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On Technology

Apple Used to Know Exactly What People Wanted — Then It Made a Watch

Credit...Illustration by Jon Han

Apple opened a routine product-launch event last month with a gag. An establishing aerial shot of Apple’s new circular headquarters set up a “Mission: Impossible”-inspired video sketch: The keynote speech is about to start, and it’s an emergency. A young woman is summoned into action, clutching a metallic briefcase while running, jumping, tripping and sliding her way out of the sparsely inhabited mile-round structure where she works. This rush across Apple’s depopulated futurescape is interrupted by an Apple Watch notifying our hero that she had completed her activity goal for the day; she runs into a colleague who uses his to teleport. The real punch line arrives when she delivers her package to Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook — and it’s not a new product, but the remote control he needs for his presentation.

The subtext, in this now-customary display of self-deprecation, is that Apple, which saw its market capitalization pass $1 trillion in August this year, doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. Steve Jobs was fond of pointing out the limits of market research. Customers “don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them,” he would say, sometimes invoking a (probably apocryphal) adage from Henry Ford: If he had asked people what they wanted, “they would have said, ‘Faster horses.’ ” Whether we understand this sentiment as an actual operating principle or as self-aggrandizing narrative, it does not quite account for what has become of Apple in the post-Jobs era.

The company never achieved true dominance until the staggering rise of the iPhone, which was a Jobs-era project, but the iPhone itself didn’t succeed until after Apple relinquished its total control over it. At launch, Jobs imagined the device as a phone that could go to websites. There were no third-party apps. Today, however, we associate our smartphones with the apps we use on them. They’re for Instagram or Facebook; they’re for WhatsApp, or for buying things on Amazon, or for checking your Gmail. They belong, in other words, to the internet giants, some of which are Apple’s competitors and together dominate the time we spend with Apple’s core product. In a bid to show people what they wanted, Jobs ended up creating perhaps history’s most efficient tool for simply asking them, and then letting others supply the answers.

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The company saw its market capitalization pass $1 trillion in August this year. What’s next?Credit...Illustration by Jon Han

The Apple Watch, a new version of which was announced at the event, was initially pitched, in 2014, as a salve for the excesses of your iPhone. Just as Apple had lost control of its iPhone to the invasive, distracting internet companies, those customers had lost control over their own experiences. The Apple Watch — with its smaller screen and emphasis on checking rather than interacting — was pitched with marketing that evoked adventure, activity and, above all, escape, as much from work or home as from the iPhone itself.

Four years and millions of sales later, the Apple-Watch-as-iPhone-antidote pitch remains, as do its use cases as fitness and health devices. More important is what hasn’t yet happened. Whether by accident or by design, the watch has so far been immune to the runaway success that redefined the iPhone. Apple is still in the process — and still in charge — of guessing what most people could get out of an Apple Watch. It’s a device that is neither a simple reflection of pre-emptive market research nor a product reshaped by its own popularity. What future it may have still belongs to Apple. And this appears to be making the company anxious.

In its announcement, and in mass-marketing materials, the new Apple Watch displays its broader, busier face, resplendent with data: the time and date, the weather, the UV index. There are indicators in various states of progress, recording a life of constant action: timers counting down; steps counting toward a goal; a song nearing completion. Up top, a reminder: 11:15 A.M. TRAINING WITH KRISTA. These carefully chosen marketing images represent a plausible day in the life of no one so much as the very Apple executives presenting the product onstage, many appearing to be in some advanced stage of the reverse-aging epidemic that has afflicted Silicon Valley in recent years.

During the presentation, executives shared glimpses of a lifestyle that was very obviously, as the product inscriptions say, “Designed by Apple in California” — attractive human bodies propelling themselves up and down mountains, surfacing between waves or wending through their local picturesque countryside. It’s the sort of destination recreation you might only daydream about at the office until you’re snapped out of it by your regular Apple Watch reminder to stand up — that is, unless you live in the Bay Area and work at a place like Apple. New iPhone announcements may have been reduced to faster-horse affairs, but at least Apple doesn’t have to guess who, or what, smartphones are for.

Over the years, iPhones have become more aware of the world around them, laden with new sensors and microphones and cameras. The Apple Watch is becoming, with each generation, better at sensing what’s going on with, and inside, its wearers’ bodies. Apple boasts that its latest model introduces a functioning electrocardiogram, or EKG, widening the scope of the device’s body monitoring well beyond elective physical activities or passive quantification and into active diagnosis. (The function won’t be available until later this year.) The Apple Watch can warn when a wearer’s heart rate has dipped too low, or jumped too high; the Series 4 can ask, when it senses an abrupt movement, if you might have fallen, offering to call an ambulance.

For now, this impressive facility for collecting and organizing information about you is just that — it’s a great deal of data with not many places to go. This is sensitive information, of course, and Apple’s relative commitment to privacy — at least compared with advertising-centric companies like Google and Facebook — might be enough to get new users strapped in and recording.

As Apple continues its institutional struggle to conceive of what the Apple Watch is, or could be, in the imaginations of its customers, it’s worth remembering that Apple’s stated commitment to privacy is, in practice, narrow. The competitors that Cook likes to prod about their data-exploitative business models have a necessary and complicit partner in his company, having found many of their customers though Apple’s devices and software.

This is especially relevant as Apple casts about for ideas elsewhere. Apple has already met with the insurance giant Aetna about ways in which the company might use Apple Watches to encourage healthier — and cheaper — behavior in its tens of millions of customers. John Hancock, one of the largest life insurers in America, said after Apple’s latest announcement that it would offer all its customers the option of an interactive policy, in which customers would get discounts for healthy habits, as evidenced by data from wearable devices. Here we see the vague outlines of how the Apple Watch could become vital, or at least ubiquitous, as the handmaiden to another data-hungry industry.

There may be many other ways, still, that the Apple Watch can fulfill its presumed destiny as the next device that we suddenly can’t remember a world without. It would be out of character for Apple to admit that the iPhone, its biggest success, was in reality a triumph of mass-market research, and to announce its intentions to do it all again, letting others figure out the real value of its device — or, more specifically, the value of the user data it could provide. Apple is left still guessing, with more persistence than confidence, what customers might not yet know they want. Meanwhile, the market is watching, and coming up with its own answers.

John Herrman is a technology reporter for The Times.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 22 of the Sunday Magazine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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