Ron Amadeo: ‘Even With the Google/Fossil Deal, Wear OS Is Doomed’

Ron Amadeo, writing at Ars Technica:

Meanwhile, the non-Wear OS competition is Samsung and Apple, both of which have their own private SoC divisions where they can invest in building quality smartwatch chips. I would argue Apple’s “S” line of SoCs is the primary enabling technology of the Apple Watch — it can be compact, fast, and long-lasting thanks to a smartwatch SoC with actual effort behind it. Apple doesn’t talk much about technical details, but the S3 chip in the Apple Watch Series 3 was claimed to be 70-percent faster than the S2 SoC. The S4 SoC in this year’s Apple Watch Series 4 is claimed to be two times faster than the S3, and it’s a modern ARM design with 64-bit compatibility.

Wear OS has never once seen the kind of performance increase that the Apple Watch enjoys every single year. If you read Qualcomm’s press releases carefully (2100 launch, 3100 launch), you’ll notice the company never even claims its new smartwatch chip is faster than its old smartwatch chip. We’ve verified this with benchmarks, too. It’s just the same ancient CPU being repackaged over and over.

Interesting way to think about it. Whatever you think of the software, Wear OS just doesn’t have competitive chips available on the hardware side.

★ Wednesday, 23 January 2019