Five years ago, Apple’s last new product category, the iPad, was unveiled. In just a few days, the company’s next new product category, the Apple Watch, will make its debut. So I’m going to do something I haven’t here since 2010: I’m going to make some informed (if almost certainly wrong) speculation about one of the biggest remaining unknowns: In this case, pricing.

Pricing is an often-overlooked part of design, something we tend to think of as purely the domain of business, to be taken care of by MBAs rather than product designers. But pricing is just as interwoven with design constraints and user psychology as any other design choice, and I’m nearly certain Jonathan Ive’s team played a part in the process.

Mind the gap

The one thing we do know about the lineup’s pricing is its floor: Apple Watch Sport is $349. We have wild speculation for the ceiling: five, ten, even twenty thousand dollar price points have been proposed for the top-end, solid-gold Apple Watch Edition. That’s uncharted territory, but what’s most interesting in terms of price design is the mid-range, un-suffixed Apple Watch.

Consensus seems to be that the steel-clad Apple Watch will start at nearly twice the price of the aluminum Sport. While this is hardly unreasonable to expect for a semi-luxury item, it would leave a huge hole in Apple’s usual pricing structure: Ever since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has priced all its mobile devices in $100 increments, and it’s become a proven strategy for the company. Edition notwithstanding, I can’t really see them abandoning it for the Watch.

Finding the right variable

Apple’s upsells for mobile products have included storage space, screen size, and in the case of previous years’ models, hardware revision, all priced with the same $100 increments. But the Apple Watch has none of these easily-tiered variables.

As for screen size, it’s highly unlikely the four-millimeter step from the 38mm to the 42mm version will be enough to carry a $100 premium (for aluminum and steel, at least); even $50 seems like a stretch. All Apple needs to cover the cost of are the additional metal (a few cents to a dollar?) and a few more pixels of OLED ($12?), for which a $30 bump seems just about right to maintain the product’s margin. And the $30 increment is a familiar one, used with iPads for which the $100 increment alone wasn’t sufficient to maintain the margin on cellular radios.

So that’s a $30 increment, but still no $100. How about color? Even though John Gruber has suggested a possible return of the 2006 MacBook’s “black tax,” Apple has been selling black versions of its hardware for the same price as all other colors since the iPhone 3G in 2008.

Stepping up

The magic of the repeated $100 increment is the negotiability it engenders in the buyer’s mind. Whatever you’re considering buying, the next step up is never more than $100 away – it’s right there, tempting you. It’s for this reason that Apple more or less has to have something at a $449 price point, and with no premium bands in sight for Sport, only a modest premium likely for screen size, and equal color pricing, that leaves the entry-level steel version to cover the gap.

From there, however, I think Apple has plenty of flexibility to maintain its $100 increment strategy with premium bands, each tier falling into the groups outlined by Gruber in his piece.

The market versus the margin

There’s no doubt that premium watch buyers are used to spending more than this for a quality steel watch. Perhaps Apple could charge higher prices to signal competition with quality mechanical watches, but I think they will lowball simply because they can. A steel-housed smartwatch doesn’t cost twice as much to build as an aluminum-housed one, and I don’t think Apple will price it as such.

I could be entirely wrong about this, but historically, Apple doesn’t really seem to care about charging a lot as much as they care about charging enough to maintain good margins. Remember Steve Jobs’ deft anchoring of the iPad at $999 before announcing it would be half that? However the Apple Watch ends up being priced, I think it’s going to be based more on the margins Apple can make than on how high the market might be willing to go.

Next week, it’s anticipated that Apple will announce a successor to the Apple TV based on iOS. While this predictably inspires more speculation than a Rod Blagojevich verdict, the most interesting question it poses is how the onscreen user interface will be controlled.

While some sort of optional iPhone integration is a given, Apple’s multimedia standby, the traditionally-bundled Apple Remote, starts to look a little inelegant in light of the usability strides made on Apple’s mobile devices. Directional pads are older than Apple itself, and their usefulness falls off quickly with the number of elements they are used to navigate through. Click gestures such as long presses and double-taps can help, but they remain stop-gaps for a limited interaction technology.

Dan Provost’s suggestion of a Click Wheel remote is a very intuitive one. A logical progression of decoupled input for Apple, it works very well for navigating hierarchical lists, and to be sure, it even has plenty of creative potential for use in an iTV App Store. But the question of how to build a better remote is one that has intrigued me for some time, and I think it’s possible to go much further.

You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling

The one-to-one motion and gestural speed control of the Click Wheel make navigating in one dimension much nicer. But a trackpad takes out both dimensions at once. And with Apple’s mastery of intertial scrolling on mobile devices, it’s a perfect match for two-dimensional menuing on a new iTV.

It’s not hard to imagine an onscreen UI built around swipe gestures, inertial scrolling, and the snap-to-rest behavior of something like the iOS spinner input, across a two-dimensional menu system like Sony’s XMB. Add the Magic Trackpad surface-click to navigate, and you have a lot of potential in a very simple remote control.

With the addition of an iOS-standard home screen button and perhaps a play / pause button, this hypothetical remote could not only make 10-foot navigation as pleasant as using an iPhone, but extend a lot of its interaction vocabulary. Such a system might just be the closest one could get to mirroring the iPhone’s direct interaction in a decoupled context.

As the above might suggest, I had something in my head which begged to be mocked up.

Trackpad on top, surface click on both top and bottom, home key in the middle. Slight resemblance to sushi.

Playback or play

Dan Provost suggested the very slim possibility of a game controller for the new iTV. While it’s unlikely that Apple will make gaming a central pillar of iTV, Apple is nonetheless making serious inroads in the market. So how might they make this part of the out-of-the-box experience?

With something like the concept envisioned above, there’s already a game controller: Just turn the remote sideways.

Even without any other features, a trackpad and two primary buttons allow for plenty of latitude in designing gameplay. Add an accelerometer or another button or so, and you have something that can easily rival the twitch-friendly controls on major consoles.

Will Apple take the adventurous route, or will they play it safe with iTV? We’ll find out soon enough.

So, yes, I think I figured out the e-reader part of The Tablet. Me and approximately 47% of the Internet, I know. This isn’t anything new. But I do believe I have found a pattern.

The web as an iTunes Store

Apple is making an iTunes store for web content. Yes, you know this already, but hear me out: This is where the magazine and newspaper negotiations, the HarperCollins negotiations, the Quattro Wireless acquisition, iTunes LP, the podcast directory, the App Store, and iWeb all meet. The publishing deals aren’t the only part of Apple’s “e-reader strategy” because Apple isn’t going into the e-reader business any more than they went into the minidisc player business with the iPod.

E-readers strive to simulate paperbound books. The Tablet doesn’t bother. Apple has left it all behind for interactive text with animation, multimedia, maybe social networking. Which sounds a lot like the web as it currently exists. But you know how Apple hates to stop at how things currently exist.

The web is a huge mess of things. Which is great. But it’s not so great for some things, especially the monetization of editorial content, as we are reminded time and again as various major print publications make plans to charge for online content only to be heckled back to the ad-supported model. But if there’s one platform that has successfully induced people to pay for things this past decade, it’s the iTunes store.

On the design side: As powerful as the art of CSS is, the diversity of end-user contexts means web versions of print magazines rarely have the character of their paperbound counterparts. Look at the cover story in Wired on the newsstand and then look at it online—one is like seeing a play, the other like reading the script. Paginated HTML5 in a controlled, predictable environment, however, can make these both look archaic in the hands of a good designer. Look at iTunes LP. That’s how you do it.

Everybody now

So yes, you know all this and the above four paragraphs weren’t necessary. But there’s much more to it than just the media incumbents. Just like with the podcast directory, Apple is inviting everyone to the party. Just like with the App Store, Apple is giving everyone a chance to monetize. Just like with iTunes LP, it’s a content experience based on HTML5 and a controlled browser environment. And this is where the new iWeb comes in. Everyone will have the opportunity to build their content into this new HTML5-based format and container; the bundled iWeb will come with a bundle of themes and preset grids to guide non-designers; iWeb Pro will become the de facto InDesign of this new field. Adobe will build support into CS5.

And of course, the hub for this will be the iTunes Newsstand. Buy a multimedia-packed issue of a magazine for $1.99. Subscribe to a free newsletter supported by Quattro ads placed painlessly through iTunes Connect. Publish your own free newsletter and throw a party when it reaches 10 downloads, as I will. It’s a content platform based on existing web technology but all packaged seamlessly in Apple’s domain.

A body of standards

This is not to say that everyone will be locked in. The major publishers will produce content compatible with anything packing a WebKit browser and the right size frame. The Tablet’s resolution will become the new 320 x 480, and similarly-specced, competing devices will soon filter out from most of the major manufacturers. But content on those will have to either be free or use a competing store to the iTunes Newsstand, and Apple’s counting on theirs being the best experience for both consumer and producer. And, unfortunately, there’s the issue of DRM: iTunes Newsstand will offer FairPlay wrappers to piracy-paranoid content producers, making the alternatives a tougher sell.

Everything I’ve written above is almost certainly wrong. I will regret using the future tense instead of conditional, making this post look even more silly in a week’s time, though on the upside, I greatly doubt anyone has actually read this far. But there you have it. Apple reinvents the web as its own sequel to print.

I apologize if you have actually finished reading this, and will return to actually writing about design and usability next week.