Apple Watch and MacBook Event

Apple has self-declared a revolution in technology with the Apple Watch, promising that the new fitness tracker will “help us all stay fit throughout the day,” as Apple chief executive Tim Cook put it when the watch was first unveiled.

The Apple Watch monitors and displays your heart rate, how much activity you’ve done, and how many calories you’ve burned. All of this information — and data from your other health apps — feeds into a new Apple platform called HealthKit, which acts like a dashboard of personal health information.

The Apple Watch certainly makes analyzing data easier, and it may even be more precise than other wearable technologies. HealthKit data will also be made available to researchers for analysis through a new platform called ResearchKit.

The tech company is promising this will amount to an Apple-shaped health revolution. “Apple Watch gives us the ability to motivate people to be more active and more healthy,” Cook declared last year.

But the claims deserve some scrutiny: the evidence on existing wearables suggests that — as with all other silver-bullet solutions for health — we haven’t yet figured out how to make behavior change stick. Scientists are also skeptical about how helpful ResearchKit will actually be in the sea of big data about health.

Natasha Dow Schüll, an MIT anthropologist who has been studying the science of self-tracking and behavior change for her forthcoming book Keeping Track, told Vox, “Even with the automated devices that just track you, like Jawbone and Fitbit, usually you still have to do something to keep using it — making sure to wear the thing, recharging it — and reports have shown there’s a drop-off in use after about two months.”

One of the first questions to come up in almost every discussion of the Apple Watch is: what is it good for? People have trouble imagining why anyone would want a tiny, underpowered computer strapped to their wrist.

But the funny thing is that people ask this question every time a new computing platform comes along that’s an order of magnitude smaller than the one that came before. And people keep being surprised by how useful smaller computers can be.

Apple is obsessed with making its laptops as thin as possible. On Monday, company execs touted the latest Apple laptop, the MacBook, as its thinnest yet.

The image above comes from the company’s presentation, and it shows something astonishing: when you crack open the laptop’s case, most of the space is taken up by its battery. Or, more accurately, batteries — plural. The irregular brown rectangles in the laptop’s four corners, as well as the big one in the middle, are all batteries. The device’s logic board — the brains of the laptop — is at the top. At the bottom of the image you can see the underside of the trackpad.

The most striking thing about today’s Apple event is the price of the luxury edition of the Apple Watch. While the low-end Apple Watch Sport starts at $349, the high-end version starts at an astronomical $10,000.

Why did Apple do this? The obvious reason is: because it can. Presumably, the profit margin on a $10,000 watch — even an 18-karat-gold one — is huge. So if Apple thinks people will pay that much, why not do it?

Apple held a big event on Monday, showing off the Apple Watch and unveiling other new products. Here are the three biggest announcements.

The Apple Watch will be available on April 24, with many of the features of a cellphone. Apple emphasized the watch’s notifications, which will alert users of scheduled events, social media happenings, and breaking news. The watch will also let people make and take calls, read and send messages, make payments with Apple Pay, and track workouts, among other features. It will work with other Apple devices to navigate and install apps.

Steve Jobs famously said that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” And no one is better than Apple at making us want things we didn’t know we wanted. Today, the company is going to try to make us want new watches.

But the Apple Watch faces an extra hurdle that the iPod and iPad didn’t, and the company knows it. As Reuters reported, CEO Tim Cook summed up the challenge as follows: “We’ve never sold anything as a company that people could try on before.”

Back in 2014, lots of tech-watchers were hoping the much-hyped Apple Watch would feature kinetic charging. The idea is that the movements of the wearer would charge the watch’s battery.

Unfortunately, the Apple Watch — out today — has no such thing, and the watch will have to be charged overnight. But kinetic charging wasn’t a totally unrealistic dream. Seiko already has a line of kinetic watches, and Apple filed a patent for a kinetically charged device in 2009.

If you think about the Apple Watch as a gadget, the product doesn’t make much sense. You can’t do very much with such a small screen. The device’s battery life is rumored to be mediocre. Moreover, it’s not clear what problem the Apple Watch solves.

But Apple isn’t just trying to build a gadget. It’s trying to build a luxury product. On Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that the high-end version of the Apple watch will start at $10,000, making it one of the most expensive products Apple has ever sold. In this price range, a watch isn’t a functional item; it’s a fashion accessory and a status symbol. Luxury products operate according to a totally different set of rules than gadgets do.

Andrew Nacin has noticed what might be the most consumer-friendly innovation in Apple’s newest MacBook: fliers may be able to use the laptop during airplane takeoff and landing.

The FAA guidelines to which Nacin refers were written in late 2013 and, indeed, do require that all personal electronic devices, or PEDs, that weight two or more pounds must be stowed as the plane lifts off and lands. There is, however, some discretion given to the pilots. They are allowed to ask passengers to stow lighter devices if they “are of a size that would impede egress.”

Price: $349 (38 mm), $399 (42 mm)

The sport is the lowest-end watch. Apple says the Sport is lightweight, with a scratch-resistant, ionX screen and an aluminum case that the company engineered to be extra strong. The case comes in steel and space gray. The band comes in fluoroelastomer, and in five colors: white, blue, green, pink, and black.