This article was first published in the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
In early 2013, Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple. Funny thing about the offer: it didn't say what he would be doing.
So intense is Apple's secrecy that all Lynch knew was his title, vice president of technology, and that he'd be working on something completely new.
It was odd that Apple even offered him a job. During his eight years at Adobe, most recently as chief technology officer, he was best known as the only person dumb enough to publicly fight Steve Jobs over the iPhone's lack of support for Flash videos. When Lynch announced his move, the reaction was immediate: they want this guy? Apple blogger John Gruber called Lynch "a bozo, a bad hire".
Lynch had a lot to prove -- and a lot to do. When he showed up at 1 Infinite Loop on his first day, he was told to skip the new-employee orientation. His boss told him to head straight to the design studio and get to work.
He soon found out the project he'd been hired to run was behind schedule. There was a design review in two days, he was told, with the Apple brass. Lynch had better be ready.
There were no working prototypes or software, just experiments -- the iPod crew had made something with a click wheel -- and lots of ideas. The expectations, however, were clear: Apple's senior vice president of design, Jony Ive, had tasked them with creating a revolutionary device that could be worn on the wrist.
It was either hubris or a justifiable expectation. Or both. After all, over the past 15 years, Apple has upended three major categories of consumer electronics and, in the process, become the most valuable company on Earth. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but Apple made you want one. The iPhone brought the smartphone into pop culture, and the iPad brought tablets in from the fringes. For its fourth act, Apple chose a watch -- the first launch without the guidance of Steve Jobs. The watch had to be, in Apple parlance, insanely great.
No pressure, Kevin.
Apple decided to make a watch and only then set out to discover what it might be good for (besides, you know, displaying the time). "There was a sense that technology was going to move on to the body," says Alan Dye, a designer at Apple. "We felt like the natural place, the place that had historical relevance and significance, was the wrist."
The problem that this wrist-mounted technology would solve was something the Watch team would come up with slowly, during the process of inventing a bunch of new ways to interact with the device. But one thing was clear: the Watch would succeed or fail on the strength of what's prosaically called the user interface. This would determine whether it ended up displayed in museums or remembered as Apple's biggest flop since the Newton.
That's where Alan Dye comes in. As chief of Apple's human interface group, he's in charge of creating the ways you tell your device what to do and how it responds. Those little experiences -- like when the app icons quiver when they're ready to move around your screen -- that's the human interface team.
A graphic designer by training, Dye is more Burberry than BlackBerry. He came to Apple in 2006 with a CV that included stints as design director at fashion house Kate Spade and as a heavy hitter at Ogilvy & Mather. After working in Apple's marketing division, helping design the company's now-iconic product boxes, Dye was handed the reins to the human interface group.
Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after Steve Jobs's death in October 2011. He brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio. Around this time, Ive began investigating horology; how reading the position of the Sun evolved into clocks, which evolved into watches. It became an obsession. That obsession became a product.
Along the way, the Apple team landed upon the Watch's raison d'être. It came down to this: your phone is ruining your life. Like the rest of us, Ive, Lynch, Dye and everyone at Apple are subject to the tyranny of the buzz -- the constant checking, the long list of notifications. "We're so connected with technology now," Lynch says. "People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much." They've glared down their noses at those who bury themselves in their phones at the dinner table and then absent-mindedly thrust hands into their own pockets at every ding or buzz. "People want that level of engagement, but how do we provide it in a way that's a little more human and in the moment when you're with somebody?"
Our phones have become invasive. But what if you could engineer a reverse state of being? What if you could make a device that you wouldn't use for hours at a time? One that could filter out all the bullshit and only serve you important information? After decades of building devices that hold our attention, Apple decided that the way forward is to fight back.
Apple, in large part, created our problem. And it thinks it can fix it with a slab of metal and a Milanese loop strap.
The goal was to free people from their phones, so it's perhaps ironic that the first working Watch prototype was an iPhone rigged with a Velcro strap. The team built a simulator that displayed a life-size image of an Apple Watch on the screen. Software was moving much more quickly than hardware, and the team needed a way to test how it worked on your wrist. There was even an on-screen digital crown that you could swipe to spin, but it hardly replicated the feeling of twisting a real crown. So they made a custom dongle, an actual watch crown that plugged into the dock connector.
Clumsy prototype in hand -- well, on wrist -- the team could start testing some of the core functions they hoped the device would take over from the phone. Figuring out how to send a text was illuminating. Initially they built a process that was a lot like texting on an iPhone: addressee here, message here, confirm message. Tap to send. "It was all very understandable, but using it took way too long," Lynch says. Also, it hurt: try holding up your arm as if you're looking at your watch. Now count to 30. It is the opposite of a good user experience.
So they came up with Quickboard, a robot that reads your messages and suggests a handful of possible responses. When your date asks if you want to do Mexican or Chinese for dinner, "Mexican" and "Chinese" automatically show up – tap one and you've replied. For more complicated communication, the team equipped the watch with a microphone for dictating a message or command using Siri. Too complex for voice control? At that point, use your phone.
As the testing went on, it became evident that the key to making the Watch work was speed. An interaction could last only five seconds, ten at most.
That led to features such as Short Look. It works like this: you feel a distinctive pulse pattern on your wrist, which means you've just received a text message. You flick your wrist up and see the words "Message from Joe." If you put your wrist down immediately, the message stays unread and the notification goes away. If you keep your wrist up, the message is displayed on the Watch's screen. Your level of interest in the information, as demonstrated by your reaction to it, is the only cue the Watch needs to prioritise.
And so it went. The team developed notifications that let you see information and take action without opening apps. They built Glances: a single place for quick hits like sports scores and news. "We rethought the UI," Lynch says. "We rebuilt the apps -- messaging, mail, calendar -- more than once, to get it refined."
But if the software was complicated, the hardware was straight-up alien. The human interface team had latched on to the watch's ability to vibrate on your wrist and was working with engineers to create a new kind of interactivity. The so-called Taptic Engine was designed to feel like a finger tapping on your wrist. Because our bodies are enormously sensitive to taps and buzzes, the Watch can deliver rich information with only slight variations in pace, number and force of vibrations. One sequence of taps means you're getting a phone call; a subtly different one means you have a meeting in five minutes.
Apple tested many prototypes, each with a different feel. "Some were too subtle," Lynch says. "Others felt like a bug on your wrist." When they had the engine dialled in, they started experimenting with a Watch-specific synesthesia, translating specific digital experiences into taps and sounds. What does a tweet feel like? What about an important text? To answer these questions, the team sampled the sounds of everything from birds to lightsabers and then began to turn sounds into physical sensations. The teams would test, say, the sound and feeling of receiving a phone call. Ive was hard to please: too metallic, he'd say. Not organic enough. Getting them to the point where he was happy with them took more than a year.
Everyone involved with the project takes seriously the difficulty of making a machine that people will strap to their arms. But maybe that's not asking so much: Swiss watch designers do it all the time. Taking cues from them, the team broke away from the company's long-standing practice of offering a narrow range of options. Instead they made three different levels of Watch: the Sport, from £299; the £479 Watch; and Edition -- starting at £8,000.
That's what he learned from the watch industry: personalisation and beauty are everything. The only way to get one company's product on to people's wrists is to offer options -- sizes, materials, bands -- for a range of tastes and budgets. "If you're going to put something on your body, we can't not pay attention to that," Dye says. Options were central to the plan from the beginning: two sizes, three tiers, easily interchangeable straps, and tonnes of faces and digital add-ons that show information like the weather and your activity level, to make your Watch uniquely yours. "Through hardware and software, we can have millions of variations," Dye says.
With the Watch, Apple takes the next step toward status as a maker of premium products, even in an era of ubiquitous technology. Now it has to persuade users that this thing is worth adding to their lives. But if Apple does manage to establish itself as a company that sells £9,500 watches, it will be positioned to conquer other luxury markets. Such as cars.
Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Silicon Valley-based market research firm Creative Strategies, thinks the company might pull it off. The luxury watch industry generates more than $20 billion ($13.7bn) a year in revenue, money that comes from the same kind of customer already drawn to Apple -- "the most profitable, high-spend customer base on the planet," as Bajarin puts it.
The business implications are important to Apple, of course, but the problem the Watch aims to solve is important outside Cupertino. The Watch could impact our relationship with our devices. Technology distracts us from the things we should pay the most attention to -- friends, moments of awe, a smile from across the room. But maybe a technology can give those moments back. Whether Apple is the company to make that technology is the three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar market-cap question. Lynch leans forward in his chair, saying how grateful he is to be able to glance at his Watch, realise that the latest text message isn't important, and then go back to family time; about how that doesn't feel disruptive to him -- or them.
A moment later, he stands up. He has to leave; to give Dye and Ive an update. In all the time he's been talking, he's never once looked at his phone.
David Pierce is a senior writer at US WIRED
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
