We Are Now Fully Wireless

The Apple Watch is many things: a refined product entering an expectant market, Apple’s first post-Steve product, a companion for your iPhone, a bundle of sensors and a number of technical innovations; all wrapped up in an amazing package and strapped to your wrist.

This would all be enough, but the biggest step forward for the Apple Watch is how completely wireless it is: inductive charging and no docking port makes it the first completely wireless product Apple has produced. All communication with the device happens wirelessly, and when even the charging pins aren’t exposed the design lends itself to things that weren’t possible with ports and promises to deliver an extremely reliable platform.

WHITHER WI-FI?

Apple Watch S1 Board Showing a Lone U.FL Antenna Connector

The open question, and Apple hasn’t made any announcements, is what radio or radios does the Apple Watch have inside? Given the compatibly matrix and the payment support it looks like a Bluetooth LE and NFC radios will be included at a minimum. But what about Wi-Fi? We won’t know for sure until we get closer to the release date.

RATE vs RANGE

The potential inclusion of Wi-Fi would make the Apple Watch a real game changer. With the ability of iOS and Mac OS to synch keychains, including Wi-Fi passwords, always on connectivity is suddenly an option, bandwidth is available for high quality voice and our phones need not drain their batteries supporting our watches.

Wi-Fi also has much more range than Bluetooth, with a corresponding increase in power consumption. It’s fair to say that the charging picture painted by apple: “wear it by day, charge it by night” suggests that the display is not the only part of the watch that consumes a significant amount of power for a necessarily small battery (lack of battery life numbers is a serious omission, I expect they are targeting 18 hours on 4 hours charging duty cycle and they haven’t hit that target just yet).

NOT FULLY CLEAR

I’ve never really liked NFC. As an RFID solution it’s interesting but it solves a problem I really wish we didn’t have: how do I connect to a device that’s right next to me? Ideally devices are able to talk to each other when they are in proximity, Apple has developed a number of technologies for this: Air Drop, PeerKit, and the upcoming continuity features of iOS and Mac which all rely on devices being able to talk to each other without infrastructure.

NFC is a step backwards in this regards, but it makes sense given how utterly backwards the payment industry is. Where Apple typically forges ahead it is in this case forced to implement NFC (with it’s attendant antenna systems challenges) in order to integrate into partner ecosystems. Tim Cook took time to point out that magnetic stripes are now “five decades old”, well as my friend Florian pointed out: “the NFC Standard ISO/IEC 18092:2004 is now a decade old itself — and must have been in development for at least five years before it was standardized — so we implement a 15 year old technology to have a modern phone talk to a payment terminal.”

Compromise on this level is not entirely new to Apple but I think it is something to keep an eye on, as with the iPhone Six ‘Phuls’ model, it’s a concession to what the market wants, not a creation for the world of tomorrow, which is typically the target for our favorite fruit company.

ALL TOO SOON?

Finally, the timing of the pre-announcement is interesting. No fixed release date, but a very clear ‘not this Christmas’. I suspect more than a few people will wake up one morning in late December with an Apple Watch IOU in their stocking, and imagine that Apple will have clarified pricing if not a pre-purchase program by them. Expect holiday season 2015 to be the Apple Watch 2’s big debut (“it’s a full 33% thinner”, I can just hear Johnny saying in the promotional video).

Seeing Apple move into a new product category, much the same way it did with the iPod and the iPhone (both of which were ‘late’ entrants into their markets), with deliberate pacing and a “we ship no product before it’s time” ethic, is a clear indication that even without Steve, apple continues to roll.