Jony Ive:

Many years ago, we made prototypes of phones with bigger screens. We made notebooks with bigger screens; it was a concept that we were familiar with. There were interesting features having a bigger screen, but the end result was a really lousy product because they were big and clunky like lots of the competitive phones are still…And we thought there is a danger you are seduced by a feature at the expense of making a great product. And so years ago we realized well this is going to be important that we have larger screens, but we needed to do a lot of things to make that larger screen yield a really competitive product.

It was very important to making [a phone with bigger screen] comfortable and actually feeling less wide than in reality it was.

ReadWrite:

You can't buy a latte with your iPhone 6. Starbucks is only supporting the in-app version of Apple Pay. It will be "primarily for loading and reloading" your Starbucks Card, says Maggie Jantzen, a Starbucks spokesperson. Starbucks stores don't currently have the NFC technology needed to make use of Apple's tap-to-pay feature. [...]

Apple Pay will save you from having to enter in your credit- or debit-card number if you need to reload your Starbucks Card. But you're far better off just using the Starbucks app and keeping your card on file for automatic reloads. And it changes nothing about how you actually pay for your latte.

This is rather disappointing. Apple Pay needs to become a habit before it can really catch on with consumers. I like how McDonald's, Subway, Petco, Whole Foods, and Chevron are on the list of launch partners, but how many people go to these places on the daily basis? Starbucks customers get coffee EVERY DAY.

I'm still bullish on Apple Pay and (US) mobile payments in general, but early adoption would be much stronger if Starbucks were on board completely.

Business Insider:

The wording here makes it sound as if there's a chance that Apple would be able to remove the S1 and replace it with, say, the S2 or S3 in the future. After all, Apple has the entire computer on one chip. It just has to rip out that little computer and replace it with a new one.

As Apple upgrades the computing power, it could replace the chip for, say, $500, Gruber suggests. This sounds high, but this is what it costs to service a high-end luxury watch every few years. If this were to happen, it would solve the problem of turning the watch into an obsolete brick after a few years.

This is only speculation but the potential for this is truly fascinating and it's the kind of innovative thinking I expect from Apple.

Every year, Apple proudly boasts how its latest iPhone is the thinnest, most powerful, and most power efficient iPhone ever. And every year, most of us yawn at it.

But what we're seeing now is the very best of Apple, using everything they've learned from compacting the iPhone to miniaturize an entire computer into a single chip. That alone is a huge innovative achievement. If the S1 chip ends up being swappable? Man, that would be a game changer for smartwatches.

Whatever Apple ends up doing, it's already pretty clear that Apple is approaching this as a modern, fashionable timepiece for the future, not a disposable $300 wannabe mini-smartphone for the wrist.

Now this is interesting. While I do believe there is a future for hybrid tablet-PCs, I do not believe the hardware technology is quite there yet. I'd love to one day be able to do full-time web development on a hybrid, while being able to hold my 500 GB of personal photos/video, and not having to pay over $999. That day will come eventually.

As for the software side, this "Continuum" concept seems like a great step in the right direction.

A Blog To Watch:

Apple actually made clever use of the Apple Watch's relationship with the iPhone. Apple Watch users will install an Apple Watch app on their iPhone, which will be used to download apps onto the watch as well as likely manage Apple Watch settings. A user's iPhone is also used to help with computational demands. Apple cleverly pushes a lot of processor needs to the phone in order to preserve Apple Watch battery life. Thus, the Apple Watch is snappier, with longer battery life because a lot of tasks can be off-loaded to the host phone.

Smart way to handle Apple Watch apps for the first few generations until the Apple Watch can stand on its own. Reminiscent of how the iPod first required iTunes and a computer until it evolved into the iPhone and iTouch.

My biggest doubt for the success of the Apple Watch stems from the replacement cycle. How often does Apple want consumers to upgrade their Apple Watch? Why would a high-end consumer spend over $1,000 on an $18k Apple Watch if its technology will be outdated within two years?

But Nicolas Schobinger brings up an interesting idea:

How often does one need to buy an ‘eternal’ product? How often would you buy ‘ephemeral’? Look at iPod, iPhone, and even computers in general. Technology advancements and rapid innovation cycles make you lust for the newest gadget. And that’s just it: Ephemeral product lures customers to the next best thing.

I can easily imagine, that Apple could extract a higher lifetime customer value with its iWatch Edition, than the ‘eternal’ brands of Swiss watchmaking.

I could imagine that the Apple iWatch Edition will generate a lot of repeat buyers. A good trade-in program would recycle your precious metal and refund that to you. You could keep the straps. The price for your repeat purchase could be then a fraction of your initial buy. You could constantly renew your statement with the Edition line and stay current. Ephemeral disrupting Eternal.

Now this would be an awesome strategy for disrupting the timepiece industry.

In my mind, I've been telling myself that I won't spend over $400 on a first-gen Apple Watch, no matter how badly I want the polished stainless steel model on black leather. But if Apple can guarantee some sort of trade-in program that'll make it easy to upgrade, hell yes, I'll consider spending over $500 on launch day.

AppleInsider:

Despite Apple's A8 being run at a slower clock speed, and being dual core rather than quad core as many high end Android are, the new iPhone 6 beats the fastest phablets and flagships from LG, Motorola and Samsung. It's not only faster, it's more efficient, running longer on a slimmer battery.

FastCompany:

But after two years on the market, Google Wallet has made little to no progress in replacing paper cash, plastic cards, and leather wallets. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, the Wallet app has seen a paltry amount of downloads for a company of Google's scale, and Bedier has since left the company. Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported that Google Wallet is "leaking money" and that "it’s reconsidering or has abandoned projects designed to broaden Wallet’s appeal." What went wrong? Jonathan Wall, the founding engineer of Google Wallet, puts it bluntly: "With Google Wallet, we had one point of failure--the carriers." [...]

"Ultimately, the carriers perceived this to be their opportunity and use the necessity of hardware to really block the product." Sprint remains the only major U.S. carrier to support the service; AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have instead decided to support Isis, a competing mobile payments service, effectively denying their customers access to Google Wallet (or vice versa).

Android did NFC payments first and failed. Let's wait and see how NFC payments pan out with Apple Pay and its partnerships with major credit cards, banks, and merchants.

Techinch, March 2011:

Looking just at the specs, a microwave didn't make sense to many. So manufacturers bundled them with cookbooks that detailed the many things you could cook in a microwave. Look, you can make this great Chinese dish in a microwave! Our microwave lets you bake a cake! Need a hot cup of this complicated spiced cider? It'll only take 15 steps in our microwave! They thought the microwave needed to be a full oven, and more.

But, wonder of all wonders, people started buying microwaves and using them regularly. In the store, a microwave didn't seem like a must-have item to many, but once you incorporated it into your daily life, it was irreplaceable. [...]

The microwave isn't easier for every cooking task, and perhaps it takes longer to prepare a complicated meal in a microwave. Perhaps no award winning meal will be created in one, unless it's a special contest for microwave cooking. But it simplified simple cooking, and consumers around the world saw it as a necessary piece of equipment within in years of it becoming popular. It didn't need to be an oven, and didn't need to be better than an oven. It just needed to be the best for some certain cooking scenarios, and that was enough to win the hearts and minds of people around the world.

Last year, Apple introduced the iPad, a computing device many have struggled to classify. It's bigger than a smartphone or iPod, smaller than a computer, but can do some things you'd otherwise do on both of these. You can type a document in Pages or find your way with GPS and Google Maps. So what makes it so special? From a specs perspective, tablets don't make sense. It cost just under $500, but if you've already invested in a computer and a smartphone, it's just another expense. Plus, netbooks only cost $300, right?

In 10 years, young adults will look at the tablet the same way we look at microwaves.

It's definitely an adjustment, sacrificing one-handed accessibility for a larger screen. It's a little harder to take food pics lol, and I found myself having to use both hands when reading while lying in bed. But because of my bad vision in my right eye, I can definitely appreciate the larger screen for reading.

I have yet to really play with the camera but I've definitely noticed it's improved ability for taking photos in low-light conditions.

I'm really excited to test out the quick autofocus with my puppy; taking non-blurry pics of a hyper pup is one of the hardest thing to do.

My only real complaint is a temporary one -- most third-party apps haven't been redesigned to support the larger screen yet, so they all look like blown-up zoomed versions of the 5S. Surely this will become a non-issue soon.