{"id":2913,"date":"2015-03-08T16:50:27","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T19:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/?p=2913"},"modified":"2015-03-08T16:50:27","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T19:50:27","slug":"watch-update-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2015\/03\/08\/watch-update-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow (we suppose) the Apple Watch will be out. For months, there’s been\u00a0lots of interesting documentation<\/a> on Apple’s site \u2014 but it’s all about WatchKit, the framework used on the iPhone side to run \u201cWatch\u201d apps. Almost nothing about the Watch itself. I think most of my previous speculations<\/a>\u00a0were confirmed: specifically, the part about the Watch mostly\u00a0being a remote display for the iPhone:<\/p>\n

Perhaps… just a sequence of drawing orders?\u00a0The important part is that there\u2019ll be\u00a0a single process on the Watch for doing the UI, and all the application-specific parts can be offloaded to the iPhone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, for now, the application logic will all be on the iPhone side \u2014 where the actual WatchKit part runs \u2014 and \u201cassets\u201d, meaning storyboards, xib files, and PNGs with pre-rendered icons, buttons and so forth, are downloaded to the Watch and displayed as needed. My back-of-the-napkins calculations about battery life (around 15 hours) still seem valid: Tim Cook said that you’d have to charge the Watch every night. I also said:<\/p>\n

Watch OS …\u00a0will\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0be\u00a0a stripped-down iOS; maybe even not a Darwin derivative. It will be a highly optimized embedded system that runs as few processes as possible. It will be very robust because it will be able to do only a fixed set of functions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, this clashes with everybody else’s assumption that of course the Watch will be running iOS<\/a>. Apple continues to be very careful about this: the OS that actually runs on the Watch is named nowhere that I could find. Likewise no hardware specs beyond the two screen’s pixel sizes were revealed. Details about the OS\u00a0may not be revealed until next year, when developer apps supposedly may run on the device itself. It might make\u00a0make sense for Apple to repurpose, say, the OS running on the smaller no-app iPods.<\/p>\n

Beyond speculations about functionality, rumors have concentrated on price and updatability. I’m not competent to speculate about prices, but John Gruber’s final thoughts<\/a> on the issue seem very reasonable.<\/p>\n

Opinions are split on updatability, since few of Apple’s products\u00a0can be upgraded, and none can have their hardware\u00a0updated to a next generation. Then again, here’s a completely new type of product, smaller and (in some versions) more expensive than any other;\u00a0it’s also, perhaps, the most personal Apple product ever. If you get an expensive Watch, say, as a graduation present \u2014 with an engraving, perhaps \u2014 you’ll be very reluctant to dispose of it and get a new one in a few years, even if the new version does much more.<\/p>\n

At absolute minimum, the battery will have to be replaceable, and in my opinion, the entire Watch module\u00a0(probably including the battery, probably excluding the display) will be upgradeable for a fee once a better version comes out \u2014 maybe not forever, but for at least 2 or 3 generations. We’ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow (we suppose) the Apple Watch will be out. For months, there’s been\u00a0lots of interesting documentation on Apple’s site \u2014 but it’s all about WatchKit, the framework used on the iPhone side to run \u201cWatch\u201d apps. Almost nothing about the Watch itself. I think most of my previous speculations\u00a0were confirmed: specifically, the part about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,16,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-dev","category-hardware","category-software"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-KZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}