It's not about the watch, it's about Apple diving into health care

14 September 2014 by Steve Blum
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When Tim Cook unveiled the Apple Watch on Tuesday, and launched into a rapturous description of the digital crown – the old school winding wheel on the side that’s redesigned into a user interface – the first thing I thought was “they made the damn watch for right-handed people”. Any southpaw old enough to remember having to wind a watch every day – yes, me – remembers having to unstrap it and shift hands first. The crown is on the right side, which is the wrong side if you’re a lefty.

Well, not exactly. The display can be flipped around so you can wear the watch on your right hand with the crown pointing left, albeit sub-optimally positioned lower down. But enough grumpiness.

The big take away for me isn’t the design or functionality. It’s Apple’s determination that smart watches are about health and fitness. The Apple Watch will display text messages and otherwise serve as an iPhone extension, but the killer app is health and fitness, with Apple forming a high caliber development team around it.

Apple didn’t make the first MP3 player or the first smart phone or the first tablet. But it figured out what those devices were good for and how to build supporting platforms and content to make them useful and attractive to consumers. That track record is reason enough to presume that Apple has done the same for smart watches, and could do as well for other wearable categories.

Health, particularly, has been a tough sector for technology companies to penetrate. Microsoft has been trying to run an online medical record platform for years, with little success. Stringent legal requirements and the threat of further regulation has been a stumbling block for nimble startups. Apple has the market strength, development talent and raw resources to succeed, though. It’s not a done deal – an Apple Watch and health platform would be the first post-Jobs attempt at a category breakout – but that’s the way to bet.