It can be entertaining to read (got me interested in the Garmin Forerunner that was mentioned) but it's just people at a bar chatting about the topic of the day.

It is thick. They had to resort to gimmicks - communicating heart rates, drawing fish, three dots to ask for lunch(!) - to make it sound useful. The price is off by at least $100. They specifically danced around mentioning battery life - with these many features it might not actually be all that better than the competition - an area where Apple habitually shines.

The UI also looked complicated to me - two ways to control it - touch and the unimaginatively named crown thing. Which is again very un-Apple. (When the watch is on your wrist I kept thinking how easily am I going to find the crown. For a normal watch that thing is very rarely used and that too when it is not on the wrist.)

Not that I think SmartWatches are here to stay as a mainstream product but the little hope we had that Apple will knock it out the park with some must have feature - that hasn't panned out with the iWatch for sure.

Right now it looks interesting but it's hard to say much more than that.

I would've been fine with less functionality app-wise, a nicer overall look and a lower price. I don't need to watch photos and read twitter on my watch (it still needs an iPhone for that, right? So what's the friggin' point?)

The wireless things like payments and opening hotel rooms are kinda cool, though, but then again, I'd probably be too lazy/paranoid to enter the data into the watch than to get out my wallet/hotel room key.

That's all subjective though, we're going to have to wait for the numbers. http://vr-zone.com/articles/apple-watch-sales-projections-lo... - but as with any, take them with a pinch (bucket?) full of salt.

Watch isn't even primarily a watch - it's an iPhone remote. And that's getting into rarefied meta-product territory.

So unlike the iPhone and the home computer, both of which have obvious use cases, Watch is still trying to define a compelling reason for existing.

But this just highlights the current Apple problem. Cook designs products using a very simple heuristic - smaller, bigger, thinner, more colours: basically good enough.

Jobs used to use a different heuristic - magical, original, creative, obviously useful, with world-beating production values.

It's a completely different approach. And you can see that in Watch.

Watch has no magic. It's good enough - barely, more or less. But that's all it is.

And if you're aiming for good enough instead of magical, it's too easy to fall short and end up with not quite good enough - which is where many Apple buyers are feeling the current product lines are heading.

> The watch has failed to become the status quo object in wearables. For Apple, that's a flop.

It seems to be more a case of "after we moved the goalposts, Apple didn't meet them" than really of flopping. I think that people forget with what scepticism most Apple product launches are met, and how, so far, even the most initially disparaged ones of recent times have proven to be eventual successes.

(I know this sounds fanboi-ish, and I do own both a Mac and an iPad, but I am no Apple loyalist, just observing what looks like a trend to me.)

But now that I've seen the keynote, I've got some issues with the watch:

First of all, I feel it's too expensive, because those smartwatches are basically obsolete after a year. (at least to me)

It would have been good if Apple would allow those watches to be sent in and upgraded, especially for the version that uses a gold casing, which I suspect will be extremely expensive. (probably > $1000)

The design of the watch is not bad, but not good either. I would have no problem wearing it, but I don't like that rectangle look. (the Moto 360 looks better to me)

But on the other hand I like the navigation wheel a lot. I'm pretty sure that this alone will allow for more complex apps than what we see on Android Wear at the moment.

The new types of messages that Apple presented isn't interesting to me, but I can see the younger audience using it a lot.

Just take a look at their pages for it: http://www.apple.com/watch/apple-watch/ tons of focus on the physical design details, with the actual interface and such taking the back seat.

And with prices ranging from $349 to $17K, it's pretty easy to see it's more fashion than practical.

The fact is, there is a market of people who want this & who bought this, and that's what matters. Yes, it's role as a gadget is questionable, and you certainly do not need it for anything; but people like it anyway.

I don't know that it will flop, in the end. Battery life and features will improve, and new versions will come out that people will buy. Eventually it'll do phone calls and probably have a camera, which will have a whole Dick Tracy appeal to it.

The force sensitive display might be useful, I couldn't really tell from the coverage. At least one person there commented that they were having a hard time seeing the big difference between "force press" and "long press".

Is the "Taptic" feedback significantly different that the vibrating motor present on every other watch? I can't really tell, but I think functionally, vibration can already serve the purpose well enough, although the Apple implementation might be a bit more elegant -- I can't find enough information to say for sure.

I would say the Apple innovations here is mainly the digital crown. On every smartwatch, there's a lot of swiping around to do basic navigation, but there's not been a really good way to zoom in and out. Apple's implementation allows for apps like their photo demo to be more practical. I'm suspicious that they might be overusing it -- the idea of needing to zoom around to launch apps seems less like a good idea, but overall the novel input method is an innovation I'd say.

I assume they must have NFC in the watch to handle the payments system. That's (I think) novel among the smartwatch lineup, and maybe that's a thing that really catches on.

Mostly though, I think that the people who complained that Android Wear was just a mini cell phone on your wrist should be disappointed with the Apple Watch as well. I'm not one of them for the record, I'm wearing the Gear Live right now, and I quite like it. But I don't think Apple has revolutionized the smart watch. They've just made what looks to be a solid entry into the market.

The iPhone announcements were, I agree, quite tiresome. So much so, I closed the window a few minutes into Schiller's discussion of the chips in the new models.

I suspect it's because I can only do so much with a phone and nothing in the "smartphone" space jumps out to me as "revolutionary". It seems that innovational leaps in mobile computing will depend on what software becomes available.

Now more and more people have a voice-activated assistant not only in certain rooms of their home or in their pocket, but also on their wrist. It might seem to be a small thing not to have to reach into your pocket to invoke a voice assistant, but that small amount of time saved really adds up, especially if you're doing something with your hands like cooking or holding a baby, which some people still do!