One of the major selling points which Apple spent a lot of time on during the iPhone 15 keynote is the double pinch gesture that you can perform on the Series 9 Apple Watch. You can control the watch via gestures on the arm you wear the watch, and you don’t even need to touch the watch to use it, perfect for when your hands are occupied.
Now, this might look new and unique to the Series 9 (and Ultra 2) but a similar feature was first introduced with watchOS 8 a couple of years ago. This was introduced as a new accessibility feature and hidden in a few menus deep. Pinch, double pinch, clench, and double clench – you had 4 different gestures not just one. Pinch is now what is rebranded as double tap.
I recall having tried out these gestures on my old Series 4 watch with and feeling a bit underwhelmed. It sounded like magic, and it even looked like magic on the demoes, but when I tried it, It felt as if I had to remember all the 4 different gestures and it was slow; it was easier to use the index finger on my other hand and just touch the Apple Watch to get what I wanted done.
With Apple touting this as one of the major selling points of the Series 9, and that this is enabled by the Series 9 SiP with a new “four-core Neural Engine processes machine learning tasks up to two times faster”, I would like to believe that this iteration of this feature will be much faster and work as promised. Plus there aren’t 4 gestures (although you can enable them in accessibility), just one that Apple had perfected. Apple knows to take their time than release something unpolished. In fact, this feature is not releasing with the Series 9, it’s “coming in October”.
This lead to me thinking about the various “magic” gestures that Apple could incorporate in future Apple Watches, the Apple Silicon is getting faster and more more intelligent with more neural engine cores. You can perform certain actions without even having to touch the Apple watch thanks to Siri by using your voice. But with the Series 9 there is one more way, no voice, a simple gesture.
When Tim Cook introduced the Apple Watch in 2014 (one of my favourite product announcements ever) he said:
“Turns out with every revolutionary product that Apple has created a breakthrough in user interface was required. With the Mac we introduced the mouse to make navigation so simple on a personal computer. Click on the iPod allowed users to scroll through thousands of songs in the palm of their hand, and with iPhone multitouch gave us the ability to interact with a beautiful canvas of photos or videos or music or all of the information that we use every day. The Apple Watch required the same kind of deliberate consideration, what we didn’t do was take the iPhone and shrink the user interface and strap it on your wrist. The display is too small, it would be a terrible customer experience. For example if you take a gesture like pinch to zoom… it covers the content, it obstructs the view, it doesn’t work. So we placed extra functionality in a mechanism that’s been on the watch for decades. It’s this dial, it’s called a crown and on the Apple Watch it’s called a digital crown.”
I have been thinking about this lately as we step into the 10 year since the Apple Watch announcement; I can’t think of using a Mac without the mouse, I can’t think of using an iPod without the click wheel, multitouch is what made the iPhone (and Apple as a company) the success that is, but the Digital Crown? I use it every day I use the Apple Watch, which is every single day. But if there wasn’t a crown, i’ll still be able to touch the display and get things done.
Advancements in software and the Neural Engine, and Apple’s unmatched ability to make great mobile chipsets can mean the Apple Watch can one day be a device with multiple interactions not just limited to voice, touch, or the Digital Crown. Apple could bring in many more gestures that the Apple Watch can be smart enough to recognise and act as input. Apple Vision Pro, the next big Apple product due to be released next year mostly uses gestures as input. I hope Double Tap takes off and Apple is willing to experiment with multiple intuitive gestures for the Apple Watch. If there is one company that can do it, it is Apple.