You can’t set it up without an iPhone. But, once you set it up - especially the cellular one, you can leave your phone at home. You can do anything on your watch that you can on your phone that would make sense on a screen that small. You can make phone calls, text, receive notifications, get directions, stream music and podcasts, etc.

As of the latest OS you can download apps directly to it.

Right now it requires an iphone. They've been slowly reducing the need to have one until pretty soon, maybe v5, won't require one

iPhones were originally an accessory to iTunes. What you complain about is all software. Software is changeable.

This is a predictable response that is trivially wrong. Originally the iPhone required iTunes to set it up. Is it an “accessory”?

It's more nuanced than that — things like smart phones require the serendipity of any number of both technological and even cultural events before they are born.

The Newton is an interesting foil.

Why wasn't the Newton the first smart phone? Early internet, barely a high-speed cellular infrastructure, silicon not quite small and efficient enough, no lithium batteries, cost....

Saying the Newton was "ahead of its time" is really a way of saying all the right bits and pieces weren't there yet.

We'll know what the next "big thing" is after it happens. You can't force it though regardless of the dollars you have for R&D.

Just MHO.

Apple is Apple because every ten years or so they take an existing product category and make it worlds better than anyone has ever before. They’ve done this with workstations (iMac), laptops (iBook then PowerBook then unibody/retina), they’ve done this with phones, and they’ve done this with in-ear headphones.

They almost did it with wireless speakers (the HomePod is an absolute engineering marvel, entirely unparalleled as a speaker), but they left out bluetooth in a platform play for AirPlay on their own phones/tablets, and it basically flopped. It would have been an airpods-level success if it were a record player that could play everybody’s records.

People keep talking about how they might do it with cars, or televisions, or glasses, or whatever. But so far, as yet, that has failed to materialize.

Edit: I left out the watch, despite it being the best selling watch. It isn’t as better than a normal watch as an iPhone was better than a blackberry; it is merely sufficient: great, but certainly not insanely so. If it could support Google Assistant instead of Siri, and had better bluetooth device support, and didn’t require an iphone, it might be. But the watch presently really just falls short of the Apple level expectation for a product. To be fair, that level is literally “insane”.

I dunno, but it seems like the iPhone was a product of many technological advances coming together at once, and Apple's key addition was to execute it in a way that made it appealing to the masses. So, I don't expect Apple to make a teleporter, or home fusion energy, or something that doesn't exist. I expect them to take something that is possible, like VR/AR, like videoconferencing, like IPTV.. even just computers and cellphones, and to execute them in a way that makes them the best designed product in the industry. Lately, it seems like they've been failing to do that. At this point, it seems like they're just a fashion brand whose products lack a compelling advantage over their competitors' products. Apple needs a guy like Steve Jobs to raise the standards and drive the company to meet them. Under Cook, it seems like they're sliding into mediocrity.

How are you measuring success? I would say the digital quartz watch was far more disruptive and certainly moved more units. It's definitely consumer electronics.

The Apple Watch is much more impressive technically than the iPad. The iPad was easy once you had the iPhone and once it was introduced, was easily copied hardware wise. The amount of technology in the Apple Watch still hasn’t been duplicated in the same small form factor.

That’s nothing to do with Apple. That’s just because you are now used to the technology and not so awed by it.

But that feeling is irrelevant to whether or not they are innovating or not.

How much have Google’s “innovations” led to profit?

People seem to forget that one of the first things Jobs did was get rid of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group and focused research on profitable products.

Google’s lack of focus explains why it has had five failed messaging apps.

But Pay is so common. You've got Google Pay, Apple Pay, AliPay, and WeChat Pay. It's a good addition because it adds something that was really missing from the ecosystem but it's just really something that is expected.

That's not an accurate depiction of Tim Cook - a man who is a very capable supply chain guy and general businessman. My personal opinion? Steve Jobs was the marketer -- his skill was getting other people with hard skills to buy into his general vision. (Recall the "reality distortion field" he possessed.)

No. The Apple Watch was started under Cook.

They are better on security than anyone else, so if this is ‘slacking’ it has to be contrasted with abject failure elsewhere.