Welcome to Pragmatic.
[Music]
Pragmatic is a discussion show contemplating the practical application of technology.
By exploring the real world trade-offs, we look at how great ideas are transformed into products and services that can change our lives.
Nothing is as simple as it seems.
Pragmatic is part of the Engineered Network.
our shows, including this one, head over to our Patreon page. And for other great shows,
visit engineer.network today. I'm your host, John Chidjie. And today I'm joined by Russell
Ivanovic. How are you doing? Hey, John. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming back on. It's
been a while since we've had a chat. So I appreciate you coming back on to talk about something that
could be complicated. Oh, I see what you did there. I do. Yeah, I know it's terrible. It's
just terrible. But, so, okay, I'm going to break it now. I would like to talk about complications
on watches, specifically smartwatches. But before we get stuck into that, I just want to quickly
talk about a little bit of history of horology. Have you heard of horology, Russell?
I have. I have indeed. But only because about 30 minutes before we started the show,
you explained it to me. So, please tell us all about horology.
You're not supposed to tell the listeners that.
Oh, sorry. I mean, I've never heard of this hour-ology.
That sounds very strange.
Yeah, I know.
Actually, a few years ago when I first heard of the terminology horology, I actually thought,
"What do you mean?
Is that like horoscopes and stars and things?"
Because that's what I first thought.
But it's actually the study of clocks and watches.
In the context of watches, a complication is what they've always referred to as any
feature in the timepiece that is not displaying hours and minutes.
So that could be anything, including the day, the date, alarms, chronographs, phases of
the moon, for example. They're all very common complications in a traditional watch. So anyway,
and any time piece that just shows you hours and minutes is referred to as a simple movement.
So the interesting thing is that in order to sell watches, I'm guessing, watchmakers
decide to add more and more complications, which made it more complicated. Funny that.
But obviously, the more you add, the more difficult it is to design, to create, to assemble,
repair makes it more expensive. So a typical sort of day and date display
chronograph could have about 250 parts but more complex watches could have
thousands of parts and watches with several complications they refer to an
industry as grande complications but yeah anyway whatever. So as a result I
guess it was about in the 16th century they started to see a lot more very
very complicated watches and according to Wikipedia the font of all knowledge
The Frank Muller, I'm going to mince this one, I think it's an Eternatus Mega 4 is the world's most complicated wristwatch.
It's got a good name as well.
Yeah, I'm sure someone else can pronounce it properly other than me, but it has 36 complications. This is a mechanical watch, right?
Wow.
And how they figure that is that 25 of them are visible at any time.
It has 1,483 individual components.
And one of the complications, perhaps the most useless, is a thousand year calendar.
Now if that watch lasts a thousand years, I would be prepared to pay 2.7 million US
dollars for that.
Of course, I'd have to win the lotto first to pay for that watch.
Do we know how many of these were made?
- I actually have no idea.
I'm assuming not many.
- Yeah, not for that price.
- No.
So yeah, I think that was one of those projects
that they just, they did it because they could.
And they said, "Hey, look at this.
"We got lots of complications.
"You give me money now."
And everyone said--
- You'd hate to be the person
that someone brings it in for a service
and then be like, "Yeah, one of my complications
"stopped working."
And you're like, "Oh."
- That'll be part 1,481, witness to be fixed.
Can you imagine how annoyed you'd be
if you got water in that thing?
I mean, oh my, you wouldn't wear it, would you?
- No, in fact, I do wonder that people collect everything.
So I assume there's a whole group of people
that collect watches and put them on their shelf.
- Yeah, exactly, which is, I don't get that either.
But cause that just makes it completely pointless.
Here's a watch, but I can never put it on my wrist
'cause that would just be silly.
It's like buying a car and leaving it in the garage.
I can't drive it 'cause it's just too expensive.
- Yeah, but you don't wanna ruin the perfection.
You've bought something perfect.
second you put on your wrist you've destroyed that.
Exactly, exactly. It's terrible. Anyway, alright. So I think one of the interesting developments
in the last, what, maybe 20 years, I suppose, has been the development of software watches
versus mechanical watches. But it's really only been in the last, I would say, 5 or 6
years that software watches have had enough interesting things going on with them. And
I don't mean like, I suppose you could argue a software watch is from 20 years ago or maybe
even 25, you know, with a couple of extra functions like the musical chimes.
Like I had a watch when I was a kid that had like 25 alarm tunes and it was just one of
those, similar to the old mobile phones, you know, they had those polytone, you know what
I mean?
Like it would play these things like clear to loon and a few other different things and
then I had to go and look up what clear to loon was and never mind.
I had one of those as well. I remember it fondly.
I was very depressed when mine got water in it. Hence my previous comment about the 2.7 million dollar watch
because it got water in it and it just didn't play songs anymore and I was very sad.
So anyhow, yeah but that's not really what I mean. Software watches, I think,
my definition of a software watch, I say my definition, is that what I want to talk about specifically
are watches that are configurable on the fly in terms of what they can display
through software modification. So if you do that, if you've got a digital watch, digital
front face or a section of the front face that is digital that's configurable as like
an LCD, that's highly configurable, then by going digital, you know, there's no additional
parts. You don't have to add any additional parts in order to make as many complications
as you like, at least in theory. Yeah. And you can easily change out, you can reconfigure
your watch face to whatever you want, provided that there's a watch face that you like to
use or want to use and a complication available for what you want to do. Of course, assume
that they are. You have that power with a software watch. You don't with a mechanical
watch. You're stuck with what it was when you bought it. And the thing that I think
is really cool is that that lends yourself to the place where you could have multiple
watch faces for different activities. Which is something I find myself doing with my Apple
watch. So you have an Apple watch, yes? I do, yeah. Yeah. And do you still wear it?
I am literally wearing it right now as we're talking.
So I didn't, I stopped wearing it for about three months,
but then when I was working on some software updates,
I put it back on and yeah, so it's still here.
- Excellent, yeah, I'm wearing mine as well.
It's just recovered from a long, long time
away from its charger, but now it's back,
back on my wrist again.
Yes, that is definitely a downside.
And I don't really want to necessarily go
into the whole charging problem, but nevermind.
Ultimately, I've worn my watch pretty much every day since I've bought it and I love this thing and I have a whole bunch of reasons why.
But the beauty of the...
Okay, so what I want to focus on today though is talking about complications.
And I guess the problem I have with complications now on watch faces is that the problem is no longer the ability to choose.
The problem is now that there are so many choices of combination and it's getting more, they're getting more choices all the time.
So the Apple Watch itself, you know, we still can't design custom watch faces.
like, you know, I can't buy a watch face from an awesome developer like Shifty Jelly, let's say,
or anyone else. I can't. It's like, I've got to go with what Apple give me. I mean, sure,
I can configure the photos that go on it maybe and have the photo screen, but I can't say,
oh, I'd like a complication in the top left. I'd like one in the top, in the middle, one in the
very middle. I can adjust the size of it. It's completely not configurable. Yeah. In fact,
that's one of the biggest things that I don't know if noise is the right word, but I find
frustrating about the Apple Watch is there some of the watch faces are almost
there but I'm like if I could just move this down like for example in I'm
looking at the is this one called utility I'm not sure though I'm that the
digital one with that has the most complications I just want the time in
the middle but I can't put the time in the middle the time has to be in the top
corner because you know that's what Apple has ordained and then I'm forced
to you know pick a certain amount of complications and if I leave one blank
you know the screen doesn't reflow it's just that spot is now blank and that
that frustrates me a bit because you've got this infinite potential for configurability
and I know you don't want to introduce infinite complexity at the same time but still there
needs to be a balance. I'm like well you know it's a digital watch I want to make it look
this way but I can't I can't make it look like that.
No exactly and it's frustrating because like you say it's just I just want to tweak this
just a little bit it's close to what I want but it's not quite what I want and being completely
configurable in that respect, it can be frustrating. So I guess
everyone anticipates that they're going to open it up and I think that there's
I think they will open it up but then
I mean updating things like in iOS, here we are in iOS 9
and is it possible for any non
first party app to update their screen icon
on iOS dynamically? I mean you can push badges to it but can
you actually update like the calendar updates its date? No, if you're not Apple, you are
definitely not allowed to do that. Yeah, see, and this is my problem is that what if they
treat watch faces the same way? I certainly hope they don't. Yeah, I was kind of wonder
they do like to control things and sometimes for good reason. Like I think if if Apple
was here, they'd be like, well, you know, if a developer could change their icon, then
they do nefarious things. They change it to the Facebook one and you'd be tapping it back.
like hmm yeah okay maybe I see that. I think what they might do with watch
faces at least initially is maybe just team up with a few you know select
developers they'll be like okay these five or ten developers have been ordained
by us as being able to make watch faces and now you have a choice of I don't
know 20 or 30 instead of instead of 8. I can't see them just opening it up I
mean Google has done that with with Android Wear that's that's the platform
on the other side that anyone can make a watch face and the results are amazing
You get some really, really high quality ones,
but the other, you know, 85, 90%, just you look at them,
you're like, "Oh, oh, like what have they done?"
And I can't see Apple, you know, putting up with that.
I think Google's quite happy to say this 10% is amazing.
So we'll accept the other 90%
that doesn't look that brilliant.
But I don't think Apple's that kind of company.
- Yeah, I suspect you're right.
Let's look at the ones they do give us
because I just want to quickly cover
just how much configurability we do get.
So utility you mentioned before,
I think actually you meant modular
and modular is the one that gives you the five configurable.
- Yeah, so it's called modular, I'm just looking at it now.
- Yeah, so modular gives you the five configurable
complications, slots, positions,
you know, whatever you wanna call them.
Utility gives you three configurable ones
that are fully configurable,
but one that is either the date or the day only.
Color gives you four configurable slots,
one on each corner,
but it gives you an extra one that's either a monogram only,
like your initials or it's blank, which is interesting.
It's like, yeah, I could put JC on there.
- Just in case you forget.
- In case I forget who I am, you know?
Anyway, it's okay.
Simple, which is four configurable slots
and one of them is either the date only or it's blank.
The chronograph has got three configurable slots
and another slot that's date or day only.
And Mickey Mouse, go Mickey,
tapping its foot impatiently whilst you're looking at it.
I'm like, what's...
- Or wiggly butt Mickey, as I prefer to refer to him.
Because I know somewhere some engineer
had to sit down and animate that.
That's the bit about this watch face I absolutely love.
- Yeah, it is kinda, it's fun.
But I look at it and every time I look at it,
I'm just like, why are you so impatient?
You're tapping your foot, stop it already.
Anyway, so Mickey Mouse gets three configurable slots.
So ultimately, if you want the maximum number
complications, module is the clear winner and simple is probably a close second.
But interestingly, there's a whole, all the other ones don't support complications.
So, motion, which is like the butterfly or the flower opening, the time lapse, astronomy,
which is the one where you zoom into the earth or away from the earth or whatever you do.
The photo one, no complications.
The solar one, which looks like a sine wave.
And I would say that because I've just, whatever, you know, the solar one, it's got the little
yeah, I'm playing with it now.
And of course, extra large.
Yeah, I know it looks like the little dots going to go up and down a slide anyway.
And the extra large one, which is it just melts my brain because I cannot get used to seeing the
hours on the top and the minutes on the bottom of the screen.
Just yeah, there's something about that.
And also they overlap with some of the icons.
So if you have it in do not disturb mode like I do right now, the moon's covering the one
Apple. The moon is covering the one. It's terrible. I know, they just didn't think that
through. But anyway, it's okay. Those ones just don't have complications. So, if you
like those watch faces, then too bad you can't have any complications at all, which I don't,
I don't know. I guess I see to some extent, but ones like motion, I mean, why not? Solar,
there's room, they could have, you know, anyway, it's okay. It's fine. It's fine. So, obviously
when I'm speaking of the complications, we're restricted to speaking about the ones that
have complications at the moment. Hopefully someday they open that up. But what I've done
to overcome this, like when I say overcome it, is to get the best of both, is I've set
up multiple watch faces. So I have a utility one set up for work, as in like work at work,
and I've got a modular one set up for work that's calendar-centric, and I've got a modular
one set up for home tasks that's to-do list centric. So I have my to-do list up on the
big one in the middle and then I've got the photo watch face for when I'm not working
and I'm just kicking back and I'm not at work. So right now I've got my photo watch face
on.
Tyrone:
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I've done something similar so I only have three though.
I've got the utility, the modular and the extra large. So the utility one I put on the
weekend when I no longer need to track you know a bunch of work related things, the modular
I have during the week. The extra large is when I'm doing something like, I know this
sounds stupid, but I'm playing a game and I get really engrossed in it, I just want
to really quickly be able to glance at my watch and be like, "Oh, I should be in bed.
It's past midnight."
Tyrone:
Fair enough. Yeah, I didn't start out that way. It's something that sort of evolved.
It's like I've added watch faces, I've tweaked it for different activity and I've reached
that point now where it's become a force of habit. I leave work, I change my watch face.
I'm on the train in the morning I change my watch face to work mode and when I'm doing
to-do list stuff on the weekends I'll change my watch face again. So it's just sort of
evolved that way but I think three or four is kind of for me anyway is the nice balance.
Yeah you definitely and with that amount it means you don't have to endlessly swipe between
them as well. It's easier to get like from one to the other. Yeah exactly. So and I almost
think that that would be a better use of the second button to be honest. I don't know I
I don't even want to get into this giant button on the front.
When I first got my Apple Watch,
I've obviously taught myself differently since,
but I kid you not, I pressed that button about 30 to 40 times
to try and go home.
So I'd be somewhere in the watch,
I'd be in an app or I'd be somewhere else
and be like, "Oh, just go home."
And then the people would pop up and be like, "What?
"Oh, that's right, this is the people button."
And I've had to untrain myself to press that button.
Do you still find yourself pressing it?
- I actually have reached the point
where I think that button is so useless
that I just never press it ever.
'cause I never start a conversation that way.
- Yeah, I mean, unless you wanna send, you know,
Mr. Creepy Emoji to someone you know,
or in the early days, I mean,
I drew a lot of those doodles and things,
but I find I just do not do that anymore.
It's easier to pull out your phone
and just send someone a text.
- Well, all the doodles that I wanna send
are probably not fit for consumption
unless they're for my wife.
And it's like, well, my wife refuses
to get an Apple Watch.
I threatened her, I said, you know what?
I am gonna buy you an Apple Watch, you know,
around Christmas time and it may come from Santa,
I don't know.
But the point is that, she's like, I have a watch.
It's a beautiful watch.
I don't want an Apple watch.
So I'd switched at the last minute
and got her a Pandora bracelet instead.
- Good move, good move.
- Yeah, I think it was a very good move.
It's worked out nicely in the end, so there you go.
- See, sorry, I was gonna say my wife,
actually, she has an Apple watch.
So I think for the, she got hers after mine.
I think being a developer, I got mine like day one,
I'm like, I must develop for this thing.
And then she got hers, I think for a birthday,
like shortly afterwards.
And I found for the first week, you know,
we do the tap thing and the, I don't know what you call those
explodey fireworks type things and draw little pictures.
And I find after that, I don't know,
maybe I'm not a romantic guy,
but I just stopped like completely sending any of those.
- Yeah. The novelty sort of wears off.
I guess it kind of felt a bit like a gimmick,
but being able to send your heartbeat is kind of cool
and tapping someone on the wrist is kind of cool too.
But the drawing the doodle thing to me
always felt a bit odd, but in any case--
- Especially on a tiny little screen like that as well.
- Yeah, exactly.
It's gonna be hard to be precise.
Not the precision is maybe necessarily the point,
but if you're trying to convey a message in a diagram,
then maybe that's not the right way to do it.
I don't know.
I guess maybe I'm just annoyed that, yeah,
I got a bracelet and not a watch
and I could never test that theory,
But it sounds like you've tested it for me,
so maybe that's okay.
- Yeah, look, I'm a husband, she's a wife.
We speak for every single husband and wife,
even for boyfriends and girlfriends and partners out there.
So none of you have to test this.
I've done it for you, it's all good.
- Fantastic, thanks, Russell.
That's awesome.
(laughing)
All right, cool.
Okay, so a little bit more
about the complication sizes though.
'Cause the thing is, when I started looking into this,
like before when the Apple Watch came out,
I was curious about this, the different complications and what would be potentially possible in
future.
This is all sorts of different sizes.
So all the different screens that we're either stuff earlier, they're all different size
complications.
So you got circular, which is, you know, for the color watch face in the corners only.
Yeah.
And the modular small and modular large.
So the modular small is in the top left corner and there's three along the bottom.
Yeah.
The large ones, the big sucker in the middle.
And it's like three lines, three rows of text,
which is the biggest complication you can have
with the most information.
And then on the, yeah.
And then on the utility, large and small,
which works in utility and Mickey Mouse,
but utility and Mickey Mouse,
it's top left and right corners.
Simple actually has them on all four corners,
chronograph, top left, bottom left, bottom right corners.
And then utility large, which is utility and Mickey Mouse,
is a bar across the bottom.
- Yeah, I guess the interesting thing about these,
and I'm sure this is where you're going,
but these are actually all template-based.
So you don't, as a developer, you don't get to design,
oh, I'd like a graphic either side
and something in the middle.
No, it's literally, here's the three choices
for this particular spot.
You can have a graphic on the left and text,
or you can just have text.
There is no third option in some case.
- No, exactly.
And in terms of looking at the real estate and the screens,
I also just had a quick look and there's a link in the show notes if you're interested
listeners about it.
There's about 2 to 6 pixels of difference depending upon which complication you're talking
about between the 38mm and the 42mm Apple Watch.
If you run all the numbers and all the different numbers drop out of all the different combinations
of possibilities, it actually is quite complicated which come to think of it is really not that
funny.
It was maybe funny the first time, but I'm not sure I can let it pass anymore.
- Fine. It's fair enough. It's totally fair. You called me on it. That's okay.
All right. - Look, I'm just looking out for our listeners.
I know that's what they're thinking right now.
They're driving or they're commuting somewhere and they're like, "Come on, John.
The third time? Really?" - I know.
But, you know, Jim Davies, who does the Garfield strip,
would say the more you say the joke, it gets funnier after a while.
So, you have the initial funny, it gets bad, and the more you do it, it gets funnier after that.
I can actually get behind that. I think you either have to stop doing it or you just go all in.
That's it. Yep. Guy says you got to own it. So I'm owning it. There we go. All right. So now that
we've gotten all that complicated stuff out of the way. That's it. That's it. You did it. See,
I'm owning it. What I want to do is talk about how you figure out what on earth you actually put into
a complication. So what is the value of a complication? Because the problem is I've
seen complications that don't actually display any live information. They're just an icon of their
app or of themselves. You tap it and it's a shortcut that launches the app. And I see that and
I'm like, well, that's not dynamic. It doesn't add any information. Okay, it removes tapping the crown,
swiping, tapping, or maybe if you've got a glance set up, you can glance, swipe up across and then
tap it to get into the app, you know, and that, yeah, it turns into a single tap.
So I get that as a shortcut that works, but to me, that's taking up valuable
complication space on my, on my watch.
And yeah, I mean, I agree.
I do realize that tapping the crown is a little bit complex and if the icon's not in the
middle, you might have to pan around.
And sometimes, you know, I still hit the wrong icon in this sort of weird collection of
icons, but it does feel like a bit of a waste if it's not doing anything.
Like the watch face is the one thing you see every single time you turn the watch towards
yourself, it lights up, that's what you see.
It feels like a bit of a waste if there's just an image on there and nothing else.
Tyrone:
Yeah exactly and so I sort of think to myself that maybe this is one of the things that
Apple has an issue with opening up watch faces because if they did, maybe someone's going
to make a watch face that has a grid of 3x3 or 4x4 like 9 or 16 positions on the watch
face without the time on it and then some white box just going to put a bunch of shortcut
complications on there and it'll just be like a teeny tiny incy wincy iPhone screen.
Oh, guaranteed someone will try that.
It's supposed to be a watch people.
The same thing happened with the today notification shade when that first came out.
You pull down and it's meant to tell you information about today but the first thing people thought
of is, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice if I just had my four favorite apps I could just launch
directly from here?" I think that's one of the first things that people added.
Yeah, exactly. And it would definitely, it's no doubt in my mind that someone would do
that. And I don't know, maybe it's not right for me to tell people what they should or
shouldn't do, it's true, but if you look at the utility of the watch, that's not what
it's for. You know, it's for, at least in my opinion, it's about, it has to give you
information at a glance that you can access quickly without having to get your phone out
or look on your computer or your iPad or whatever other device you've got. It's like real quickly,
what's the time or what's the weather doing or you know, what, what, yeah, well, okay.
So how do you decide what you put on a complication? Obviously the answer is different for, you
know, different apps, but I know that you've developed. So, okay, let's talk about specifically
in your case then Russell, because I know you've developed one app in particular, that's
got an Apple Watch complication on it. So can you describe a little bit about what that
app is and what's on the complication and why you chose what you did?
Sure. So the app is Pocket Weather Australia. And I guess the reason a lot of people install
this up in Australia is because the built-in Apple one just doesn't have the right data.
It sources it from I think the Weather Channel these days, it used to be Yahoo.
But they're both.
Yeah.
I mean, the other day, I literally looked at it.
It was 9 degrees out.
And in Fahrenheit, that might not sound like a lot.
But in Celsius, 9 degrees, that's a lot of degrees.
That's the difference between being cold and being slightly warm.
So that's the first thing we thought.
We're like, right, you need to be able to know the weather.
But then it got a bit interesting.
bit of Tesla a lot of things so that the first thing I thought is with watchOS 2
Apple introduced this time travel feature so basically you can spin this
this dial here and you can go backwards in time and forwards in time and you
know for things like your calendar you can see future appointments if you've
got the time zone complications you can see okay it's 1 p.m. here what what time
is it going to be in New York you can spin that around and the first thing I
thought of is wow wouldn't it be good to see you know what the temperature is at
at 3 p.m. so you'd scroll to 3 p.m. you're like oh and so it's funny that's
the first thing we implemented was the I think it used to show the max for today
and the current temperature and one of the very first hurdles we ran into is
while you're learning the the watch SDK and what goes into it you find that
building a complication is actually quite complicated yeah because the reason
is Apple has been very very restrictive about how many times you can refresh it
how often you can send it data and also there's basically a hard limit to how
often you're even allowed to send it updates so let's pretend that we update
the weather I don't know every 15 minutes every half an hour whatever
sensible for for weather app to keep itself up to date that's too much
information to be sending to the watch constantly and so what we found is you'd
send a whole bunch of data and then it'll be up to it as to when I ask you
for that data again. So it could be three hours later it's like hey I need the
data again. So it doesn't really have the concept of this is the data I need
right now and this is other data. It's literally just data on a timeline. So I
guess they're thinking more like a calendar for example. So your calendar
events are ordered and you've got a certain amount of bookings and at three
o'clock whatever's coming up at you know three o'clock that's that's relevant. And
so that information you can see maybe you might add a few calendar events, you
might move some, you might delete some, but the amount of updates that needs to go to
the watch is not a huge amount. Whereas for weather to keep the current
temperature especially up to date, you really need that, you know, probably no
more than every half an hour and that's the first hurdle we ran into. We were like,
"Okay, we can't update it every half an hour, like what do we do now?" So we played
it around with a whole bunch of things and in the end I had to take a step back.
I'm like, "All right, if we can't have that, what's the next most useful thing?" and I
just looked at the way I was using the watch. So every morning I'd pick it up
off the nightstand, I'd look at it and be like,
all right, what do I need to wear?
So literally, when you wake up in the morning,
it now tells you, this is what it's gonna be like today.
This is the maximum temperature,
which in Australia at least,
that's the most important number.
It's, you know, do I put on a jumper?
Do I put on a pair of shorts?
Do I need to huddle indoors and not leave the house
because it's burning hot outside?
And then at 5 p.m. it shows you
what it's gonna be like tomorrow.
So it auto switches to this is the overnight temperature
and this is tomorrow's temperature.
And that's, in the end we found that was a good balance
but it's funny, like if I had the choice
I think I probably would have gone
with the current temperature
just because of the limitations that are on there.
Like that was just too hard to handle that well.
- Yeah, it's one of the things
that I was a little bit frustrated by
because when Apple have their,
whether they show current temperature
And when we sort of, I'm not sure if it was you and I
or if it was Monica and I, but we were talking about
options and possibilities when Pocket Weather came out.
And when we started talking about this,
I did a little bit of digging and I mean,
it sounds like, perhaps I shouldn't sound surprised,
but the first party apps have a different rule book.
- Ta-da.
- Yeah, ta-da.
- Yeah, and as someone who's developed
like a podcasting app as well,
like I can tell you that, yeah, for the longest time,
Apple's always played by their own rules.
- Yeah, exactly.
And so I'll look at my watch
and if I have the actual native weather app
on as a complication,
it fetches the current temperature update just fine.
And I'll do air quotes that you can't see there just fine.
I'll talk about still in a minute.
But the truth is that that luxury is not afforded
to third-party apps, right?
So like you said, it could be hours later
when it decides it'll fetch the data.
You can't actually force it to refresh exactly, can you?
- Well, this is the thing I've been looking into since.
So I probably spent a good week and a half
trying to get that right.
And it was just obvious that in that time period,
especially because watchOS 2 had literally
only just come out,
there wasn't a lot of information around it.
Often you'll find you go to a site like Stack Overflow
or you'll delve into some of the developer forums
and people will find all these sort of hidden things
that either Apple hasn't talked about
or they mentioned super briefly in a video
or someone talked to a tech rep
and the tech rep's like, "Oh, you just do this."
And they're like, "Well, that's not anywhere
"in the documentation."
Like I had a session, I went to WWDC,
Apple's Developer Conference.
I was trying to figure out this audio related thing.
No documentation I could find whatsoever.
I'm like, "Well, this is just not gonna work."
And I sat down with one of the AV Foundation engineers
which is their sort of high level,
you know, playback libraries that they have.
And she was like, no, no, you just,
you do this, this and this.
I'm like, oh, really?
And the header files were there in it.
So the, I guess the non sort of documentation,
just the raw code was there
and you could look into the header files
and you'd be like, oh, actually it is there.
But nowhere, anywhere in the documentation
was it mentioned that you could do these
or that these APIs existed.
And they're not private APIs,
they're just ones that for some reason
haven't sort of made it into the documentation.
And I think since then, some of that stuff
might've happened with the watch.
So that's why I'm trying to put these caveats in
is at the time when I researched it,
it looked like it was impossible.
Since then, I wouldn't be surprised if someone's found,
you know, a push notification that you can send to your phone
that maybe somehow pushes data to your watch
or some kind of event that you can signal
to the WatchKit API that, no, no, this is really important.
And you stick maybe a certain flag on it,
or there's a particular type of event that you can send
to actually get it to update.
So I guess on my to-do list is to reinvestigate that
because it's entirely possible that, you know,
someone's found a way to work around it.
- Well, I certainly hope that that's the case.
And if there isn't an indirect work around
or a direct way of doing it at this point
that in the next watch OS release
that they provide that functionality,
because I think that that sort of,
without that ability, it's sort of,
I see where they're coming from
from battery life point of view.
I don't want someone to push an update to it constantly
and flatten the battery on the thing.
I get it.
The batteries on the watch are precious, right?
- Yeah, exactly.
- Yeah, I do understand that, but at the same time,
it's a bridge too far in some respects
because it sort of cripples that functionality
to an extent.
Like you've got access to third-party complications,
but within very tight restrictions.
- Yeah, and it's interesting the way
they've structured it as well.
When you build a watch app, you essentially have three parts.
So you've got the watch app itself,
which most of it runs natively on the watch.
You've got the complication,
which is it's almost like its own complete separate thing.
Like it's fenced off from everything else.
If you wanna use shared code in there,
you have to put it in libraries and you have to import it.
It's very sort of walled off.
So it's obvious their intention was,
no, this thing runs on the watch face.
It doesn't run itself.
Like it works the other way around.
Like they call you when they want information.
like you don't call them type thing.
And you can tell it's intentional.
They obviously knew the battery constraints,
they knew how much juice they had to work with.
They probably knew the kind of update cycles
that the thing operates on as well.
And I think they probably also knew going forward
that if they discovered, hey, most of our users,
when they put their watch on the thing at night,
they still get 40%.
Maybe let's crank this up a little bit.
So potentially, or maybe they make some saving in software
where they're like, okay, now we've saved 5%
of our battery life here.
let's direct that into complications.
So I guess that is a lever they can sort of pull up and down.
- Interesting, okay.
- And I guess the other thing is you always want to start off
if you're the people making the API,
you always want to start off really conservative
because if you open the floodgates on day one,
that's really hard to pull back.
Once developers have written hundreds,
if not millions of lines of code against this API,
it's very hard to turn up at the next developer conference
and be like, you know that API we gave you,
It's actually really destructive.
It's destroying people's battery life.
And sorry, but it's no longer there.
Like that's a very hard thing to walk backwards.
If you start off really conservative and you're like,
no, these are the things you can do.
You know, don't call us, we'll call you.
If you try and force update it too often,
we're gonna cut you off for the rest of the day.
That's, you know, not from my end
'cause that really frustrates me as a developer,
but I can see it from the other end, from Apple's end.
That's probably the smart way to, you know,
to start off initially.
- Yeah, I, again, I do appreciate and I understand
that they want to start out restrictive and gradually let a little bit of slack out and
give developers more room to move and that's just the way they function, that's the way
they operate and I guess that's typical Apple. Not all companies are necessarily like that
I think but definitely Apple are. But one of the other things I just wanted to touch
on about complications is to some extent is sort of discoverability. Because one of the
things that I found interesting or I don't know, I think it's worthy of mention anyway
is conveying to users what their options are for complications. Because what I found you
have to do with any Apple Watch app that has complications is you have to poke and prod
and basically try all the different complications
on the different watch face types
to figure out what data is available and what isn't.
- Not only that, but the Apple apps,
I don't know if you've noticed,
like the World Clock is a good example.
They're allowed to have more than one complication
against the same app.
And as a third party developer, you can't do that.
So that's the other thing we toyed with
is we really wanted people to have a choice.
We're like, well, maybe someone cares about this data point
more than this data point.
And that's the first thing we tried.
We were like, what if we can have two or three complications
that can scroll through and they'll be like,
that's the one I want, but you can't do that.
So any of that sort of configuration that you wanna do,
you actually have to do it in the phone app itself.
- Well, that was the other thing I wanted to mention
is because it's configurable up to,
it's not configurable on the phone,
oh, sorry, hang on, on the watch itself.
So on the watch, if you say,
I want to have this to display current temperature
or let's say it's not current temperature,
it's feels like temperature.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Yeah, so you would have to configure all of that
in the phone, in the Apple Watch app,
in the configuration options of that,
or would that actually be in the app itself?
- As far as I know, you'd have to actually put it
in the app that runs on your phone.
So you'd have to launch Pocket Weather in this instance,
you go to settings, there'd be like an Apple Watch one,
you'd drill down to there.
And then, yeah, we've been trying to plan this out recently
because we do still wanna show you different things,
but then it's like two steps removed.
Like at the point where you're adding the complication,
I don't know that most people are gonna be like,
"Oh, I should open the iOS app."
That's a good idea because that's where the settings
will be like that.
That's a bit of a disconnect for me.
- Yeah, and I totally agree.
And to me it's odd because you've now got three places.
So you've got the watch itself,
which is where the complication displays,
but it doesn't have the settings for what it,
the controls what goes into the complications information.
Then you've got the watch configuration app on the iPhone,
which controls whether the app is installed,
whether it's available as a gesture
or where the complication is installed, but that's it.
And oh yeah, and notifications
if there's any related to the app.
And then if you want to do any more configuration
of the Apple Watch app,
you don't have to go to the app itself.
It's just, yeah, like you say,
it's two steps removed from the actual watch itself,
which is what you're trying to configure,
which is a bit odd.
- Yeah, and I wouldn't be surprised if that changes
because I mean, they've definitely done more than that,
you know, for their apps.
Like when you're choosing a world time,
all the times you have configured,
I think it's actually in your phone,
you can scroll through those on the complications
and you're like, bang, yep, New York City,
that's the one I want now.
I think something similar to that for third party developers
is hopefully in the works as well,
'cause that makes a lot of sense.
Like I'm already here, I want this complication,
but if there's three different options,
I wanna be able to choose those.
And they've already got this really nice interface
sort of mechanism.
You've got the digital crown there,
you can slide it up and down.
the UI is already there for it.
They just need, I guess, the APIs
and the frameworks around it.
- Yeah, exactly.
And as you say, the first party apps
have got a lot of that configurability.
It's a matter of letting third party developers
do more stuff like that on the actual watch, I think.
- Yeah.
- But I guess the other thing though,
I mentioned before,
I just wanna dive into a little bit as well,
is for watch complications to be useful,
it has to be quicker than pulling out your smartphone
or logging into your iPad, your desktop or whatever.
Well, you know, if you're sitting in a room
searching the walls that you're in to find a wall clock
to tell you the time, you know,
it's gotta be quicker than those things.
- Yeah, definitely.
- And the thing that annoys me
is that just on the subject of weather apps
and I mean the native weather app in this case,
I've put my wrist up many, many, many times
just to see a couple of dashes
in the space where the data is supposed to be telling me
what temperature it is. And that's a first party complication. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
And that happens to me semi-regularly.
And the connection is that's pretty well almost not always,
but almost always I'll probably say about nine out of 10 times when there's no
wifi around or rather there's no wifi that my phone and watch can
connect to. Cause at work I've got wifi blanketed through the whole building,
but it's all locked down with certificates and all sorts of stuff. Right.
So I can't, so yeah. Yeah. So once I'm at a Bluetooth range,
it's like too bad, so sad, you know.
And that Bluetooth lag versus wifi lag
is I thought something to, yeah,
something that's worth just--
- Oh, it is an immense difference.
Like I'm not a low level communications engineer,
although funnily enough, I did once work on a project
where the data had to go over HF radios.
And I believe our bandwidth was, I can't remember now,
either 2048 bits or 4096.
There was a tiny amount of bandwidth
and you had to leave like massive gaps in it.
And that wasn't a fun experience,
but Bluetooth is obviously faster than that,
but compared to Wi-Fi, man, it's just a world of difference.
Like I know we did some tests
on the Android side of things,
because they opened up an API
where you could actually copy data to the watch
and then go for a jog, for example,
and still listen to your podcast.
And that seemed like a really cool idea.
I'm like, that's nice.
You know, you pair, it's a bit of a hassle.
You have to pair like some headphones with the watch,
but once you've done that, you can leave the phone at home,
go for a jog, you know, play a podcast.
But the problem is, you know, most podcasts are, you know, 40, 50, 60, you know,
sometimes even 70, 80, 90 megabytes in size and transferring that over Bluetooth.
I mean, you're talking, you're not talking seconds, like you're literally talking minutes.
And that's, that's an odd thing for, you know, it's, it's 2016, you know, we have really fast,
well, not at my house, but in most places you have really fast, you know,
data transfer speeds between all sorts of different things.
And then now to wait five minutes to sync a podcast to my watch.
I mean, that, that just feels primitive.
- Yeah, exactly right.
- And so I guess the connection speed,
it's the same issue, like you were saying,
when you're off the wifi network
and the weather app has to update
or something else has to update,
and it has to wake your phone up, talk to your phone,
deal with that latency, deal with the bandwidth constraints,
and then eventually get it to you.
Yeah, it's annoying.
And I mean, it was especially obvious in,
I don't know if you remember,
watchOS 1 where you'd launch the built-in apps,
and then you just watch a spinner.
And sometimes the spinner would be there
until your watch went back to sleep.
And you're like, okay, well, that was fun.
I held my wrist up for 15 seconds, nothing happened.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, if I'm holding my wrist up and it's up there for 3 seconds and I can't see the
information on the complication all the time, well, the time's never been a problem, but
the complications are the problem.
If I can't see it within 3 seconds, I might as well have got my phone out, in which case,
where's the value from that point of view of having the complications?
The problem with Bluetooth is that everyone goes on about how Bluetooth 4 is amazing because
it's got the low energy part of it and that's just that's got to be a good thing, right?
Well the thing that's interesting about Bluetooth 4 is actually three previous standards kind
of rolled into one and when I say you start digging into it, it's interesting because
specifically Bluetooth low energy is more about the ability to wake up, send a small
chunk of data and go back to sleep again quickly because it's like minimal data transactions.
It's not about data throughput and Bluetooth 3 actually was one that originally touted a
24 megabit per second transfer rate but the thing a lot of people don't realize is that
it's actually not the Bluetooth standard that actually was what did the data transfer. Maybe
it's a technicality but it's actually 802.11 as a parallel channel to achieve that. So
Bluetooth did the negotiation and the data transfer rate was actually a parallel channel
which is interesting. But if you look at it from a Wi-Fi point of view, assuming, here's
your assumptions, ideal network conditions, so you got no one dragging your network down,
let's say like a slow device. And I tried to track down specifically what the Apple
Watch supported because there's two channel bandwidths like 40 megahertz or 20 megahertz
channel bandwidths, but I couldn't find out specifically which it is. I'm going to assume
that it's probably 20 megahertz, but I can't be sure. So best case raw data rate for Wi-Fi
on the watch, it's 802.11n compatible, is 150 megabits per second, but it's more likely
about 72.2 megabits per second for the 20 megahertz channel. But that is significantly
more than the best that Bluetooth 3 could possibly give you, and Bluetooth 4 incorporates
the elements of Bluetooth 3. So, essentially the best Bluetooth on the watch is, what is
that, about a third, somewhere between a third and a quarter of what Wi-Fi can do.
And the other problem of course is range, because the Bluetooth being a point to point
and the Wi-Fi is going via a router that's got longer range to start with, the range
is the other killer. So, it's like, yeah, if you're away from Wi-Fi, it's just terrible.
you know, just terrible. So, it's frustrating and what worries me is that in that respect
at least, I wonder if that's anything that can possibly be fixed with the current hardware.
I think that maybe we've gone as far as we can go with that with the current hardware
on the Apple Watch. I don't know. Yeah, well that's the interesting thing is because when
these things were first announced and when they first came out, everyone was like, "Oh,
that is expensive for a watch that could potentially be obsolete like in a year or two years or
three years and everyone started to speculate you know they can't do this
on a yearly cycle that that would be insane because you know you just bought
a $500 watch and then a year later they're like hey that watch is useless
get a new watch and I know I know some people would like I probably would for
example because I'm a sucker for that sort of thing but that's that feels like
a tough sell and that also means that like I think this is where you're going
is that there's there's limits to how far you know they can push the software
before they actually need to rev the hardware as well.
Yeah, exactly. So the problem I have with complications as they currently stand is that
they aren't giving enough power to the third party developers or at least it doesn't appear
that they are and I'm sort of at the point where I'm with the lag issues when you're
away from Wi-Fi as in a Wi-Fi network that both the phone and the watch can see, you
you know, the lag issues in when you try to glance at this information is such that the
current hardware is just not up to the task. And you know, the battery life being what
it is, I don't know, it feels a lot to me like, you know, the original iPhone and I
had an original iPhone too and I loved that phone. It was only 2G, it had no GPS, the
camera was terrible. You know, I look back and I'm thinking, what was I thinking? Why
did I think this was so amazing at the time? It's because there was nothing else out there.
- Yeah, no, I had the same phone.
- Yeah, exactly, right.
I mean, we both, you know, modified it
so it would work on the local network here in Australia,
I think, 'cause we had to at that point.
- Yeah, exactly.
You had to run all these complicated,
like command line things just to get it to, you know,
just all you wanted to do was get it to run.
And like, yeah, that's a 45 step process.
- Yeah, you remember the size of the text on that screen?
It was this minuscule text scrolling away on the screen.
- Oh, that's right.
- The terminal, because all the terminal
incantations you had to enter because that was back before all the all the
GUI based tools were around and all the different hacks that other hacks have
been discovered so that was back in the bad old days of yeah jailbreaking but
yeah but I know what you mean you look back at that phone now and you're like
yeah really nice hardware design but there there was a lot of things that are
in the modern smartphone that are just completely missing that I could not live
without like if I know how to someone gave me a phone and they're like oh by
the way no GPS and enjoy the 2g I don't think I'd even use it I'm like I can't I
I can't use this. I navigate with it all the time. I rely on high speed data networks.
I can't get by with this.
Yeah, exactly. And I sort of think to myself, well, when it comes to first gen products,
particularly from Apple, it seems to me as though you got to love the product when it comes
out and don't expect it to do a heck of a lot more in a year or two's time.
You're going to need to uprev the hardware maybe once or twice before it becomes something
that is truly extendable.
It's because I think that everything was right on that fine line of,
you know, there's a whole list of caveats, right?
If I had better Wi-Fi throughout the building than my iPhone and Apple Watch
could handle and, you know, maybe that would make it a little bit better.
Probably would. But ultimately, it doesn't solve the other problems of, you know,
third party apps being able to update their complications when they need to in the most
effective way. And I suspect that if they did release more of that control,
that ultimately it would end up with really bad battery life and some people would come
back and start having a big complaint about it.
So, and that would be bad for the precious customer sat, right?
So I don't know.
I think that honestly they are going to uprev it probably sooner rather than later.
So I do think it will be an annual, like there'll be an update this year, but maybe not every
year and maybe not every watch.
I don't know, but I'm not sure.
I'm trying to remember the space between the original phone and the 3G.
This could be my memory but I think it was only about 8 months wasn't it?
It depends on where you measure it from because it was announced well before it was released
because they knew as soon as it hit FCC for qualification testing the cat would be out
of the bag.
So I think that if you measure it from the date it was released, yeah it was only about
9 months I think before they announced the release of the next one.
It wasn't quite a full year.
Tyrone:
Yeah and I don't think that's something Apple's scared of.
You know a lot of people say you know if they're smart, they'll wait 2 and a half, you know
3 years to show people they've got value for money.
I think if they have something that's significantly better than the previous one, I don't think
they'll hesitate to you know roll that out and try and sell it like on all the new features.
Ben:
Yeah exactly.
So on the topic of complications at least I guess I'm generally I've been honestly a
little bit disappointed in the fact that third party developers aren't given the access that
they really, I think, need to get the best out of it. And it's also down to the fact
that the hardware itself is sort of riding on the edge of practicality. But it's only
going to get better. New hardware will be better, new operating systems will have more
features. I have no doubt about that. How configurable the watch face has become, I
don't know. But as for me and my Apple Watch, there's enough other things that I love about
it that I'm happy with. It's just one of these frustrations and you know, the complications
have turned out to be complicated.
Surprise!
One more. Just that was one more.
I just had to push that one extra one through. I think the other one for me is because I've
sampled, you know, the other side, I've worn an Android Wear watch for, you know, a significant
amount of time. I've watched them evolve. Haha, see what I did there? And so, yeah,
I got the other joke in, but the thing about that is,
they allowed third party watch faces
fairly early on in the game.
And there's some that I've really fallen in love with
that I just miss when I come to the iOS side.
And this, I'm gonna try and explain this
and it's gonna sound trivial and you'll be like,
"Well, I don't need that."
But there's a few of them.
There's one called, I think it's called something simple,
like Rocket Ship.
And it literally is this really nice
sort of cartoony animation of,
you've got like a planet in the middle
and that's got your time on it.
And the second hand is represented by a rocket ship
just with this comic style flame coming out of it.
And the rocket ship just goes around and around the planet.
And I don't know, there's just something about this.
When I look at it, I'm like, oh, I feel good.
I've not only have I seen the time,
but I've seen something that is uniquely interesting.
And there's another one on there.
I think it's called Fit Cat.
And it's this cat that has like all these, again,
different animations and things that the cat does,
depending on how much exercise you've done for the day.
So instead of the Apple approach
where you've got three rings,
showing you different kinds of activity,
it's the same information being measured,
but it's being shown in a completely different way.
Like based on how the cat's behaving
and what the cat's doing,
that's how you know how active you've been.
So if the cat's kind of lazing around
and just looking sleepy and just sort of
prodding the ball of wool every now and again,
you're like, "Oh, I should get up and move more."
But if the cat's really energetic
and it looks like it's about to bounce off the wall,
you're like, "Oh, I've had a good day."
So it's, I know that sounds stupid as examples,
but it's little things like that.
And there's some really nice watch faces
that have been designed by some,
I don't know what you call them,
like design agencies that really have
these sort of unique designs
and unique concepts to them as well.
And I do like that experimentation part of it
because what happens is you buy a watch
and you have the watch faces built in,
But if you can just go and download, you know,
hundreds and hundreds of other ones until you find,
you know, the 20 or so that you really love,
like it's that whole concept of a digital watch.
You know, you've turned it into something more
than an analog watch could be.
And that's, it's not a complaint,
but it is something on the Apple Watch
that sometimes I look at the things
like the utility watch face that has a round watch face.
And I'm like, I know why it's round.
It's because, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years
of watchmaking has been, you know,
that sort of design language.
but now you've got a screen,
like you can do all these interesting things
that you could never dream of doing,
even with your 1000 moving parts,
it's just things you physically can't do with hardware
that you can do with software,
once you've got an LCD screen.
And I'd like to see that side of it explored a bit more.
- Yeah, I mean, where's my sans in the hourglass?
It tips itself over at the end of every hour.
Come on, where is this?
Where's my binary clock?
Yeah, where's that?
- Oh, there are like a hundred of those on Android.
So there's-
- Yeah, I want a hexadecimal clock now
and then octal clock.
And I'm like, come on.
- Yeah.
And I realize there are a hundred dumb ideas
for every good idea,
but it's that one good idea I want to get to
that I feel like we're missing out on at the moment.
- Yeah, no, I absolutely agree.
And I think that they'll open up watch faces
probably with the next watch, but a little bit more.
But like you suggested,
I think it'll be just,
it'll be still a little bit restricted
either by the numbers of developers
are allowed to do it or there'll be some more restrictions
that we haven't thought of yet that Apple will say,
well, you're only allowed to have a limit
of like four complications on your watch face
or the complications you do have have to fit
within the following restrictions.
And yeah, that will be the limit.
- Yeah, maybe you have to show the following things
and if they're not present,
it's not considered a watch face or something.
Actually, I know this is your show,
but I have a question for you.
It's not strictly related to complications,
but it kind of is in that wheelhouse.
Do you think in the next five years
they'll make a round watch?
- I think they will, yeah.
I think there's a very good chance that they will
because starting off with the square
and the rounded corners,
it makes certain things easier about manufacture.
And the problem with making a round face
and a round LCD is that there is a bit of waste
when you make it and it's machining from a machining point of view on the steel is not
a problem.
When I say steel I mean either stainless steel or aluminium or gold.
That's not the issue, it's the LCD wafers or whatever else, it's a waste problem.
Yeah, I know what you mean because they're cutting them out from sheets in grids and
if you have to cut circles then you've left all the... it's like a donor I guess.
Yes, exactly. And certain geometries are so much simpler. I mean, think about all of the
components. How many rounds integrated circuits are there? How many rounds? It's just that's
not the way that they're done. And quad flat packs and bore grid arrays and arrays are
rows and columns, which then they're not circular, they're not honeycomb patterns. They're regular
rectangular or square shapes and the whole design language of computers. I mean, computer
screens, they're all square or they're rectangles. The keys on our keyboard are all squares,
they're not circles. The funny thing is though, there are other things that we twist with
our fingers. So, the digital crown because we twist our fingers around and knobs on door
handles around because it feels better for our fingers in that action that we're using.
But there's no advantage to having a round watch face other than its appearance, I think.
Unless of course you've got a diver's watch that you're using the external dial and you
are again using that action with your fingers and you're turning it.
And obviously being round allows that.
So I would absolutely believe that at some point they will release a round watch and
I wouldn't be surprised if they did something like going back to the original iPod and whether
or not they have like a, if they had a round watch, what I think Apple would do is they'd
have a sensor around the outside, you can run your finger around the outside as a form
of navigation beyond the digital crown.
Tyrone:
Yeah which like Samsung's done with their S2.
Ben:
Okay fair enough.
Tyrone:
So they've got 2 models of that, one where you can just run your finger around the edge
and one where you can actually physically turn, I guess something like a diver's watch,
but it's just, it's the method of navigation.
Yeah.
And I think that that would be fine.
It's the sort of thing that ultimately, I think that Apple want to make a watch that
looks more like a traditional watch, but isn't a traditional watch, if that makes sense.
I think that they probably chose the compromise on this design, which is a more square shape
because it makes certain things easier.
But I mean, ultimately,
yeah, we'll see what happens in a few years.
And yeah, I'm not sure how I go on predictions.
They're really kept track, but we'll see.
- Listeners, you're gonna have to note that one down.
- Yeah, write it down and come back and yeah,
yell at me later, it's all good.
But yeah, so any other parting thoughts
or about complications?
No, I think you've kind of covered the majority of it.
I mean, I keep looking at this
and I think the one other thing I'd like to see from Apple
is either more templates
because it's fairly sort of templated and locked down
or just more configuration options for those templates,
which I think you'd be surprised.
Like I think that would make a lot of difference
if I don't have the choice of just,
hey, this is how you can present things.
If I can maybe do some, you know,
cool graphics, for example, drawing
or something like that in there
or provide it with images that I can actually use
as a background rather than just as image on the left,
text on the right.
I think maybe then you could do some really sort
of interesting things that you can't currently do on there.
- Yeah, absolutely agree.
And I think that that will come in time.
The only question is how much time
are we gonna have to wait?
So, but yeah, but that's okay.
They will, yeah.
I'm very interested to see what they do next with the next version of the hardware as well.
The other interesting thing about it I guess is this watch barrel account has sold really
well for any other company but I don't know that it's been an absolute home run for a
company like Apple where normally they launch a product and it just goes like absolutely
gangbusters.
This does feel like it's a slightly softer launch, maybe even more in line with how the
original iPhone sold. That sold in decent numbers but the 3G and the 3GS that followed
it just absolutely blitzed those previous numbers and I wonder if the watch could end
up similar. They may be sold 5 or 10 million whatever the current estimates are. I wonder
if they can actually find a few more things to hook people on and a few more features
that will be like wow I really must have this then maybe you could start talking 40, 50,
60, 100 million watch sales.
- Yeah, absolutely right.
And I think that it is very analogous
to the original iPhone,
which is one of the reasons I brought it up earlier
is because it feels very much like that is,
the early adopters that see the promise of the technology
and it's a leap ahead of what's come before it,
but at the same time, it's still restricted in a lot of ways
and if you did it on a spec comparison,
if you'd like against other competing products
in the market right now,
that are a little bit more autonomous.
Yeah, it's, we can definitely see,
just like with the original iPhone,
where the next, the improvements need to be.
So I think watch this space.
- Watch this space, it's getting complicated.
- Nevermind.
So if you'd like to talk more about this,
you can reach me on Twitter @johngg,
or you can follow @PragmaticShow
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Remember that Pragmatic is now part
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It also has an account @engineered_net
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engineered.network. People are really loving Causality as well which is another podcast.
I do a solid podcast. So if you like Pragmatic, be sure to check that out. Also, Nutrium on
the Engineered Network. If you'd like to get in touch with Russell, what's the best way
for them to get in touch with you, mate?
Probably the best way is on Twitter because I check that quite often. So, Rusty Shelf
or one word.
Excellent. And you're also on two excellent podcasts. One of them is Topical and the other
one is Material. Yeah, I keep forgetting to mention these and both my co-hosts on both
the shows always want to murder me. So Topical you can find at topical.fm and Material you
can find at relay.fm/material. Fantastic. And tell Jelly if he's going to threaten
to murder you that he's Jelly, he can't physically hold a knife. So that's not going to work.
Anyway, not only that but I have him, you know, I have hours and hours and hours of recordings of the guy saying incriminating things
So if I do disappear, that's the first place. I want the the police to search
Excellent. That's the Monty Burns. Excellent. All right, very good
So if you'd like to send me feedback about the show or the network
Please use the feedback form on engineer.network and that's also find show notes for this episode
So if you'd like to support the show the best way you can is to become a patron by patreon our patreon
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check it out. It all helps and it's all greatly, very greatly appreciated. So, thank you everyone
for listening once again and thank you, Russell.
Yeah. Thanks for having me on.
No worries.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(upbeat music)
[Music]
(upbeat music)
[Music]
Alright, seriously, we're gonna start now.
(laughs)
I'm, alright, push the button, Max.
- Done.
- There's a movie reference.
Do you know that one?
- I'm gonna guess Max Orr's "Smart",
but I don't remember her saying it.
I'm guessing, '99?
- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Push the button, Max.
It's actually out of a movie called "The Great Race".
- Have I seen that?
I might have, I don't remember that line.
- Yeah, Jack Lemmon, it had,
got Peter Falk in it, before he was Columbo.
and um...
Oh God, Tony Curtis.
No, no I have not seen that.
Yeah, that's... never mind anyway.
Every time he wants something he just says push the button Max.
So it was a big button on the dashboard, he pushed the button.
Never mind, it's fine, it's all good.
And it's completely nothing to do with watches or watch complications, which is all I want
to talk about.
never mind anyway. Every time he wants something he just says push the button max. There's
always a big button on the dashboard, he pushes the button. Never mind, it's fine, it's all
good and it's completely nothing to do with watches or watch complications which is all