IPhone Killer: The Secret Story of Apple Watch

Original author: David Pierce
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In early 2013, Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple. Interestingly, he was not told what exactly he would do. For reasons of trade secrets, he only knew that he would be vice president of technology and would work on something completely new. It is strange that he was offered this position at all - for 8 years of his work at Adobe, he became famous only for a public dispute with Steve Jobs due to the fact that the iPhone did not support Flash-video.

Lynch had to prove and do a lot. On the first working day, they did not even begin to familiarize themselves with the company. His new boss, Bob Mansfield, told him to go straight to the development studio and get to work. When he came to his workplace, he discovered that the project for which he was hired was not only on the eve of the deadline, but also behind schedule. Two days later, a design review was to be conducted with management.

There were no working prototypes, no software - only experiments and a bunch of ideas. And this was what was required of him: the senior vice president of design, Joni Ive, set the task of creating a revolutionary device that could be worn on the arm.

Arrogance or justified expectation? All at once. Over the past 15 years, Apple has been successful in three areas of consumer electronics, making it the richest company on Earth. Before the iPod, there were mp3 players, and the iPhone converted the smartphone from a business accessory to an attribute of pop culture. iPad popularized tablets, overtaking Nokia and Microsoft over the years. The clock was selected for the fourth time. And that was to be the first step without Steve Jobs. Expectations and attention to this product will be incredibly high. The clock should be really cool.

Nothing to worry about, Kevin.

Apple decided to first make a watch, and then understand what it would be useful for (except for demonstrating the time). “It felt like electronics were moving closer to the body,” says Alan Dai, who runs the human interface group. “It seemed to us that the wrist is a natural place with historical roots.”

When asked why technology is needed on the wrist and what problems it is intended to solve, the Watch team had to look for answers leisurely, inventing various new ways to interact with the device. One thing was clear: the success of the Watch will depend on the interface. It will determine whether the Watch will be on display at various museums, or whether it will be Apple's greatest fall since Newton .

Alan Dai is just responsible for how you communicate with the device and how it answers you.

Even the appearance of Dai says that he does not miss a single trifle. He joined Apple in 2006 with a resume mentioning working at Kate Spade's fashion house and working at Ogilvy & Mather with brands like Miller and Levi's. After working in marketing for Apple, he was given the reins of the Human Interaction group.

Ive began to dream of a watch from Apple immediately after Jobs died in October 2011. He came up with the idea to Give and several designers. Then they worked hard on mobile iOS. “We almost lived in a development studio,” says Dai, “a few people who worked on iOS 7.” It was not just a redesign of the OS, it was a change in tone throughout the company, marking the rise of Joni Ive to the throne of Apple design. They had to reinvent every interaction, every animation, every function.

Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels is known for encouraging rabid staff rework because people usually become the most creative and fearless when they get tired. So it was in the design studio Apple. When the whole day the team worked on software for a smartphone, then in the evenings they already began to talk about other devices. They began to think that they could bring watches to people's lives? What's new with wearable devices? Ive became interested in the science of time measurement, studied how tracking the position of the sun evolved into a wall clock, and how they turned into a wristwatch. And all this resulted in the final product.

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Meanwhile, the Apple team came to understand what the watch is for: your phone is preventing you from living. Constant calls, vibrations, verification of notifications. “We're all connected all the time thanks to technology,” says Lynch. "People carry phones and often look at the screen." People want to return the balance of engagement to the phone. How can we give them the opportunity to do this in a more humane way? "

Phones are invading life. What if you could make a device that you could not use and would not use for hours? Which would filter all the garbage and serve as a supplier of only the necessary information “It would be possible to change the style of modern life. After 35 years of working on devices that absorb all your attention, Apple decided to go the other way.

Apple created this problem, and now thinks that it can solve it with a square piece of metal and a clasp.

The task was to free people from phones, so it was rather ironic that the first working prototype of the watch was an iPhone fastened with Velcro. As Lynch says, "a very high quality Velcro."

The simulator showed the image of the Apple Watch display on the screen in full size. There was even a digital tuning wheel. But since finger movements on the screen could not replace real scrolling, they specially made a test wheel, which was connected to the phone with a cable. The first prototype of the watch looked like a project with Kickstarter - an incomprehensible iPhone case with a strange accessory.

With such a prototype in hand, or in hand, the team could test the basic functions of the device, which it could take away from the phone. Sending messages - initially this process was similar to sending from the phone, but on the watch it took too much time, and it was difficult to keep one's hand in weight.

Therefore, Quickboard was invented - a robot that reads messages and offers a set of suitable answers. When you are asked whether you want to go to a Mexican restaurant or to Chinese, then “Mexican” and “Chinese” automatically appear in the list, and just select one of them. And for complex messages, the team equipped the watch with a microphone for dictation. If the message was too complicated for dictation, then it was suggested to use the phone.

It soon became clear that the main thing in Watch was the quick execution of actions. Any action should not take more than 5-10 seconds. Something that could not be done quickly, simplified, threw something. The software had to be redone twice until it became fast enough.

Take the function Short Look (quick look) - you feel the vibration, which means receiving a text message. You look at your wrist and see the words "Message from Vasya." If you lower your wrist, the message has not been read and the notification about it disappears. If you hold your hand, a message is displayed on the screen. In this way, Watch will know if you want to read the message. And so the new technology should wean you constantly staring at the screen.

This was done with the rest of the applications. The Glances screen was developed - one page with excerpts of information such as news or competition results. “We redesigned the UI,” says Lynch. We rebuilt all applications - messages, mail, calendar, - several times. ”

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All software is focused on the presentation of information in a compressed form. If the flow of information annoys the user, he will take the watch off and they will be the first device that you buy and immediately return.

But if the software was complicated, then the hardware in general came from another planet - the engineers worked on creating a new type of interaction. The Taptic Engine should create the feel of a finger touching your wrist. Since our bodies are sensitive to touch and vibration, Watch can transmit different information, only slightly changing the efforts and frequency of vibrations. One sequence of touches means an incoming call, the other - a meeting after 5 minutes.

Among the prototypes tested, there were many different ones - some were annoying, some were hard to feel, others felt like the presence of an insect on the skin. Then, work was done to present various events through vibration. How can I tweet? How is important information? Engineers took various sounds and turned them into vibrations.

The small screen required a new approach to the interface. Here you have the digital tuning wheel and the Force Touch system, when a slightly stronger press opens access to an additional menu. A new font was developed called San Francisco, which is easier to read on a small screen than Helvetica. The letters are more square, but with rounded corners - they repeat the shape of the dial.

All the people who worked on the project took seriously the difficult task of developing a device that people wear on their wrists. However, Swiss watch designers do this all the time. Drawing on their experience, Apple decided to move away from the standard approach and manufactured three different devices: Sport, Watch and Edition. The $ 349 Sport aluminum watch works the same as the $ 17,000 gold watch, but Dai believes these are different products.

The experience of the watch industry suggests that personalization is very important - this is the only way to satisfy the needs of different people with different capabilities. “If you place something on your body and wear it on your wrist, you can't help but pay attention to it,” says Dai.

Watch is not just a cool messaging toy - it's a fashion statement. Now you need to convince users drowning in a variety of gadgets that this thing is worth adding to their lives. If Apple can become a company selling watches for $ 17,000, it will be able to conquer other luxury markets - cars, for example.

The consequences for the business, of course, are important - but Watch should solve a problem that matters not only inside Cupertino. If the watch is successful, it can affect our relationship with devices. Technology distracts us from more important things - friends, amazing moments, the smile of another person. But maybe technology can bring us back these feelings. Whether Apple fits the role of the company that will develop this technology is a на trillion dollar question.

Lynch leans forward, sitting in an armchair, and talks about his children: how convenient it will be for him to just look at his watch, understand that the last message is not very important, and return to his family. How little he would be distracted by such things.

Then he gets up - he needs to leave, to report something to Give and Quince. For all the time of our conversation, he never looked at his phone.

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