My First Interactions With The Apple Watch

A friend of mine recently bought an Apple Watch and it’s been fun for all of us (roommates) to play around with it.  None of us have ever really interacted with a wearable for more than a few minutes, and certainly not one with as much functionality as the watch.  There were moments when I smiled and said “that’s pretty neat,” others where I though some functionality was missing and others yet when I was stumped trying to understand how to use it.

Putting those first few days of interaction with the Apple Watch in context I couldn’t help but feel that this type of technology is the future.  I am excited to see what types of killer apps people thinks up, which I fully expect as the watch is really a new medium. I predict that I will look back ten years from now and laugh at how little I understood about the technology and how dumb I must have looked trying to get it to work.  I think those first few interactions I’ve had with the watch will be very similar to the time many of us have spent trying to get one of our grandparents to understand how the iPhone works.  To us, it is so obvious and intuitive, but to them it is a foreign experience. 

I am a pretty big Apple fan and definitely see myself owning some type of wearable technology in a couple years, most importantly (to me) when the battery life improves, but I don’t think it’s an investment I will make anytime soon.  

Future of TV

For the past several years I, like so many others, have wondered why Apple has not come out with an Apple Television.  In his biography, Steve Jobs noted that he finally cracked the TV and knew how to make a better one (I'm paraphrasing).  More recently during an interview with Charlie Rose, Tim Cook let it slip that Apple had at least been experimenting with the idea of coming out with a TV. As a huge fan of Apple that sounds great but when you think of where the future of TV might be heading it's easy to understand why Apple has not come out with one yet. 

An important question to ask is, could the TV end up being the dumb device in our house?  With streaming devices such as Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and many more continuing to pop up it's becoming very clear that the content we watch won't actually be coming from our TV's, rather the TV will just be the dumb device who's only purpose is to play the content.  Not only are we seeing a proliferation of streaming devices, but the unbundling of cable services in recent years has the potential drive more people away from traditional offerings.  Unbundling gives the consumer the freedom to watch more content on a variety of devices without having to pay for cable.  With HBO and CBS now allowing you to subscribe to their streaming services and Starz suggesting they will do the same it's clear the cable companies are going to have to rethink their business model at some point in the next 3-5 years.  They simply won't be able to charge consumers an arm and a leg for a bundle of 150 channels when most people are only concerned about 10% of them.  

If that does end up being the case then Apple choosing not to develop their own TV makes more sense. Another big issue to consider is that TV's offers a much less attractive business opportunity.  Most iPhone users upgrade to new devices every year or two, but that's not the case with TVs where we might have the same TV for up to five years.    In short that means less money in Apple pocket.  It's a problem they are already facing with the iPad and one which they would probably like to avoid in the future.

Apple and the Finnish Economy

I read an article last week where Finnish Prime Minister, Alexander Stubb, blamed Apple for many of the country's recent economic woes.  The gist of his argument was that Apple had crippled Nokia, the nation's largest private employer and as a result the Finnish economy has been on a steady decline for some time.  He also blamed the economic decline on the Finnish paper industry, which is wholly unsurprising for a number of reasons.   

I was fascinated that a single company could have such a huge economic footprint in a developed country in Western Europe so I decided to do a little digging.  I was absolutely stunned to find that Nokia directly employed 22,000 Fins and indirectly employed another 20,000.  At it's height the company also accounted for 1/5 of the country's total exports, 2/3 of the total value of their stock market value and it's $25 billion in sales was nearly equal to their entire national budget (which probably put a nice dent in Finnish tax revenue when they started declining.  

I'm going to spend a little time researching to see if I can find any other country that is so reliant on a single private company as an engine of economic growth.