Name: Apple gambles on payments and watches
Uploaded: 2014-09-09
Duration: 3 min 5 s
Description: In this week's Tech Debate, Andrew Nusca and Time.com's Alex Fitzpatrick break down Apple's product announcements.

Apple just announced a whole bunch of products. Two new iPhones, a mobile payment service, and of course that long awaited smart watch. Alex, yes or no on Apple? Good, bad, otherwise? How'd it go? I think it went really well. I mean, the iPhones were fairly incremental upgrades. Other than that I think we saw two new interesting things, a service and a product. That I'm pretty excited about >> It's kind of fascinating this is the first announcement in which I feel like the iPhone was the lowest build .>> Yeah, it really it almost felt like you know how they do the iPhone number and the iPhone letter. This felt like more of a number letter situation, where we just sort of an incremental year long you know here's a new iPhone kind of, but not really .>> So lets talk about this mobile payments thing. It's crazy, Apple just had this I Cloud of security. Security breach of celebrity photos were leaked all that kind of stuff. Trust is an issue for them. Are we gonna trust them with our mobile payments, our financial data? That's a really good question. They were trying to say hey trust us, we're secure. We're not gonna even look at, you know, what you're buying, what you're purchasing, where you're buying things. Mm- Hm. But at the same time you look at this hack just a week and a half ago and you have to ask that question. Do I trust Apple with this data or not? And hopefully they're trying to make you not think about that, right? So that, the, the thing that Tim Cook and the rest of his crew emphasized about this one was that you know, just boom and it's done. It's probably the simplest kind of implementation of a mobile payment. Right. And that's probably been the issue with this. Yeah, I mean, they've been clunky, they've been hard to use. But I think it's a very natural. Expansion of what passbook already is you know it's a pretty neat surface if you use anything that it works with, but it needs to be expanded to really be better than it is .>> And one other thing that this works with is their new watch, the apple watch, it's the big big big product of this announcement it's Tim Cooks. Kind of his baby. Wouldn't you say? Right. It's the, you know, the first new category they're in under Tim Cook's reign. First new category since the iPad in 2011. And it's just a huge deal, you know. This is really the, the marker that this is Tim Cook's Apple now. Yeah, yeah. And I think it definitely sends that message to investors. The question is, does it send a message that this is a good business to be in, right? We, we know that wearables are gonna be growing. We know that there important to work with phones and the watch does that with the iPhone, but you know their not very profitable, at least we don't think they are .>> There not, I think that though that Apple if anybody can crack the smart watch knot. I think the other companies that we've seen their interesting products, but everybody's sort of been waiting for to see what Apple is going to do in this category. It's tough as a consumer to decide ok i'm going to go buy a Samsung smart watch. If you know that Apple's probably gonna do something, but you don't know what it is yet. [ LAUGH ] Right. Which is kind of like, well, should I save my money and see what this next entry in the category is gonna be. And speaking of saving money, there, there's this new Apple watch just $ 349. It starts there. We don't know where it ends. Right. Would you spends hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a watch. That can't work without your phone. Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I'm interested in that $ 350 model, but I'm sure there are people who like high end watches, luxury watches, who would be willing to spend that money. So what do you think, thumbs up, thumbs down? I give the whole thing a thumbs up. Fair enough. Alright. For one show you can always watch, come to fortune. com for more tech debate.

In this week's Tech Debate, Andrew Nusca and Time.com's Alex Fitzpatrick break down Apple's product announcements.