Is Apple Watch Getting Closer to Our Hearts? 2015-03-10

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, showed off their newest device, the Apple Watch. Mr. Cook said it is the "most personal" device Apple has ever created.

The Apple Watch is a miniature, or very small, computer a person wears on his or her wrist. There will be three models with straps to attach them to your wrist. An Apple Watch will be able to do many of the same things as an iPhone. It will show email, texts, news, health readings and other information. These apps will be customized for the watch. It will be different than just seeing what is on your phone.

Like a phone, you will be able to receive calls on your wrist. Mr. Cook smiled while describing this. "I've been wanting to do this since I was five years old," he said. "The day is finally here." Decades ago, a comic strip hero named Dick Tracy talked into his wrist watch, but until now, that has only been something possible in the future.

Mr. Cook also said it is "incredibly intimate." He said you can capture and send your heartbeat to another person with an Apple Watch.

"This is an incredibly intimate way to tell someone that you are thinking about them," he said. "I hope someone sends me one of those.

The crown of the Apple Watch is what sets this Apple product apart from other companies' smartwatches. Like the touch screen on smartphones, the crown controls what you can do. By turning the crown on an Apple Watch, one can zoom in and out, to look at a map, for example.

The watches will be available in stores in late April. They will be sold at different prices, beginning at $349. Mr. Cook called the high-end model, the one made of 18-karat gold, "jaw dropping beautiful." Its price tag will be thousands of dollars.

"The biggest surprise to me was that the price range goes up to $10,000 for the Apple Edition Watch," writes tech blogger Carolyn Nicander Mohr of The Wonder of Tech. "That price is quite steep for technology that may be obsolete in a year."

Apple hopes to excite consumers so they will want to buy and wear computers on their bodies. The first smartwatches from Samsung, Sony and LG have not been selling well. Only five million smartwatches were sold last year, according to Strategy Analytics. Another wearable computer, Google Glass eyewear, is no longer on the market.

Critics say one problem with Apple Watch is that you need an iPhone on your body, or nearby, to make this watch fully functional. Like a phone, it will also need to be charged each night. It remains to be seen whether people really want to carry both a smartphone and a smartwatch.

Apple has overcome skeptics before. Both computer tablets and smartphones were not popular until Apple released the iPad and iPhones.

The announcement today comes after last week's news that Apple will replace AT&T on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Dow Jones index includes the top 30 companies representing the U.S. economy and markets.

I'm Anne Ball.

Anne Ball reported and wrote this story for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

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Words in This Story

gadget n. a small, useful device

miniature adj. very small or tiny

wrist n. the part of your body where your hand joins your arm

customized adj. something that has been changed to fit the needs of a person or business, etc.

intimate adj. having a very close and warm and friendly relationship

obsolete adj. replaced by something newer

skeptic n. a person who questions or doubts something or someone