Only after years of infighting did he give in, and only for a mouse that LOOKED like it had one button.
Yes, that's true, but he did do it. The point is that the "Steve Jobs would never have..." trope falls apart, because he eventually believed that it could work. Heck, OS X had right-click contextual menus years before the Magic Mouse arrived. The goal wasn't to force you to use one button -- it was to make sure that newcomers could always get things done with that one button.
3D Touch is being sold in advertisements by showing features (like the moving picture thing) that only 3D Touch can do. I would argue that Apple considers that stuff "key functions" because they are the marketable difference between the 6 and 6s for "normal" people, and unlike a Mac right click there is no other way to get to those functions.
What makes it worse is 3D Touch functionalities can only be discovered via trial and error, which is the same buried feature concept Steve hated. I just can't see any way he would have loved what they did with 3D Touch, not that his opinion matters anymore but he had a way to know what features would resonate with normal folks (which 3D Touch doesn't do).
I'm not sure I'd agree that Live Photos or the peek-and-pop stuff are vital functions. They're nice to have, but you don't need to peek to see an email before you dive into it. You are right that there's no alternative to these functions, though, and that you don't immediately know which apps support it.
Square watches have been around forever, Armani and Ralph Lauren have historically used "rectangular" shapes. Also you have to consider that I had a square smartwatch on my arm for almost a year before any consumer owned an Apple Watch, and Pebble owners had it long before that. Sony had NFC payments in a smartwatch before Apple, and Moto had a heart beat monitor in one before Apple. In fact I would argue hardware wise the only "innovation" in the Apple Watch was a 3D Touch that again doesn't resonate with regular people.
As far as the image density thing, someone did us a favor and created a mockup of Apple UI elements on a round face: *snip for brevity*
And as you can see it only takes a little adjustment to get around the round information density problem. Hell, the Apple Watch's activity monitor is already round, no modification needed.
That would look a hell of a lot better on a round watch.
The key is that the rectangular display was a conscious choice based on the content, not an attempt to mimic rectangular watches. And yes, there are advantages to it that aren't possible with circular displays: it's better for reading text (say, an incoming email) and adding complications (read: widgets) that don't obscure the watch face.
I think you're confused as to what Apple does to clinch markets. There were already MP3 players that were more portable than the first iPod, and ones with higher capacity; that didn't stop the iPod from dominating the market. The original iPhone didn't have 3G, GPS or an autofocusing camera, but that didn't prevent it from starting a sea change that killed most of its competition from that era. Apple's approach to innovation isn't to pad the spec sheet -- it's to deliver interface and design advancements that take a category into the mainstream.
I don't think the Apple Watch is all that revolutionary, but you're purposefully downplaying what's there. Force Touch is damn handy for expanding what watch-based apps can do, and the "digital crown" helps me read things without covering the screen.
Besides, it's odd to claim that the Apple Watch "doesn't resonate with regular people" when current
market share estimates have Apple dominating the smartwatch space by a wide margin. If that's failing to resonate, then Google and Samsung are completely out of touch. We both know that's not true, of course (Apple's success is partly due to sheer market clout), but you don't have much of an argument when Apple is so far the
only smartwatch maker to click with the public in a big way.
Meanwhile main competitor Samsung has a payment system that works on old card readers, a VR headset that beat the big Oculus to the market by a year and a half, and a curved screen form factor that literally looks years in the future when compared to all the bezels in the iPhone 6s. THAT is what real innovation looks like, the kind Apple used to show off when Jobs was around. And I don't just mean mobile devices- that new Netbo... I mean Macbook is the most terrible major consumer product sold by Apple since the third generation iPod shuffle.
I fully expect the next amazing innovative product with the Apple logo on it will be a car that Elon originally designed/invented when they throw enough money at him to buy Tesla. I have given up on the concept that a Cooks-run Apple can innovate, even if I really admire his stance on privacy.
Samsung got its payment tech by acquiring a company that was already doing it on other platforms, and I'm not sure what its curved display actually does besides look cool (I've used the Note Edge and S6 Edge extensively, so I know how useless the side menu usually is). Gear VR is the only truly innovative one in the bunch. To me, innovation means developing something from scratch that genuinely moves the industry forward -- acquisitions and pretty-but-not-much-else curved screens don't amount to much.
Under Cook, Apple has:
- developed the first genuinely easy-to-use mobile fingerprint reader
- pioneered port formats like USB-C (it's known that Apple helped shape the standard)
- created the first truly accessible, easy-to-use NFC payment system
- ushered in the first "Retina" (that is, significantly greater than HD) laptop displays
- invented haptic-based, pressure-sensitive trackpads
- taken smartwatches into the (relative) mainstream
- beaten everyone to the punch on 5K displays, at a better price point
- introduced 64-bit mobile processors well before the competition
This isn't to say these are all groundbreaking, or that Apple is a non-stop invention factory. It's not, particularly in iOS. However, I think we have to remember that innovation isn't just about creating brand new categories or technologies -- it's pushing them forward in a significant way, or making a once-niche technology accessible to everyone.
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