The past and present and future evolution of wearable devices

Although the form of wearable products is not unique to the current era, technological advancement and product iterations are still far beyond expectations, and many people are shouting, "Wearable devices will subvert us. life". However, in the hustle and bustle of the good voices, there are also many people who hold the wait-and-see attitude and even oppose the attitude, and they are undecided or questionable about the new products.

So what kind of product is a wearable computing device, what should it be, what features it should have, and what are the deficiencies or areas for improvement?

Snapchat, which has a very high popularity among teenagers, has just changed its name to Snap. It also released a smart sunglasses called Spectacles. What kind of medicine is it sold in this gourd? Will it follow the footsteps of Google Glass? What can the wearable device get from the success of the iPhone and the failure of the previous smartphone? Ben Thompson, a contributor to the tech blog stratechery, analyzed this.

Speaking of the future, "what (what is the future?)" generally does not have the "how" (how to reach?) is so tricky. for example:

This stuff is Simon. A handheld phone with a touch screen can also run third-party applications. IBM launched this thing in 1992, when even the WWW was not born. Its role is to send a fax.

I emphasize that fax is not intended to be ridiculed. On the contrary, it reflects the fundamental reason why smartphones have been used for 15 years (the iPhone was born in 2007). The new category is not only technically feasible but also affordable. An ecosystem of thighs and a satisfying user story.

Think about what happened between 1992 and 2007. At least at first glance, nothing is related to smartphones:

Personal computer from the office to the family

WWW invented, an entire ecosystem was built from scratch

Personal electronic device boom: Most people owned or used calculators and walkmans in 1992, and introduced PDAs and digital cameras in the 1990s; handheld GPS devices and digital music players appeared in the 2000s

The reason we see 2007 as the first year of smartphones is because although many smartphones have been released before (mostly Nokia/Saipan systems in 1996, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile in 2003), only the iPhone (benefited by Its groundbreaking user interface and forward-looking hardware take advantage of all those advances.

Let's review this film again:

None of these features are produced out of thin air:

The wireless network of the telecom provider has been built for 20 years, and the mobile phone status has been stabilized.

The iPod is very popular and has very practical use cases. Many of the iPhone's features first appeared on the iPod (the aforementioned calculators, PDAs, digital cameras, and GPS devices).

The Web has evolved into an entire information universe that can be reached through a browser.

A year later, Apple added an app store that allowed the iPhone to add a variety of computing power that it lacked; the result was a device based on everything that was developed before:

The key point is here: even if there are technical possibilities, if the use cases are not implemented, if the ecosystem that the iPhone relies on is not established, the iPhone will not become the iPhone.

Those failed wearables

Last week Snap (the original Snapchat) somewhat unexpectedly revealed a wearable device:

The product, called The Spectacles, is a pair of sunglasses with a pair of cameras: it will take a 10-second video by pressing the side.

Of course, Snapchat is not the first company to launch video-recording glasses: Google has released Google Glass since 2013:

But for obvious reasons, Glass is a failure product: too expensive, difficult to use, ugly, and ignorant of social practices. Despite this, these problems appear pale and weak in the face of a more fundamental problem. The question is: What is the use of this thing?

Oh, of course, the theoretical use of Glass is easy to say: you can easily capture interesting events without having to pull out your phone in real time, and you can ask questions without clumsing the touch screen. The problem with this theory is the same as the problem that plagued the original smartphone: none of these use cases has been established, and there is no accessible ecosystem.

Similar criticism can be made for Apple's original applewatch. Although applewatch hardware is much more attractive than Glass, and no one is uncomfortable with the prospect of wearables. But the most striking thing about the release of watches is the lack of rationality: what is the use case? Where is the ecosystem?

This lack of focus has led to the release of this device may be a bit out of place: because Apple does not know what applewatch should be used for, so it has an overly complicated user interface to support the facade, and the launch of the SDK leads to slow app. It can't be used; Apple is so eager for third-party developers to find the missing use cases, so that even the user experience that should have been its own logo is ruined.

Those wearable devices available

Compared to the first generation of applewatch, the applewatch announced last month not only improved the hardware, but also configured a faster processor and GPS to be waterproof, and more importantly, the use case is already clear.

This video has 47 separate “snippets”; 35 of them are health and fitness related (this is not counted as walking or breathing, both of which belong to a broader category of “health”). The rest of the intro video also follows the same theme, as does the product's flagship partner, Nike. The message Apple wants to make is finally clear: applewatch is for health and fitness.

Can applewatch only be healthy and healthy? Absolutely more than that. But those new use cases -- like notifications, Apple Pay, and controlling smart homes -- now have a protective umbrella for the development of all these relatively new use cases.

This focus also defines Apple Watch's most obvious competitor: Fitbit. Although the ability of Watch is much better than that of Fitbit, both of them compete in the same place on the wrist, and the product positioning is doing the same thing.

What's interesting about Fitbit is that from a product development point of view, it's the spiritual inheritance of Apple's own iPod: it's purposeful at the outset, as an adjunct to the computer, responsible for a well-defined thing - step by step. Indeed, this is a new use case, but the original Fitbit specifically avoided all other issues with wearables: it's unobtrusive but unique, and easy to understand. It has yet to lay the groundwork for product line expansion: once the use case is determined, Fitbit can create trackers to overcome challenges such as wearing strange devices on the wrist or costing more than $100.

The introduction of Apple's second wearable device, AirPod, has also done a good job. Its use case is no more obvious: a wireless headset for the iPhone 7 without a headphone jack. This positioning is no more clear! But its potential use is much more obvious: as I pointed out 2 weeks ago, AirPod plus applewatch portrays the future of the iPhone.

The future of wearables

This is what I said in the opening: "The future." Although our smartphone is great, it seems that this is not the end of the calculation. Remember, all of the smartphones before the iPhone, especially Microsoft's, failed because their creators couldn't imagine a device that was more central to our lives than a PC. But now we are in a world where PCs are best understood as optional smartphone accessories.

I suspect that one day we will look at our mobile phones like this: extremely useful devices, many tasks are better than anything else, but they don't become the center of our lives, just because they no longer need to be with us from time to time. . After all, we already have wearables on our body.

To make it clear, this future has not yet arrived, and it may be quite far. But that doesn't mean that the middle of the time and those transitional products are not important. The technology that geeks like is no longer good, because these people don't care about social conventions and products. Now is the time to make use cases and ecosystems that make wearable products meet market needs.

Snapchat is not Google Glass

To be fair, the picture above is not the official product image of Google Glass, although it quickly became the most famous one. Of course, this is because the identity of the wearer - Marc Andreessen, Bill Maris and John Doerr is the industry's most famous VC - but this photo is so perfectly captured by what Google Glass stands for: that is what Silicon Valley emphasizes, Whether you like it or not, technology will change lives because that's the truth.

Undoubtedly, the contrast between the above and the following feels like Snap Spectacles is even more powerful:

Although it may be that no one will use these things - and it is much more difficult to produce physical products on a larger scale - I suspect that the results of Spectacles may be quite different from those of Glass. On the one hand, they look much better than Glass, and the price is an order of magnitude lower ($130).

But the bigger difference is that Spectacles' key ecosystem and use-case components are in place: Snapchat has more than 150 million daily users, who send more than 1 billion photos a day and watch an incredible 10 billion videos. It's all unique to Snapchat. It's not surprising to add video, which is not surprising for people who know Spiegel.

Snapchat and Apple

Obviously. This is another word I have used. Considering Apple's AirPod, the most attractive potential impact of Spectacles is that it reflects the potential for a long-term relationship between Snapchat and Apple. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said that Snap is a camera company, not a social network. Or, to be more precise, the company is also a social network: it is a completely independent ecosystem that is optimized for content creation and circulation even better than Facebook. From an Apple perspective, it's important that Snapchat, like Facebook or WeChat or other apps that are a user's life center, is a layer closer to its customers. Now this doesn't pose a threat - you still need a real device to run these apps - but then again, most people use Google on Windows, which makes Microsoft still make a lot of money, even if it Frozen the future of Microsoft.

That's why Apple is determined to advance into the wearable arena, although their advantage is not that great (because services like Siri play an important role). The current moat is not to control distribution, but to have consumer touch points – wearables are just such touch points.

To clarify, what I want to observe is a very embarrassing future; on the basis of excellent interaction, Snapchat still has to make actual business, although I think the company is in the right direction. And the importance of technology is still self-evident: the chip has to run faster (this is a big advantage for Apple), the battery needs to be improved (this is Apple's specialty), and everything has to be smaller. But this is the development path that all hardware has followed since the emergence of this industry. These are difficult issues, but they are known issues, so smart engineers can solve them. But what is even harder to realize is that creating a market for this kind of smart technology requires a more thoughtful solution. Now you can hardly imagine that a person who is far away from Silicon Valley and lying on the Venice Beach will be a better practitioner. .

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