It didn’t occur with complete regularity, but one notable item from Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs’ tricks of the executive trade was to deliver a ‘one more thing’ moment at the end of a keynote product presentation. Oh, how I miss those.
Most Apple new product presentations are a formal sharing of the latest reasonable rumors to gel within a week or so of the big show. Still, Apple under Jobs has a number of ‘one more thing’ moments tacked onto the end of a show. It’s a long list. FaceTime. PowerMac G4 Cube. MacBook Air. Wi-Fi, among others. Here’s one more thing we want to see.
Born Of Watch
No one who follows technology expects Apple Watch to be the second coming of iPhone. The former is a great accessory product to the latter, one of the world’s most popular technology gadgets. Watch is the most successful– by far– of the nascent smartwatch segment in technology, a combo of fashion and utility and health, thanks to a bunch of sensors that track motion, GPS, heart rate, et al.
Word on the streets says Apple is brewing another 21st century version of ‘one more thing‘ product introduction moment that will set the industry on fire. Two words: glucose monitoring. Think of this as the holy grail of sensors because hundreds of millions of people worldwide have diabetes and monitoring glucose is a pain. Literally.
We’ve heard for a few years that Apple is working on a glucose monitoring system and if such a sensor makes its way to the next version of Watch– and works as well as the heart rate monitor already in Watch– then those who own Apple stock might want to sit on it for awhile. So far, Watch, in its first two years, has sold more than the first two years of iPod and iPhone. Again, no one expects Watch to become the next iPhone, but for the nearly half billion people on planet earth who need to monitor their glucose levels with a painful device, a non-painful sensor that does mostly the same thing is worth gold.
That’s gold as in, 1) stock price, 2) retail price, 3) gross margins, 4) profits, 5) improved health; not necessarily in that order.
Sure, we look forward to details about upcoming new Macs, new iPads, and the all important new iPhone 8, but every one of those new products in the proverbial pipeline are iterations on a theme. Thinner, lighter, more powerful– better in every way. But a Watch that can monitor glucose levels ever x-number of minutes as Watch monitors heart rate now is a massive game changer.
That’s the one more thing I want to see, and it could be the one more thing that makes Tim Cook stand taller in Steve Jobs’ shadow.
Constable Odo says
Does a pizza box that keeps your pizza crisp count as “one more thing”?
Andy Atkinson says
Ugh! As important as that feature or ability would be — it is an add on. It does not change the fundamental tools we are using. The Warch itself was an innovation; as was the Mini or the iPad itself.
But adding an extra feature — e.g., the Touch Bar — really doesn’t represent
One. More. Thing.
At least not as we once knew it.
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To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen,
“I knew Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a friend of mine. And, you, Mr. Cook, are no Steve Jobs!”
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OK, I went for the cheap shot. I’ve been a strong defender of Cook around the Internet, but the piling up of glitches, the letting products languish without updates, the deliberate slow doling out of incremental upgrade, and, again, the accumulating glitches and errors and inconsistencies in design and the OS, are changing my mind!