iBand + iPod > iWatch

How many people wear watches these days? Hardly any young one does, as Tim Cook said in his D11 interview. There will be no iWatch.

There will be iBand and the hint is very obvious: Tim Cook wears a FuelBand and Nike drops new FuelBand plans.

iBand will be a much more versatile gadget than all the current health or sports wearables, with more sensors and perfect integration with Apple’s platforms such as iOS, Health Kit, and Home Kit.

There will be a new iPod with Lightning connector. It can be connect to iBand which is self-Lightning-connected when standalone. When connected, the iPod will enter watch mode — that’s your “iWatch”. Now we see another advantage of Lightning connector over the old 30-pin dock connector: it is small enough to fit in iBand. Some clever connection design is required because simply adding in the iPod would make the normally fit circumference of iBand too long.

The idea of iBand + iPod will be much easier to sell than a standalone iWatch. Separately they are already popular and useful enough. Combined, they become a new thing, cool and more powerful, which gives customers a feeling that 1 + 1 > 2 so they are more willing to buy both.

By the way, I don’t think there will be iRing. Rings are too small and bear too much special meanings to be retrofitted into intelligent gadgets.

So far all the attention is on wrist. But I think head is another good place to put on a wearable.

I’m not talking about glasses. That’s Google’s thing. I’m talking about headphones. Compared to glasses, headphones are used by far more normal people. Remember every iPhone and iPod comes with an Earphone or EarPod? It is also a good gadget to use Siri. And consider the recent acquisition of Beats. What about an intelligent EarBud? iBud?