charlesn

lewchenko said:

The lack of rumours for the Apple Watch is worrying. Series 9 was a woeful release , as was the 8. Barely any improvement over the S7. 

Honestly not sure what else would be useful/wanted ? A stress level indicator ? 

More colours ? Longer lasting battery (obviously). 
 

This is funny. After criticizing the watch team for lack of innovation in the last couple of releases, you admit to not being sure what else would be useful. Exactly. That IS the question. What else would be useful? Fact is, we know that answer and what the next killer watch apps will be: blood glucose and blood pressure monitoring with real and accurate readings. Unfortunately, there are technological hurdles Apple has yet to clear. (What we may get sooner than later is a simple indication of how blood pressure is trending, be it up or down... but no actual readings. I believe Samsung may have this already. But such simplified and limited information is not all that useful.) 

Well, with rumors all over the map, it seems Apple has done a good job of keeping its plans for Apple Watch X under wraps. Apple, itself, probably starts some of these bogus rumors just to identify the places where its supply chain is leaking information. I always thought the supposed move to 45mm as the "small" watch size made absolutely no sense. I think we'll likely see some very modest tweaks to the design--a tiny bit thinner, perhaps a display that's a tiny bit larger--but nothing radical. The newest rumor about a titanium option for the regular Apple Watch seems very possible, although I'm not sure about it replacing SS. The highly polished SS models in black and silver give the watch a dressier, more upscale look, while brushed Ti is going to look pretty darn close to the brushed silver aluminum watch. Maybe they'll go with polished Ti for the regular watch and keep the brushed finish for Ultra, where it makes more sense. 

It doesn't sound like any new major health functionality is ready to be included. The rumored blood pressure functionality is so bare bones at present as to be not very useful at all: no actual readings will be possible, just an indication as to whether your BP is trending up or down. 

With its M-series chips that can easily boot into iPadOS or MacOS, there's no reason to try to ham-fist "touch" into an OS that was never designed for it when Apple could (but never will) release a tablet capable of booting into either OS, selectable by the user at startup. Boot into iPadOS and the tablet behaves like a regular iPad. Boot into MacOS and the tablet turns off touch screen capability and you essentially have a Macbook when the tablet is paired with a Magic Keyboard. 

The only reason we will never get such a device is because Apple wants to continue selling us two devices, not one. 

Just a reminder that the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners "data" that Apple Insider is so fond of reposting as if it were fact has, in fact, no factually-supported, direct correlation to whatever the real numbers might be. I'm not saying the numbers they report couldn't be valid, only that there is no way to verify that they are, while CIRP cloaks its methodology in exclusive sourcing and algorithms that it doesn't reveal. Also a reminder that getting their name into articles like this is how they market themselves for their actual business, which is convincing clients that that they're experts with "secret" information worth paying for. The more times your name gets quoted in the press, the greater the illusion of expertise and the more expert you become. 

It is hard to imagine ANC that is "much better" than the current AirPod Pro 2, since it is already mind-bogglingly good, especially for an earbud. In fact, I stopped traveling with my Airpods Max because I found that the ANC of the APP2 was just as good, even though the APM have the advantage of both active and passive noise cancellation. I'll be curious to hear (or not hear) Apple's latest advances in ANC.