The Apple Watch we got a glimpse at this week is a powerful peripheral device, but most of its tricks require it to be tethered to an iPhone in the user’s pocket. Last night on Charlie Rose, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed one thing the Watch can do on its own: Send music to your Bluetooth headphones. Cook wore a white Apple Watch during the interview, and showed some of its features to Charlie Rose, who pointed out for viewers that the Watch requires an iPhone to be attached.
While the Apple Watch does not have a cell chip in it to make it entirely autonomous from your phone it can do a few things independently, and one of them is play music and beam it to bluetooth-enabled headphones. Last night, Apple chief executive Tim Cook was a guest on Charlie Rose’s show, and he mentioned that: “It requires an iPhone, because they’ve been designed to work together. However, if you go for a run, and you don’t want to carry your iPhone, music is also on your watch. So with a Bluetooth headset, you can run and listen to your music without your iPhone.” Given the watch’s tiny size, a cell chip and its drain on the also tiny battery is out of the question right. But playing music over Bluetooth is one, and the joggers (and gym nuts) of the world thank you for this, Apple. It’ll be a bit like when the small, clip-on iPod Shuffle came out, and we all clipped them to our t-shirts while working up a sweat.
