple continues to show not stagnation but disciplined restraint and focus in the iPhone’s core design, introducing features that enhance the user experience and otherwise lay the foundation for input methods that extend the repertoire of user interactions.

The principles behind this focused design were (once again) in evidence at last month’s WWDC keynote; they were especially noticeable against the background of the watchOS 3 introduction in the sense that the two devices — iPhone and Apple Watch — now complement each other in a much more obvious way.

The principles behind this focused design were (once again) in evidence at last month’s WWDC keynote, especially against the background of the watchOS 3 introduction.

With every passing year, Apple uses iOS as an opportunity to ask, “what is an iPhone?” And every year, Apple’s (software) answer gets more refined. Because the company is so adept at ignoring the increasingly louder chorus of voices representative of Wall Street’s answer, Apple’s software updates continue to be exciting and purposeful refinements. If we’re being truly honest with ourselves, the iPhone has changed very little from one iteration to the next (hardware iterations, to oversimplify, happening every two years): the iPhone 3G/S was not that much of a departure from the original, the 5 not excessively different in style from the 4. The 6 shook things up quite a bit, but it was still recognizably an iPhone. What immediately comes to mind here is the way in which the iMac exterior design seemed to settle-in once Apple really nailed it with the iMac G5 in 2004. Other than build materials and a thinness that makes your kitchen utensils jealous, the design is unchanged in its fundamentals. Let it be said that what is missed in the hubbub surrounding the iPhone’s alleged “boring” design is that there is a lot more to hardware design than its exterior. Nevertheless, the place where the truly tangible change happens — and which, year after year is never boring, to the extent, for argument’s sake, that anything Apple does is actually “boring” — is in iOS updates.

With every passing year, Apple uses iOS as an opportunity to ask, “what is an iPhone?” And every year, Apple’s (software) answer gets more refined.

With the iMessage revamp, alongside a new emphasis on VOIP calling in the phone app, Apple seems to be putting a renewed emphasis on the phone as a communications device. The majority of these communications no longer take place over traditional voice channels and so iMessage provides the user with myriad ways to convey meaning over text: from animated speech bubbles, to handwritten messages, to opening up the iMessage app to developers.

In the messages space, Apple is skating to where the puck is going. It’s fair to say that Apple has positioned the new iMessage around emerging trends in instant messaging, from Facebook’s Messenger to Whats App, with even a bit of Snapchat thrown into the mix. Coupled with the new VOIP API, which vastly improves the calling experience, for both incoming and outgoing calls, the iPhone has renewed emphasis as a communications hub: the centre of your digital communication.

“Breakthrough internet communicator“, indeed.

How the Apple Watch and iPhone Complement Each Other

When we consider this in the context of watchOS’s original design aims, apparent in watchOS 1 and 2’s obsessive focus on wrist-based, intimate communication involving sharing of heartbeats, taps, tiny drawings, and a dedicated button to launch into communication with favourite contacts, I can’t help but wonder whether the rethinking of the watchOS evident in watchOS 3 involved ‘offloading’ — or at any rate de-emphasizing — these ideas around intimate and personal communication into the Messages app where they belong, and where they can ultimately better serve the watch in its function as a conduit for quick interactions and replies. In this sense, the bold, if somewhat — at least in hindsight — misguided, ideas around personal communication that underpinned the first two iterations of watchOS, were not entirely discarded; rather, they were reworked and extended into iOS 10. An opportunity presented itself between the release of the Apple Watch in April 2015 and the (beta) release of watchOS 3 to reconsider the iPhone and the Apple Watch not as two separate devices, but as functioning together, the former as a tool for personal communication, while the latter is relieved of this burden in order to focus on what it does best–keeping us connected to location- and time-sensitive information around us, in the here and now.

Apple has simplified the entire communications experience with the watch, making it function much more effectively as a companion to the iPhone.

But wasn’t the iPhone always, first and foremost, a communications device? Wasn’t that the whole point of a phone, that erstwhile one-trick-pony from which the iPhone derives its name? If Apple had to “reconsider” the iPhone as a tool for personal communication, it was perhaps because what is most obvious sometimes is the hardest to bring back into the foreground and to contemplate in itself. The failure of the watch to catch on as a communications device was perhaps the necessary catalyst, the background against which the role of digital communication could be foregrounded and considered as such, on its own terms.

And yet, watchOS 3’s newfound focus on apps, which, in the form of dock-based glances, has actually made it better at quick-reply based communications from message notifications. Scribble, even in beta 1, is fast and reliable and works across the entire platform: whether you receive notifications from Messages, Facebook Messenger, Whats App, etc. scribble makes quick replies easy and fast, especially in those (frequent, in my experience) times when the canned replies don’t give you what you are looking for. Even in the beta, even on so-called “old hardware”, it really works. Apple has simplified the entire communications experience with the watch, making it function much more effectively as a companion to the iPhone, the information conduit to the phone’s communication hub.

The final question here is whether the repurposing of the Apple Watch’s hardware ‘communications’ button will be one area where Apple focuses its redesign efforts with the inevitable 2nd generation of the device. Apple has always been a company that places great emphasis on hardware and software integration and given that the software has shifted away from the original hardware vision, it’s possible that the next hardware revision might then reflect this change in the design itself.

On the other hand, the use of the hardware button to quickly launch the dock still makes sense, if not even more sense than its function in the first two versions of watchOS, and nothing too drastic has changed in terms of its purpose: it remains first and foremost a shortcut button; only the specific shortcut that it directs the user to has changed.

And so the next chapter of Apple “innovation” begins, as it so often has in the post-Macworld expo era, with the software that will power the company’s devices, both old(ish) and new, for the next year.

1. Annual tablet shipments are declining.
2. [Even though?] the iPad Pro was pitched by Apple as a laptop replacement.
Therefore,
3. “A Mac tablet…could re-invigorate sales for Apple.”

If you’re feeling a little lost as far as the logic of this argument goes, take some solace in the fact that you’re among friends. Truth be told you are aboard the train of thought of a guy who spends way too much time reading Apple blogs, most of which are more concerned with pumping out content than worthwhile thoughts, but who’s keeping track? Everyone’s got a deadline. There are so many assumptions between the lines here that it’s difficult to know where to begin. So let’s do the boring thing and begin at the beginning.

You’ll notice that I added the words “Even Though” followed by a question mark in square brackets to statement number two. This is because the only way I could make any sense out of the logic of the article is if the decline in annual tablet sales — I neglected to mention that Sellers points out that the quantification of this decline has reached “double digits for the first time on record in 2015”, that is, coinciding with the first year, or rather, taking into account the period between when the iPad Pro was released and Apple’s Q1 earnings report, coinciding with the first 2 months of the iPad Pro’s availability — anyway, the only way I could make any sense out of this logic is if there was a more firmly established link between the decline of tablet shipments and the iPad Pro’s release. We might call those little words I added in those seemingly innocuous square brackets, “Insidious Assumption #1”. You can do that if you want. You have my permission.

I’m not going to waste all that much time pointing out the obvious, but let me just get it out of the way: there is, emphatically, no connection between the decline in tablet shipments and the release of the iPad Pro. I mean this in a very specific sense, so don’t pull out your fucking business graphs on me just yet or whatever. My specific sense is this: Apple did not release the iPad Pro in November in order affect Q1 tablet sales numbers. For one thing, if they really wanted to affect holiday tablet sales so badly — and I don’t think Apple cares half as much about that kind of boring shit as Wall Street and its idiotic ‘analysts’ — they might have shipped it sooner, so that more apps could be designed more carefully for the iPad Pro. Hell, if we’re going to go this far down the rabbit hole of speculating on ways Apple coulda shoulda woulda made the iPad Pro more compelling in the first few months of its life, we could even add that a version of iOS more finely tuned to the iPad Pro’s 13” screen wouldn’t have been remiss. Oh, and then there’s the fact that it’s called the iPad Pro, not the iPad Great Christmas Gift for the Gadget Lover In Your Life to Help Increase Our Q1 Results. The list goes on.

Apple makes devices for people, not for technology fetishists.

We might pause here to recall that the original iPad ran a quaint little version of iOS 3 (iOS 3.2) whose only (visually) distinctive feature was the ability to change the background picture in Springboard. It didn’t even have iOS 4’s sorry excuse for multitasking. If memory serves, and do correct me if I’m wrong, iOS 3.2 was only available for the iPad and was released not long before iOS 4, which in turn took a little while longer than its iPhone variant to find its way onto the iPad with iOS 4.2.1.

The 1st generation iPad, of course, which I owned up until the spring following the release of the iPad Air 2 when I finally upgraded, was hardly the technological heavyweight that the iPad Pro is (I love understatement, by the way). At a technological level, it really was basically just a giant iPhone 4. But it’s big screen, of course, allowed for a number of new use-case possibilities. Thus, even here we see the release of a new computing paradigm in hardware first, with software catching up a little while later.

Of course, the past is not always a sure indicator of the future, but I will say that when the iPad Pro was announced at Apple’s September event, it immediately struck me as a (long) play for the future of iOS and the iPad. In other words, if I’m accusing Dennis Sellers of anything in this response to his article, it is of having a lack of imagination. (Sorry Dennis, I’m sure you’re a really nice guy. Our disagreement is purely philosophical.)

Among what are arguably the many things that Apple pitched the iPad Pro as, the first thing was definitely not as a laptop replacement. That came later. On the contrary, the iPad Pro was introduced by Phil Shiller with the question, “Why make an iPad with a bigger display?” His answer was that the iPad had been, from the beginning, “a magical piece of glass you hold in your hands” that can “do things that a notebook can’t do”. Specific functions that were emphasized included watching TV shows and movies that are “more cinematic”, playing games that are “more immersive”, and being able to use a “full size software keyboard” that can, of course, be magically transformed into a piano keyboard (with the right software, of course, and which you definitely can’t do on a notebook — believe me, I tried in an early version of Garageband years before the original iPad). All-in-all, the iPad Pro has, incredibly, more pixels than a 15” Retina MacBook Pro.

The point here is that although the iPad Pro was touted later on by Tim Cook as a laptop replacement (at least for him), and that the Smart Connector allows for a laptop-like experience in the form of, primarily (at least for now), the attachment of a keyboard without the limitations of bluetooth (battery, on/off switch), the iPad Pro is nevertheless at this point in time a leap in hardware capability that allows for the future potential of iOS (or perhaps whatever iOS might become in terms of the possibility of an iPad-specific fork of the software). It doesn’t, then, make a lot of sense to think in terms of shoe-horning OS X into a tablet when a devices such as the iPad Pro (and possibility the rumoured iPad Air 3 and beyond) seem to be consciously positioned by Apple as paving the way toward an entirely new computing paradigm. 

With the new multi-tasking capabilities of iOS 9, the iPad is starting to come into its own as a desktop-class computing device. There are no doubt annoyances or at any rate weird design decisions, chief among them is, of course, the ‘drawer’ of apps that are accessed from the split-screen mode and which are a giant pain in the ass to scroll through and seem to have no organization whatsoever. I’m willing to bet, however, that, like the multitasking screen in iOS 8 that had evolved into something that made more sense by iOS 9 — up to and including the ability to access handoff apps from somewhere other than the lock screen — that this ‘drawer’ is a kind of placeholder, a stopgap that is ‘good enough’ until a truly fluid and viable way of interacting with this apps is re-thought and developed. The same might also be said of the sharesheet interface, which has allowed for an entirely new and extremely useful way for apps to interact with and share data between one another but which still needs some time to develop.

OS X is obviously not going anywhere any time soon, but iOS is where the future of Apple’s operating system lies and the iPad Pro is the hardware that allows for this transition. The desire for, let us call it, instant functionality-gratification that this OS X/iPad hybrid seems to indicate views the iPad Pro as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Moreover, there is obviously no guarantee that putting OS X on an iPad is going to magically increase the sales or desirability of the device. I am still one of those people who is firmly in the “nobody upgrades their iPads every year” camp. I know a number of people who are still using an iPad 2, but I also see a wide range of generations of the device used by commuters everyday on the subway. Sure, that’s anecdotal at best and all those other disclaimers that I feel obliged to add, but it seems to me undeniable that the devices are still out there and being used, which means that eventually people may want to upgrade.

On the other hand, for those inclined toward this desire for an ultra-portable version of OS X, there is always the MacBook Air.