“Just caught up with the Apple announcements,” commented Barry Collins, a freelance technology and football writer, on Twitter. “Cook’s Apple has turned into a follower rather than a leader.”
It is easy to see why he would think that. New phones with 4.7in and 5.5in screens aren’t new – Android phone makers have been offering devices in those sizes for years. As for mobile payments, Google introduced its Wallet offering in September 2011.
And the not-yet-for-sale Apple Watch joins a busy category of devices. It feels as if Samsung launches one every month and Google has planted a big stake in the ground with Android Wear, capably assisted by Samsung, LG and Motorola.
The accusation of being a follower, not a leader, is one regularly thrown at Apple. The Lisa, which predated the more famous Macintosh, was not the first personal computer with a mouse-controlled interface; Xerox developed that and Apple paid for it, with stock. The iMac was not the first all-in-one PC, though it was the first to use industrial design to make it instantly attractive – the first time Jonathan Ive’s design came to notice.
The iPod was not the first MP3 player but it combined an innovative method of scrolling through lists of songs with huge storage and, again, imaginative industrial design. (Though the deathless Slashdot comment that it had “Less storage than a Nomad. No wireless. Lame” will never be forgotten.)
On the launch of the iPhone, the criticism was that it did not do MMS and did not have 3G. Nokia already dominated smartphones that could do internet connectivity and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was there already too. Follower.
And the iPad? Just a big iPhone: Microsoft had been making tablets for ages.
The lesson is that calling Apple a “follower” overlooks what it does best, which is wrap excellent usability into top-quality design, often alongside an innovative interface and then keep iterating to produce a hugely popular product that also wrings huge amounts of money from people.
To the latter point, consumers seem satisfied with what Apple offers. Its shares of total sales in PCs and phones has ticked up steadily over the years. Its share of tablet sales is falling along with overall device sales, though that may be due to people simply not renewing them: tablets do not really wear out in the way that phones do.
For those reasons, it is dangerous to dismiss what Apple does as “following”. Its track record, combined with the products it showed during its event on Tuesday, has the potential to have enormous and long-term effects.
Big phones? Everyone’s done that
Yes, Apple introduced phones with larger screens, as other companies have been doing for ages. So it is just copying, right? Except that sources there tell me that the project to build larger phones has been underway for many years. “We’re not stupid,” as one put it to me. But Apple is finicky: just putting a bigger screen on a phone was not enough. It wanted the phone to be thin and the screen to extend all the way across (so there is effectively no bezel) and to sculpt the body from a single piece of metal (for rigidity, plastic would not do).
And though the sizes – 4.7in and 5.5in – might appear to be the result of looking at the market and picking the most popular, I understand that deciding on the final pairing involved many prototypes and lots of trial and error. The subtle software touches for the larger screens (bringing the top of a screen down and offering a landscape mode on the 5.5in model that resembles a mini-tablet interface) also needed careful thought. Apple is like a tailor, measuring twice or three times, cutting once.
iPhone 6 benefits from the fact that anyone who bought an Android phone because they were frustrated with the size of iPhone screens can pick something much larger. Or put it another way: the only reason Apple will lose customers to Android will be price (because iOS 8 will offer pretty much every functionality – widgets, extensions – that iOS 7 lacked compared to Android).
That on its own ought to worry companies like HTC, which is already struggling. Even Samsung, which has so far staked out a position in the 5.5in plus phablet market, might have cause to worry in Asia, where it has previously had no competitor at the premium end of that screen size.
Don’t show me the money
Google Wallet has been in the mobile payments space for years. But only in the US, and the Google Wallet app has had fewer than 50m downloads (though more than 10m), only works with Mastercard and has to be locked with a Pin. The review average is 4.0 with a surprising number of one-star reviews that must count towards downloads but not users.
Now here comes Apple, which has cut deals with American Express, Visa and Mastercard, and has a fingerprint-based authentication system. You do not need a Pin: your finger does that task. You can add cards by photographing them, upon which they will be stored in a secure enclave in the system. A hacker would not be able to get the card details out once they are in. As Apple describes it:
When you add a credit or debit card with Apple Pay, the actual card numbers are not stored on the device nor on Apple servers. Instead, a unique device account number is assigned, encrypted and securely stored in the secure element on your iPhone or Apple Watch. Each transaction is authorised with a one-time unique number using your device account number and instead of using the security code from the back of your card, Apple Pay creates a dynamic security code to securely validate each transaction.
It is about convenience. TouchID is a remarkably effective system, far better than the fingerprint swiping systems used on other phones; you gently press your finger against the phone’s home button and your fingerprint is read and validated. ApplePay adds near field communication (NFC) to phones and makes it simpler.
The cloud on the horizon for Apple is whether the iCloud celebrity pictures hack will make customers wary about its trustworthiness. The fact that this is TouchID might be the saving grace – though it remains to be seen.
In the UK you can already pay for many things using NFC-enabled debit or credit cards. But I find that getting my wallet out and then getting a single card from the sleeves inside is more difficult than taking my phone out. Pull out your phone, push your finger against the home button? Probably simpler than getting your wallet out.
And while ApplePay is only in the US for now, Visa Europe says that it will be coming to the UK and beyond in time. (There are protocol differences between the US, and UK and European NFC-enabled transactions – including EMV, aka chip/PIN – to be ironed out.)
Apple gets a giant leg up by including this payment system in its own stores – so that the people who eagerly buy its new phones will be able to buy other stuff too. Apple’s stores generate the highest revenue per square foot of any chain in the world; so NFC statistics, which have for years showed woefully low numbers (“we recognise this is a marathon, not a sprint” in the favoured phrase of a Visa representative) will rocket. It is a certainty. And as more people get NFC-capable iPhones, it will keep growing.
To those who think that the simple availability of a technology – such as NFC in Android phones – should be sufficient to drive its use, it does not make sense that Apple offering it will make a difference. If people have not used it with Android, they reason, then nobody will use it, and Apple certainly cannot make it happen.
But that overlooks what Apple does best: software and usability. TouchID is an excellent implementation of fingerprint recognition because you are not really aware it’s doing fingerprint recognition. Users hate configuring stuff; one technology journalist described his experience with Android to me as “terrible – it’s like my desk at work. Covered in crap. And I can’t turn things off”. Android has enormous capability but (rather like Windows) it does not hide them from you, and for the average user that is not a good thing. Apple makes the complex simpler and the experience uniform. It is a safe prediction that it will quickly become the poster child for NFC payments.
Note also Apple’s poke in the eye for Google, with Eddy Cue’s remark that “Apple doesn’t collect your purchase history, so we don’t know what you bought, where you bought it or how much you paid for it”. The enmity between the two companies is not easing; Apple now uses privacy as a lever against Google at every opportunity – though the iCloud hack makes that a risky tactic.
It is also worth noting that Apple is not taking a cut from these payments. Enabling mobile payments is, to Apple, simply a method of getting more people to use its stuff. Once the NFC-enabled Watch comes out, it will be able to work with any TouchID-enabled phone, which is already a market of 200 million, according to Tim Cook. Paying by tapping your smartwatch against a terminal really looks like the most streamlined way to pay: you don’t even have to take your phone (or wallet) out of your pocket.
Just as the iTunes Music Store made buying an album of music as trivial as clicking a button on the screen in front of you – rather than travelling to a shop or waiting for a CD to arrive from an online store – so NFC payments via TouchID (and the Apple Watch) could reshape how we think about transactions.
For those worried – or hopeful – that muggers will be able to steal Apple Watches from people and use them to buy things, the Watch’s authorisation is started by TouchID when you put it on; once off your wrist, the authorisation ends. So muggers should not benefit in that way.
Is that the time?
Yes, Apple showed off a smartwatch that will not go on sale until next year, meaning it is at least four months away.
Apple has form on this: the first iPad was shown off in January 2010 but did not go on sale until April; the first iPhone in January 2007 but not on sale until June. The Watch may need some sort of regulatory approval, though this seems unlikely; far more likely that Apple just wanted to roll everything together.
Being cynical, you could say that Apple is preannouncing its product to kill the market for others. I doubt that anyone who wants an Android smartwatch – or even knows what they are – is going to be put off by Apple’s announcement. And those who have only become interested in them since Apple’s announcement were unlikely to be Android Wear customers anyway. So this was probably a market-neutral announcement.
Is Apple just rushing to follow Samsung and the others? I understand the project has been underway inside the company for at least three years. The puzzle of what a smartwatch should do and how to use it, is something that to many people – especially those who don’t wear a watch – remains unanswered.
For Android Wear, the answer seems to be “tell the user what to do next” (via Google Now).
Apple’s answer is different. It’s a mixture of “allow the user to pay for things” (the Watch has NFC) and “let’s see what apps people want”. Rather as there’s no single killer app that makes smartphones so universally useful, the feeling inside Apple – where they have watched others put forward their own offerings – is that the answer, as with smartphones, will be different for everyone.
The ability to manipulate the screen with what Apple is calling the “digital crown” (disappointingly off-centre, it’s one of two buttons on the side) seems obvious in retrospect: it enables zooming in and out, or acts as a home button.
Yet if it’s so obvious why has nobody else done it? Why does Android Wear make you zoom in and out of a map with two fingers, which is difficult and gets in the way of the screen?
Even after a few minutes using unfinished software, it is clear that the Apple Watch will do a lot of things, including notifications and monitoring of health and activity data. It is sure to lead to another app rush.
Apple could be accused of being a follower: out of ideas, late to the market. But time and again it has shown that its attention to usability can win over customers. People are being quick to dismiss the Apple Watch based on photos – but in my quick tests you quickly forget it’s there (and I speak as the wearer of a standard, round, thin watch). It’s thinner and much lighter than the Moto 360, which is the most elegant of the Android Wear devices.
Don’t write Apple off yet: it follows from the front.
Charles Arthur’s travel and accommodation was paid for by Apple. Editorial is completely independent.
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