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Apple is expected to unveil its much-anticipated watch today.

NPR's Laura Sydell (@Sydell) is live-tweeting the Apple event in San Francisco. You can read those tweets here.

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As Rachel Myrow and Christina Farr of member station KQED reported on Morning Edition, Apple's entry into the " smart watch market is expected to have a huge impact. How much of one is a multibillion dollar question."

It enters a market with plenty of wearable tech, but few smart watches. The LG G, the Samsung Galaxy Gear S2 and the Pebble, the market leader.

Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, told Myrow and Farr the Apple watch will likely sell 10 million to 20 million units in the first year.

"Apple has a very loyal and large base that will purchase things just because they're Apple," he told them. "Meaning that they'll give these products the benefit of the doubt."

That will likely be true in China, too, he said, even if the watch start at $349.

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Apple

Like an elephant splashing down in a mud hole, Apple's entry into the smart watch market is expected to have a huge impact. How much of one is a multibillion dollar question.

You don't see too many people wearing smart watches walking down the street, even in San Francisco. Even at the Game Developers Conference there last week, techies in attendance sported plenty of wearable tech, but few smart watches.

Paul Quinones was one of the few wearing one. The founder of Glass Wolf Games says a buddy bought him an LG G for Christmas.

"You can do a lot of very basic stuff," Quinones says, "like dictate, check your messages, send texts and all that. But there's no real, like, wow app or software for it that makes it the kind of device that you need to run out and get."

When Quinones gets an alert, his watch lights up and he glances at it without missing a beat.

"It's kind of nice cause then I get the convenience of not having to pull out my phone every time I get a message," he says. "I can just check from my watch."

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Eitan Marder-Eppstein shows off his LG smart watch at a March 2014 convention for Game Developers in San Francisco. Rachael Myrow/KQED hide caption

itoggle caption Rachael Myrow/KQED

Eitan Marder-Eppstein shows off his LG smart watch at a March 2014 convention for Game Developers in San Francisco.

Rachael Myrow/KQED

Google gave Eitan Marder-Eppstein, a senior project engineer with the company's mobile-focused Project Tango, a free LG smart watch. It turns out he was nostalgic for an analog experience the smart phone destroyed.

"I use it just to, actually, surprisingly, tell the time," Marder-Eppstein says. "I forgot how nice it is to have the time on my wrist."

Joshua Morgan, a tech lead for video game developer PlayStudios, got a Samsung Galaxy Gear S2, but only because it was an older model thrown in for free when he bought a Samsung smartphone a few months ago.

He says it starts conversations — as opposed to fights, like the ill-fated Google Glass. Morgan also can take phone calls on his watch — like Maxwell Smart, or Fred Flinstone, or Captain Kirk.

Morgan likes the fitness functions.

"Mostly the pedometer and the heart rate monitor," he says. "I do a lot of exercising — or I've been getting into a lot of exercising. I don't look like I do exercise, do I?"

Morgan's being modest. But in a nutshell these early adaptors have described the appeal of smart watches: discreet, convenient, and they do some of things smart phones do. Last year, 4.6 million smart watches shipped, according to the tech research firm Canalys

The most popular brand so far is Pebble, which has shipped 1 million units since it started two years ago with a Kickstarter campaign. Predictions as to what Apple will sell vary wildly — Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, figures 10 million-30 million sales in the first year.

"Apple has a very loyal and large base that will purchase things just because they're Apple," Bajarin says. "Meaning that they'll give these products the benefit of the doubt."

He thinks that will be true in China too, even if prices start at $349.

"Their second biggest iPhone market is in China," Bajarin says. "There's a lot of people there who do buy very expensive products."

Analysts like Bajarin are predicting that China may be the largest market for the watch, given the demand there for luxury smart watches. Apple arranged the device's editorial debut in Vogue China rather than U.S. Vogue.

'Gorgeous Or Invisible'

It's not clear if Apple can crack through what appears to be a gender barrier for the smart watch. Researchers have found that the female demographic is less interested in geeky gadgets with a wide array of features, preferring instead a slick and more minimalistic design.

"The wrist is sacred ground for a lot of people, regardless of gender," said Tim Golnik, vice president of product at Misfit. "Women definitely love the option to hide the technology or put it somewhere other than the wrist."

Misfit found through its research that the next generation of wearable gadgets would need to be "gorgeous or invisible" to appeal to women. Its health-tracking accessory is jewelry-like, and can be worn almost anywhere on the body.

Apple's executive team reflects the value it puts on fashion beyond its design department. The team includes Angela Ahrendts from Burberry and Paul Deneve, the former chief executive officer of Yves Saint Laurent.

The importance of fashion is not lost on Silicon Valley's other tech companies. Intel recently partnered up with fashion brand Opening Ceremony for a smart bracelet, and Fitbit teamed up with Tory Burch to create a more chic alternative to its Flex tracker.

The Apple Ecosystem

For many Apple users, the Apple Watch's biggest appeal is the fact it plugs into the Apple universe of software and products. Even if the first generation is functionally modest, Bajarin says Apple can bank on an army of third-party developers to expand what's the device's abilities far beyond what the company itself dreams up.

"Look at the watch as this sort of platform for apps," he says. "The apps can create all these different experiences that can help the product appeal to a much wider, you know, mass-consumer public."

Before that fully evolves, Apple has developed playful touches designed for broad appeal, as demonstrated here at the Apple Watch unveiling last September.

Kitsch? Maybe. But James McQuivey of Forrester Research says it works wonders on generating consumer demand.

Apple Unveils New Payment System, iPhones, Smartwatch

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"Believe me, it's that kind of touch that Apple has on its products, where they add those little things that help underscore –- not the value of the technology – but the benefits that the technology delivers," he says. "That's what Apple is so good at. I'm convinced that 10 million people in 2015 will find that compelling enough to buy an Apple Watch."

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LG Electronics

Apple

Kansas City has some of the Internet best service anywhere. Providers there jostle for customers who can now expect broadband that's about 100 times faster than the national average.

But, four years after Google Fiber landed in Kansas City, people are still trying to figure just what do with all that speed.

Kansas City's a modest, Midwestern place. Residents are proud of their barbecue and baseball team. But Aaron Deacon says that now there's something else: inexpensive, world-class Internet.

"Yeah, it's the best," he says. "Maybe Hong Kong's a little bit better than us, and Seoul."

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Deacon runs KC Digital Drive, a group set up to make the most out ultra-high speed Internet available in the city for $70 a month. "You have faster Internet here than anyplace else, and you can get it for cheaper than anyplace else. Because Google chose this market to build out in first."

The network's still not done, but Internet connections running at close to one gigabit-per-second are easy to find.

"We're sitting at the world's fastest Starbucks," says Ilya Tabakh, the COO of Edge Up Sports, a website for sports stats and news. He points out that the coffee shop has laptops hooked up to Google Fiber and says the difference is most visible on YouTube.

"Click on a video, it's loaded," Tabakh says. "Click on another video, it's loaded. Click on another video, loaded. There is no waiting for anything."

But many users are left waiting for programs to make use of all of that speed. Running normal applications on gigabit Internet is like riding a bicycle on a NASCAR track. For the moment, only a lucky few have any access. Everybody else is still on dirt paths.

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An AT&T worker splices cable for the suburb of Overland Park. Last month, the company became the third provider broadly offering affordable gibabit Internet to residents. Frank Morris/KCUR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Morris/KCUR

An AT&T worker splices cable for the suburb of Overland Park. Last month, the company became the third provider broadly offering affordable gibabit Internet to residents.

Frank Morris/KCUR

Not much money can be made figuring out a 200-mile-per-hour bicycle, or to step back from the analogy, an application to maximize the massive broadband. Toby Rush, who runs a Kansas City biometrics startup called EyeVerify, says the apps will follow as access expands.

"When you can knock down the barriers — the roadblocks of near infinite bandwidth, real time, all the time, very cheap — it allows for a lot more digital things to happen, which is great for everybody," he says.

In the meantime, Rush says, Google has made gigabit speed standard in Kansas City. "Everyone else is following suit, just making this high-speed connectivity a commodity."

Mike Scott, the president of AT&T Kansas, stands by as workers splice fiber optic cable before sinking it into someone's back yard. Last month AT&T became the third provider broadly offering affordable, one gig Internet here. Time Warner and other providers have also boosted speeds.

"It's a fiber war so to speak," he says. "We are literally standing in the trenches of a fiber war. And I think the customer ultimately wins in all this competition."

But not everyone's a customer. In some Kansas City neighborhoods only one-in-five households have any type of Internet connection, let alone a fast one. Michael Liimatta, runs a nonprofit called Connecting for Good, that's trying to change that.

"Our center here, you might consider it to be the front lines closing the digital divide in Kansas City," he says.

Folks from this low-income neighborhood come in and use Google Fiber for free, but no one has it in the huge housing project across the street. Liimatta says he's sometimes disappointed that some of the expectations that the city had in terms of universal adoption, and loads and loads of free bandwidth, "never came to be."

Not yet anyway. Residents are still grappling with uses for super-fast Internet.

digital divide

google fiber

Kansas City

Internet

When it comes to the current controversy over antibiotic use on farm animals, milk is in a special category.

Lactating cows, unlike hogs, cattle or chickens that are raised for their meat, don't receive antibiotics unless they are actually sick. That's because drug residues immediately appear in the cow's milk — a violation of food safety rules.

Milk shipments are tested for six of the most widely used antibiotics, and any truckload that tests positive is rejected. So when cows are treated, farmers discard their milk for several days until the residues disappear.

Yet a new report from the Food and Drug Administration reveals that a few farmers are slipping through a hole in this enforcement net. These farmers are using antibiotics that the routine tests don't try to detect, because the drugs aren't supposed to be used on dairy cows at all.

The FDA looked for 31 different drugs in samples of milk from almost 2,000 dairy farms. About half of the farms — the "targeted" group — had come under suspicion for sending cows to slaughter that turned out to have drug residues in their meat. The other farms were a random sample of all milk producers.

Just over 1 percent of the samples from the "targeted" group, and 0.4 percent of the randomly collected samples, contained drug residues. An antibiotic called Florfenicol was the most common drug detected, but 11 other drugs also turned up. Perhaps most disturbing: None of the drugs that the FDA detected are approved for use in lactating dairy cows.

Because the survey was carried out for research purposes, the samples were collected anonymously, and the FDA cannot send investigators to the farms to find out what happened.

Mike Apley, a researcher at Kansas State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, says that it is "totally illegal" for dairy farmers to use two of the drugs that the FDA detected: Ciproflaxacin and Sulfamethazine.

In the case of other drugs, he says, the situation is more complicated. It's illegal for farmers to use those drugs on their own, but veterinarians are allowed to authorize their use in dairy cows under certain strict conditions. Veterinarians also are supposed to ensure that no residues enter the food supply. For whatever reason, that veterinary safeguard didn't work in these cases.

Dr. William Flynn, deputy director for science policy in the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, chose to focus on the fact that the violations were uncommon. "These are encouraging findings," Flynn tells The Salt. The low number of violations indicates that "things are working well."

Flynn says the FDA is working on plans to stop illegal drug use by dairy farmers. This could include testing all milk for a larger number of antibiotics.

Morgan Scott, a veterinary epidemiologist at Texas A&M University, noted that a small number of farmers, through their reckless use of drugs, may end up imposing substantial costs on all other dairy farmers.

"That, to me, is tragic, that some farmers don't think that keeping the reputation of the industry intact is a priority," he says.

antibiotics in animals

dairy industry