Apple’s earliest Apple Watch prototype was basically just an iPhone strapped to somebody’s wrist with velcro, a new story detailing the Watch’s origins reveals.
In the early days of the the Apple Watch, software for the device was being developed at a quicker pace than the hardware, according to Wired. That meant the Apple Watch team had to rely on a decidedly bootleg method of developing the user interface: Essentially emulating the Apple Watch software on a modified iPhone.
Via Wired:
The goal was to free people from their phones, so it is perhaps ironic that the first working Watch prototype was an iPhone rigged with a Velcro strap. “A very nicely designed Velcro strap,” Lynch is careful to add.
The team built a simulator that displayed a life-size image of an Apple Watch on the screen. Software was moving much more quickly than hardware, and the team needed a way to test how it worked on your wrist. There was even an onscreen digital crown—a facsimile of a watch’s classic knob—that you could swipe to spin, but it hardly replicated the feeling of twisting a real crown. Swiping, after all, is what the knob was supposed to replace. So they made a custom dongle, an actual watch crown that plugged into the bottom of the phone through the cord jack. In a sense the first true Apple Watch prototype was, like 10,000 Kickstarter projects, just a weird iPhone case with a strange accessory sticking out of it.
The Apple Watch is due out April 24, with preorders beginning April 10.
Read the rest of Wired’s story here: iPhone Killer: The Secret History of the Apple Watch
The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech.
