The biggest innovation miss Apple's had recently (and it's pretty enormous) is the fact that the watch is marketed with an analog face.
Sure it does 10,000 things. But the image of the watch face, that ubiquitous emblem of trudging monotony, is what people see first and what gives them an impression of the device.
Instead of a new concept for navigating your day you've got $350 worth of pixels doing mostly the same thing as your $40 swatch. Apple had the perfect opportunity to reinvent timekeeping and they missed it. Luckily for them it's a software problem only - perhaps they'll figure it out.
First of all, a lot of people really love the image of an analog watch - some of them pay a hell of a lot more than $40 to get mechanical watches that work worse than the $40 swatch. Nothing wrong with Apple embracing that aesthetic.
And it's not marketed only with an analog face. For example, on my phone, the first image I get when I go to http://www.apple.com/watch/ uses the Solar face, which shows the position of the sun as a point on a graph along with a printed time. Personally, since I have depression with some link to whether the sun is out, I find that quite a useful way to think about time, although of course mine is a relatively uncommon scenario.
Sure it does 10,000 things. But the image of the watch face, that ubiquitous emblem of trudging monotony, is what people see first and what gives them an impression of the device.
Instead of a new concept for navigating your day you've got $350 worth of pixels doing mostly the same thing as your $40 swatch. Apple had the perfect opportunity to reinvent timekeeping and they missed it. Luckily for them it's a software problem only - perhaps they'll figure it out.