Yesterday’s extensive Financial Times interview with Apple’s Jony Ive sank my heart.  Ive, “The Man Behind the Apple Watch,” as the article headlined, intermixed commentary on “the moral purpose of design” with loving explorations of the different materials used on the imminent Apple Watch—including “how the molecules in Apple Apple gold are closer together, making it twice as hard as standard gold.”  There’s no doubt that Ive is a design genius and, as the son of a silversmith, it is understandable that he might have a particular love for the metallurgy associated with the Apple Watch.  But, for me, the FT interview dramatized the disappointing pivot that Apple has made on its smartwatch. It also crystallized the disillusionment that I have come to feel about the Apple Watch.  That’s because earlier hopes for the Apple Watch were wrapped around a higher “moral purpose.” Apple executives talked privately about the “moral obligation to do more with sensors.” The buzz was about how the Apple Watch could revolutionize healthcare, not merely shake up high fashion timepieces.  Apple went on a hiring spree of numerous digital health sensor experts. This expertise, coupled with Apple’s resources and design magic, fueled hope that Apple might overcome the technical, regulatory and usability challenges to sensing and helping consumers act on vital data like blood pressure, glucose, oxygenation and stress levels.  Success in doing so would have had profound implications.  Easily and accurately measuring blood pressure, for example, is key to controlling high blood pressure and therefore a person’s risk of heart disease and stroke. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 68 million US adults have high blood pressure, and about half do not have the condition under control. Almost 1.8 million die from heart attacks and strokes each year—and the total costs of cardiovascular diseases in the United States were estimated to be $444 billion in 2010.  Similarly, blood glucose monitoring could help the 29 million Americans with diabetes and the estimated $245 billion in diabetes-related medical and productivity costs. It would also help the 86 million with prediabetes—90% of whom do not know that they have it and 15-30% of whom will develop diabetes within 5 years.  That early hope has been chipped away by Apple’s public silence, and a long series of knowledgeable-source-fed reports dampening the hope of any imminent breakthroughs. A recent Wall Street Journal article details on how difficult those early aspirations were to attain.  So, instead of coming to market with revolutionary, medical-quality smarts, Apple has pivoted towards promoting the Apple Watch as a high fashion watch.  Look for the Apple Watch to grace beautiful spreads in fashion magazines across the globe, including Vogue China, Vogue France, Hong Kong’s East Touch, the UK’s Style, and the USA’s Self. Apple itself is planning a 12-page advertising spread in the March edition of Vogue.  The result is that the Apple Watch will still be the biggest smart watch launch ever. Press coverage is already relentless—and rising—in breathless anticipation of Apple’s Monday marketing event. Soon thereafter, Apple fans will line up. Millions of units will be sold. Billons in revenue will be generated.  Launching a category leading, multi-billion dollar product, as the Apple Watch will likely become, is an admirable achievement. Some might argue that generating few billion more dollars is not of much consequence given Apple’s $740 billion valuation and more than $200 billion in annual revenues. But, as Everett Dirksen pointed out, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”  I am skeptical, however, if the fashion-driven positioning opens up a market that is meaningful to Apple in the long term.
Is Apple’s fashion pivot more about short-term expediency than long-term strategy?  Let's hope it finds a higher "moral purpose."