a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Apple Watch -- Looking for New Things Done in New Ways

Episode Date: June 5, 2015

Is the Apple Watch breaking new technological ground, or just another accessory for your iPhone? a16z’s Benedict Evans and Board Partner Steven Sinofsky describe their experience with the Apple Watch one month after strapping the elegant piece of electronics to their wrists. So how is it? It’s not the one thing you will own that will fill this void in your life like the iPhone did, Evans says. And working out what is useful and pleasurable about the Apple Watch takes time, he says. Even so, Evans finds himself getting there. For example, being prodded by the watch’s map app to turn left or right while walking to your destination “is like a super-power,” he says. Sinofsky too is finding his Apple Watch more alluring than he had anticipated. What will really make the Apple Watch a piece of kit that people won’t want to part with is the evolution of the apps -- building novel things just for the watch that don’t mimic what we do on smartphones or any other existing piece of technology. “We’re in the phase right now (with the Apple Watch) where people are trying to figure out how to do the old things in a new way,” Sinofsky says. “And really, you need to do new things in a new way.”

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. We are sitting here today with Steven Sinovsky and Benedict Evans. Welcome, gentlemen. Hello. Hello. You two are sporting two models of the Apple Watch. I will say Sinovsky is wearing a Darth Vader black. It is the...

It's the cheap one. Shall we say the cheap one? I got the cheapest one because my thought was I'll end up having to buy another one in some short period of time. That's the master plan, I think. And so for those of you playing along at the Apple Store right now, Benedict is wearing the one with the kind of lacy metal band in chrome or something stainless.

It's stainless steel and it's called a Milanese loop of all things. A milanese loop of all things. Okay, great. Now that we know that. So we want to talk about the Apple Watch. You guys have been wearing them now for about a month. And so that's time enough it seems to sort of know what it's good for.

So Stephen, give us your initial impressions. Well, the first thing that occurs to me is that it's not a smart watch. Like all of the lead-up to it was Apple entering the smartwatch category. And you'd think that everybody who predicts things by now would know that when Apple comes out with a new product, it generally isn't one that fits in the predefined category notions that people have. Right.

And so to me, the thing that I noticed the most is it spans all of these categories, whether it's an exercise monitor or a timekeeping device or a wrist-based computational device. So before you actually got this thing, what did you think you were going to do with it? And then how has it changed or what are you doing with it? You definitely would put me in the skeptic camp before I had it. I'm not a gadget person. I haven't worn a watch and I can't even remember how long it's been since I've worn a watch. And a big thing for me is I'm really not a big fan of notifications.

I've written a bunch of blog posts on that. Hunter Walk at Homebrew and I had a whole Twitter tirade back and forth. Because to me, notifications are just a highly problematic thing, which we should probably talk about a little bit into this. And so I was kind of skeptical that having a computer on my wrist that needed to be tended to that basically just told me everything that my phone was telling me would be a giant waste of time. Well, and I know you've decided since that it isn't a giant waste of time, so we'll get to that. Benedict, you know, you and I have talked and you've written about how people didn't understand that this was a piece of fashion and that you had to look at it as such as opposed to a gadget. I don't think fashion is the right word because fashion implies it's sort of frothy and frivolous and it changes every six months.

I think it's more useful to think of it as a, you know, perhaps a luxury good, perhaps simply an accessory. I mean, the way that I, it's one of the things I said on Twitter is, you know, if you only buy things that have a clear use case and a set of utilities, then you would be wearing a boiler suit every day and your home would have one fluorescent tube in each room because why would you need more lighting than that? Right. And it fits into that kind of sense of its, and this is the argument that Apple made, it has to be a nice thing to own first. You actually have to like what it looks like and like what it feels like to wear it and like just using it to tell the time. and then the other stuff kind of gets added to it afterwards. And so asking, you know, what are the core use cases for this, slightly misses the point because it's not the one thing that you will own

that fills this void in your life the way a smartphone did or a PC did. It's more like, you know, buying a different piece of furniture or a nice, or, you know, a table or a chair or a lamp or, you know, why is it that we aren't all driving $10,000 cars? Why do some people buy, you know, different cars? it's something that's in a sense that's why I said it sort of fits into the luxury goods industry and obviously there's a $10,000 one but there's also a $350 one which is actually the lowest entry price of any Apple product which is the one that Stephen bought.

So but to your point you have to like something about whether it has to be enjoyable and pleasurable first and then the other stuff kind of comes. So have you started to uncover or unveil that enjoyment and that pleasure with it? It does take time. You know, you don't have that oh wow moment that you had with the original iPhone or with, you know, the Mac or something where suddenly it's this whole new world. It's a whole bunch of small incremental, useful, delightful things. And that's kind of different. I think that's what everyone's experience has been of it. And that kind of comes over a week or two. So it might be, you know, looking at your wrist and seeing what the four square

tells you you should eat in this restaurant you just walked into. Or it might be swiping up and seeing, oh, that's where I parked my car. And, you know, to Stephen's point about, modifications, it does seem like, well, there's a sort of another way of coming at that, which is all the people who've written apps for it of also having this puzzle. So like the whole first wave of apps you look at, and you're like, most of these are not quite right yet. Because working out quite what the value, quite what's useful and pleasurable and enjoyable and having there, as opposed to pulling something out of your pocket, pulling a phone out of your pocket or your bag, takes time to work out.

Stephen, you were talking about usability and how it's sort of creeping up on you. How How did it begin and where are you now? Well, the thing for me is when you start out thinking about it, you have these people who are all like, oh, what's the killer app? And of course, like going back historically, like things that were killer apps are always like in hindsight. Like, it's not like you knew right away that your PC was going to be good at making greeting cards or balancing your checkbook.

It took decades for those things that really surfaced. And certainly on the phone, you know, the first. phone reviews were all about how bad it was at making phone calls, which was like the least killer app of the thing called an iPhone. Yeah, and if you remember when the apps came out, the first way, it took several years for Instagram and Uber and all of those kind of killer things to come out as well. Well, Uber is such a great example in Lyft and general, like these on-demand apps, which like that totally changes the way you think of your phone.

And what's interesting is to me, those are some of the more interesting apps like right way because they were ready to refactor the whole experience of summoning those. My favorite so far has been just the boarding pass thing because the boarding pass element of it really shows how you can refactor the something that first, you know, the first wave of boarding passes that weren't just printed out by the travel agent were ones that you printed on your home desktop PC, then on your laptop, and then, you know, a few people were able to figure out how to show them on a on a mobile device and and now like this whole thing just works because your devices with you while you're going through the airport and and it just it sort of magically

works and so i want to get at that like describe that magic for it in those moments of magic that you've already experienced yeah it's almost like um i mean it's to the point about apps the apps tend to loop a lot of the apps remind me of like using a j2m feature phone app in 2006 where like you'd squashed way too much stuff down onto that screen. And I think the stuff that really works is when it's just one thing that's almost like floated out of your pocket onto your wrist

so you don't have to take your phone out of your pocket. Right. Like a boarding pass. And I think that that's where I think that the app developers are going to have to do a whole lot of work. Before jumping just to what was magic, like I do think that the wave of skepticism is really

fixated on this, to me on this notion that the watch needs to do everything the way that your phone did it. And so, like, that problem is that is never how a new device category evolves. Like, in fact, it, by definition, doesn't do everything the old one did. And what we're in the phase right now are the people who are trying to figure out how to do the old things in a new way. And really, you need to do new things in a new way. And so, like, I look at it, like, the way that I text message or I message somebody now, where we both know that I'm on the watch or that other person's on the watch. And, you know, all of a sudden,

like, emoji becomes like an interesting way to actually communicate, not just a fun way to communicate. Or even using the text-to-speech features. And to me, that was actually the most magical sort of experience. I will admit, it was very early version when I first started, and then there was an update about four nights ago, and the text-to-speech radically improved in just functioning for me. I mean, is it this sort of Dick Tracy moment where you're talking to your host? You literally, I mean, like I stood outside of the yoga studio last night like Dick Tracy and like people even in Palo Alto, California on University Avenue, thought I was a crazy person because I'm like, except here at least they know what I'm doing.

And so they just know how weird and leading edge I am, which also happened the other night at Whole Foods where I was like I was using Apple Pay. And I actually, to be fair, like a lot of People talked about the early setup. The first two times I tried to use Apple Pay, I had no idea that I was supposed to do some whole pairing of Apple Pay with the watch. And so I just kept trying to work on holding my wrist. And then I didn't know how to double tap, and I really did have to read the instructions. So read the instructions before you're trying to do this. But here I am at the Whole Foods, and I'm doing the pose that you have to do to pay, which is you have to turn your wrist like 270 degrees.

It's a yoga pace. It is. And there's like a lot of people behind me. It's Thursday night. It's 8 o'clock. It's busy, and then I'm in a focus group with the person who was behind me asking me how it was working. So they noticed. I mean, clearly everyone noticed.

The cashier, he was asking me, how did it go? If you go to New York, this would be a selling point, you know. Yes, I do have an Apple Watch. Yes. This was, and people were genuinely like, is it useful? You know, there was, there were two. I mean, like, so literally the whole line became this little ongoing focus group about which one did I have, when did I order it, which I think is fairly unique. to that zip code, but still a lot of skepticism. And I will say that the Apple Pay thing is

very convenient. And someone asked me, do I use it a lot? And I said, actually, I don't because I'm still trained to use my phone. And so I have to actually remind myself to not use my phone. But now what's happened to me is my phone is just in my pocket much more than I think it used to be in those scenarios. Because I could wait on the line doing stuff with my wrist, as opposed to having my phone. And so by the time I get to the cashier, I've, I think a lot of the use case is about that sort of fluidity of, you know, all of the times that you take, it's like there's all these things you do with your phone where it takes longer to take your phone out of your pocket and put it back than the thing you're actually going to do, like get the boarding pass or

look at the time or find out what that notification was and whether you need to do something about it. And somehow when you've, but also somehow when you've taken the phone out and you see the notification, then you sort of interact with it. Whereas with the watch, your wrist buzz is you have a look, you put your wrist down again. And you don't have to do anything. It's all the kind of the motion sensor means you can just raise your wrist and it comes on. And then you put your wrist down again. And then you can get deal with that an hour later, whereas on the phone, you kind of feel obliged to do something about it.

I mean, I do think a lot of the, and a lot of it, as I sort of said earlier, it's almost like you're dematerializing those notifications and they're kind of floating there. Yeah, we should talk about the notification. I had an amazing experience. I was visiting one of our portfolio companies, the CEO, and he had unboxed the watch. like a half hour before I showed up. So he had a new app and he put it on his wrist and it turns out and I think a number of reviews have said this

as well like if you have a lot of, if you don't mess with the defaults on the iPhone and you have a lot of apps, your phone screen is just filled with notifications. Yeah, it's tuned for will users as opposed to early adopters in San Francisco. Right. And so, you know, we couldn't talk because his wrist was vibrating

just to pieces from from like the endless notification. And he took it off because it was like It was truly ridiculous, which is a very interesting thing because I had already, my phone was sort of, you know, at an enthusiast level, I had highly tuned it to not notify me of most things. Right. Because I just don't find them valuable because my view of notifications is I want to be

able to act on it. And so seeing it and then having to swipe it and clear it and deal with it, I might as well just look at the app and see the badges that tell me which apps to go look at. And one of the things that I found on the phone is that the apps that are, that I want to have notified me, have thought through, are there useful verbs or not? And if you, like, too many of the apps are going to notify you and then there's nothing to do except go to your phone. And that was sort of the old problem for me on the phone.

Actually, this is great. So as a person who doesn't like notifications, fair to say, right? How do you tune your phone? Just this is for advice for all of us who would like to have a spare useful notification life. How do you tune it? Well, my view of it is that I have two kinds of notifications. The ones that the app has done a good job where I can be notified and act on it, and that's the terminus of that event. Like, I don't need to later go and catch up.

Right. And the other is that I have some apps that are truly like emergency alert apps. Like I've got the earthquake app. I've got the weather in Florida where my family is. Right. Like that if there's a real weather emergency, I do want to know about it. So, but otherwise it might be like, the car is here. We're like, okay, I'm going to get in the car.

Right, and so like for some of, like for the car is here one, like actually I just use the app and I look at it and the notifications I sort of tune down because I'm already in the mode of waiting for the car to get there and I don't want to be one of those people sitting in the house while the car is sitting out front. I think this is a point about verbs that, you know, there's almost like a forcing function that when you went from your desktop. site to your app, you had to really rethink what it was that you were going to do and what the fundamental experience you were going to give people was rather than just try and find a way of squeezing every single thing that was on the desktop website in, which of course is a problem that Facebook is going through at the moment with unbundling and all sorts of other things of how they split their service apart into different apps. And I think you have the same thing when you go onto the watch. What you cannot do is say, okay, we've got these eight things in the smartphone

app. Let's work out a way of accommodating those eight things on the watch as well. Rather you have to saying, you know, what is the fundamental thing that people will raise their wrist and then let it to see and then let their wrist, you know, fall down by their side. And it's probably not, here are five new trending terms in Twitter, which is the thing that the Twitter app is sending me, which is completely worthless. It almost kind of, it's a way of seeing what is it that the company thinks is important, as opposed to what is it that's actually important to the user. I think that they need to just be verbs. Yeah. Like, I think if otherwise, like, it's not, the watch is, it's actually a surprisingly good consumption tool,

considering the form factor and I remember I tweeted like it feels like the first time I got a Blackberry. You stare at this little pager thing and you're like there is no chance that I'm going to read email on this thing and then a week later you're like I am not reading any mail on my laptop ever again. This is the best. And so you get surprised that you would actually read through a whole email message. Let me just peel apart that a little bit. It's the best thing why because it's just right there and there's no effort involved or what? It's that combination It's right there. You get told that you have something interesting to look at, and then you're looking at it.

So there's just like endless motions that happen in order to participate and consume and to act on what's happening. Interesting. And it's slightly more, but it's slightly more motion that you would have with Google Glass, where you're kind of you're moving your eye up, so the stuff is just always there, whereas with your watch, you can raise your wrist and then let your wrist drop down again. Okay, so excuse me. Sorry, I have to stand up because my watch. It just told me it was scientists.

It was time to stand up. So there's a suggestion that everybody should stand up at 10.45 at the WWDC keynote. It did tell me to stand up in the middle of yoga class when I was laying down, which I thought was interesting. Driving down the highway, for that matter, seems like an inopportune time to stand up. And you think it would, that's an interesting one like you would think that. That is a bug fix. Because they know how fast you're going.

Yeah, and they know you're driving. So, yeah, that's a bug fix. Okay, so you mentioned Google Glass, and one of the things that was hard about that was, let's be frank, you had this thing on your face. but if I'm sitting in a group of people and then I lift my wrist to look at it that signals that I'm bored that I'm like I'm done hearing you

but on the other hand it's better than taking your phone out is it I don't know I my personally like these are the kind of conversations that I think are interesting to have but they're you can't really project where the whole social norms are going to be and like when laptops first came out we had big fights about like whether it was appropriate to bring them to meetings

or not because it was super clear you were focused on whatever was going on in your laptop. And here we are a decade later with everybody at the meeting. And there's just a norm that you can tell when a person is using their laptop for the meeting or not. And I think that, look, if you're in the middle of interviewing somebody for a job or interviewing for a job or talking to the reporters or a portfolio company and you look at your wrist, that's just not polite in any, no matter what device you're looking at, it's not polite.

But there are times when you can look. Like if it's about to be 3.30, it's okay to look at the watch. That's when Steven Sinovsky is going to have to leave us. Okay, well, so social norms will change and looking at our wrists will kind of mean something different maybe in six months. Six months from now, is it going to be this continuum? Do you think that you'll just keep figuring out more ways to enjoy it and as more apps come out? And what should app developers really be thinking about? You mentioned verbs, but how do we make this better?

Well, six months for now is very interesting because I think that some of the interesting work that really takes a minute to really sink in that Apple did. And this is where they've really built like a very interesting platform. Like the continuity work that was in Yosemite, when they talked about it, it seemed a little bit out there to most people. Like I'm browsing here, why would I want to browse there? And, you know, it's neat that you could do I message. It's super neat that you could do I message on a Mac and then on your iPad. or on your iPhone and pick up where you left off. But there were a lot of ways to do that.

And it's super clear in hindsight, of course, that they had every intention of bringing it to the watch where that makes a huge difference. The most example, I think we talked about the maps, where, like, that's of kind of a weird magical experience because you think at first, how am I ever going to get the map directions and looking up on your watch?

You realize you just pick them up on your phone when you're in the parking lot. Then you throw your phone down, and then you just keep driving and your watch is notifying. You turn left, turn right. go straight and certainly I found walking directions

to be almost like a kind of a super power because instead of walking if you imagine walking down a street a crowded street in Manhattan you know and you don't know quite where you're going and you keep pulling your phone out to double check your directions whereas with the watch you just lift your wrist every now and then and it taps you to say turn left or turn right and so that is actually

you know a killer app if there is one I mean I think you know to Stephen's point about platform this is clearly you know and again this is a sort of a thing I talk about a lot which is kind of a difference between Apple and Google which is that for Google, there's a whole Google Now story in here around making useful suggestions to you from the cloud. For Apple, the platform story is much more about how this makes your iPhone better, I think.

Well, and I think that this is one where I think people can overstate the need for the cloud side of it or understate the amount that they can do based, sort of not really cloud or clients, but on a client side way. I mean, if you think about all the things that they could suggest, they could do sort of what I would call like query refinement against the search engine using all of the data that's in your calendar, in your mail, in your

messages, in your iCloud profile, there's a lot of information that they can use to then just powered by any backend search. Right. And so it will yield that sort of level of personalization without what some small percentage people think is that creepy thing where it's all stored

in the cloud. But that also means at some point it could split from your phone, right? Just in terms of like, look, if this stuff is in the cloud, my watch can communicate with the cloud, then maybe I don't need my phone going forward. I think that's true. Yeah, I mean, it is, it reminds me quite a bit of the sense you have when you were sitting on the sofa using your phone when the laptop's on the table in front of you. And what is the point that you put your phone down and pick up your laptop?

And actually, you know, quite often you realize, well, it could be, but I'm not. And again, you see the same thing on the watch where you feel that Apple is editing for you. Yeah. You can't look at your diary three months in advance because Apple is going, you mourn, you've got a smartphone in your pocket you know take your phone out yeah i totally like you know i i i definitely get that where i'm sitting there using the watch and and i realize that i'm not using my phone or i'm not using a laptop or a desktop and sometimes it's optimal sometimes it's not like the number of times that you're you'll actually buy something on your phone when it would have been

easier to buy it on a laptop but that would have involved like extra motion and it's this conservation of energy thing right and so it's a fascinating dynamic so You're looking at your wrist, which I won't take personally because I know you're just being notified of it's time to go. You guys have never said magical so many times in a podcast, which I think is a very good thing. So this... Well, you asked us what the magical moments were. All right, man. The one thing I will say that's going to be magical is how Apple, like, evolves.

Their historic way of doing things has been to tether them and then untether them over time. And so what I think is going to be interesting to see is if they can untether the watch from your phone so that you can actually leave your house without the while. And that's a big physics problem, but it seems like they're on a path now. Big physics can be fixed by magic. So we'll talk about this more, but this has been really interesting.

Thank you guys. Benedict, Stephen. Thank you. Thank you.