Well Chris Taylor agrees with my article about Apple Watch, almost an year ago. Here is Chris Taylor's 'Opinion' from Mashable.
The most expensive watch in the world is called the Henry Graves Supercomplication, made in 1933 by Swiss legend Patek Philippe. It is an astonishing mechanism of 900 parts that are able to imitate the bells of Westminster and replicate the New York night sky; it has kept time perfectly since its last winding in 1969.
The Supercomplication breaks records every time it goes on sale, most recently in 2014 for $24.4 million. Clock nerds salivate over its every rod and spoke. It is wonderfully, exquisitely impractical; I would love to own it. I never will. And that's okay. I can let it go.
I feel similarly about the Apple Watch — at least, in the iteration that was unveiled Monday at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Sure, this is an exquisite thing, as beautiful as smart watches are likely to get. I'd gladly congratulate Tim Cook and give Sir Jony Ive a second knighthood.
The one thing I won't be giving them is my money.
That was far from a foregone conclusion. I was willing to be convinced. When it comes to Apple products, I seem to have a bottomless budget. Each of the first three iPads were mine before the first day of sales was out. Never did I think I wanted a desktop machine until the gorgeous iMac Retina 5K came into my life, crushing hopes for any other Christmas present in its wake.Nobody knows better the feeling of scheming wheels turning in your brain as you convince yourself that you really need that cool new thing to replace the few-years-old new thing. I'm doing it right now with the new gold MacBook, and I swear my Macbook Air is getting ready to slam its screen on my fingers in jealous rage.
But the watch? I just don't see it, and I've worn one on my wrist at a previous Apple event. The design is great; the user experience seems so very meh. This is not an aid to living. It is a supercomplication.
SEE ALSO: Here are all of your Apple Watch optionsMost of this is not Apple's fault. Watches are great to glance at for a second — Apple has done well to call its brief notifications Glances — but rather annoying to hold to your face for longer. Your wrist gets tired. The screen is tiny. Your phone is beckoning, and it's right there in your pocket.
Peering at your watch is not cool; culturally, it signifies that you are bored and restless with where you are, and are wondering whether it's time to go. Talking into your watch is certainly not cool. If someone forced me to use this thing, I'm sure I would find myself unstrapping it from my wrist most of the time, which defeats the purpose.
My bedside table groans at the thought of having another device to charge, and so frequently (Apple estimates 18 hours of battery life, and that's if you only use the apps for 45 minutes a day).
Sure, it would be a sweet and romantic gesture to be able to send my actual heartbeat to my wife, and vice versa. But how many times can you do that before it gets old, or even creepy? Does it really matter that it's your actual heartbeat?Sidenote: My wife and I used to own Nabaztag (later Karotz) rabbits before we lived together; the position of the ears on one always matched the ears on another, no matter how far apart. That was a cute novelty, too. Hands up anyone who owns Nabaztags today.
None of the apps Apple demonstrated made me leap from the edge of my seat and say, "Yes, I need a new device to do that!" Checking sports scores? Calling an Uber? Paying for groceries? If these things are worth doing at all, they're worth doing on a pocket-sized screen.
There just isn't that much opportunity cost in the few seconds it takes to remove a phone from my pocket. No problem is being solved here. Maybe I'd be more interested in the health tracking aspect if I didn't already own a Fitbit Flex — and know well the hassle of charging that wrist-based device once a week, let alone once a day.
Based on that launch event, I think Apple knows it has a hard sell on its hands. I've never seen the company so reliant on gimmicky turns such as wheeling out supermodel Christy Turlington Burns to tell us how she's the first person to run a marathon wearing one.I've never heard Tim Cook sound more like a pale imitation of Steve Jobs than when he enthused about wanting to make calls on his wrist since he was a kid. And I've never heard the Cupertino laugh track — those employees who add their cheers and guffaws to any Apple launch event — more necessarily vocal.
The sound and fury was complete with the news that the solid gold Apple Watch would cost $10,000, or possibly more. The company has always made high-end products, but they've also been within reach on a middle-class income.
This is ridiculous; a boneheaded tin-eared decision that invites derision and the conclusion that Apple is a company for the one percent. If it weren't Apple we were talking about, the brand could be forever tarnished by such a move. The risk is that any Apple Watch will make you look like a tool now; guilt by association with gilt.
Even leaving the infamous gold watch aside, what we've got here is a device that barely even works without an iPhone to run its services from. Sorry, Samsung Galaxy owners who were hoping to dip a wrist into Apple waters, you're out of luck unless you adapt your entire tech ecosystem at once.Finally there's the Apple Watch app, which we've now learned will be mandatory on every iPhone. This chips away at the one great advantage of iOS over the Android ecosystem, that you aren't forced to look at a "skin" of self-serving apps by the company that sold you the phone.
Installed without your say-so, with no possibility of deleting it, the Apple Watch app does nothing but run ads for the Apple Watch until you get an Apple Watch. It all sounds a lot like the controversial automatic installation of U2's latest album on every iPhone Music app. And that, at least, you could remove.
None of which is to say that Apple doesn't have a hit on its hands. It's too soon to tell whether the company is going to sell out the five million watches it has apparently ordered up. Maybe I'm in the minority; maybe you've all been dying for a tiny iPhone extender on your wrists that you have to recharge every 18 hours.
The Supercomplication breaks records every time it goes on sale, most recently in 2014 for $24.4 million. Clock nerds salivate over its every rod and spoke. It is wonderfully, exquisitely impractical; I would love to own it. I never will. And that's okay. I can let it go.
I feel similarly about the Apple Watch — at least, in the iteration that was unveiled Monday at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Sure, this is an exquisite thing, as beautiful as smart watches are likely to get. I'd gladly congratulate Tim Cook and give Sir Jony Ive a second knighthood.
The one thing I won't be giving them is my money.
That was far from a foregone conclusion. I was willing to be convinced. When it comes to Apple products, I seem to have a bottomless budget. Each of the first three iPads were mine before the first day of sales was out. Never did I think I wanted a desktop machine until the gorgeous iMac Retina 5K came into my life, crushing hopes for any other Christmas present in its wake.Nobody knows better the feeling of scheming wheels turning in your brain as you convince yourself that you really need that cool new thing to replace the few-years-old new thing. I'm doing it right now with the new gold MacBook, and I swear my Macbook Air is getting ready to slam its screen on my fingers in jealous rage.
But the watch? I just don't see it, and I've worn one on my wrist at a previous Apple event. The design is great; the user experience seems so very meh. This is not an aid to living. It is a supercomplication.
SEE ALSO: Here are all of your Apple Watch optionsMost of this is not Apple's fault. Watches are great to glance at for a second — Apple has done well to call its brief notifications Glances — but rather annoying to hold to your face for longer. Your wrist gets tired. The screen is tiny. Your phone is beckoning, and it's right there in your pocket.
Peering at your watch is not cool; culturally, it signifies that you are bored and restless with where you are, and are wondering whether it's time to go. Talking into your watch is certainly not cool. If someone forced me to use this thing, I'm sure I would find myself unstrapping it from my wrist most of the time, which defeats the purpose.
My bedside table groans at the thought of having another device to charge, and so frequently (Apple estimates 18 hours of battery life, and that's if you only use the apps for 45 minutes a day).
Sure, it would be a sweet and romantic gesture to be able to send my actual heartbeat to my wife, and vice versa. But how many times can you do that before it gets old, or even creepy? Does it really matter that it's your actual heartbeat?Sidenote: My wife and I used to own Nabaztag (later Karotz) rabbits before we lived together; the position of the ears on one always matched the ears on another, no matter how far apart. That was a cute novelty, too. Hands up anyone who owns Nabaztags today.
None of the apps Apple demonstrated made me leap from the edge of my seat and say, "Yes, I need a new device to do that!" Checking sports scores? Calling an Uber? Paying for groceries? If these things are worth doing at all, they're worth doing on a pocket-sized screen.
There just isn't that much opportunity cost in the few seconds it takes to remove a phone from my pocket. No problem is being solved here. Maybe I'd be more interested in the health tracking aspect if I didn't already own a Fitbit Flex — and know well the hassle of charging that wrist-based device once a week, let alone once a day.
Based on that launch event, I think Apple knows it has a hard sell on its hands. I've never seen the company so reliant on gimmicky turns such as wheeling out supermodel Christy Turlington Burns to tell us how she's the first person to run a marathon wearing one.I've never heard Tim Cook sound more like a pale imitation of Steve Jobs than when he enthused about wanting to make calls on his wrist since he was a kid. And I've never heard the Cupertino laugh track — those employees who add their cheers and guffaws to any Apple launch event — more necessarily vocal.
The sound and fury was complete with the news that the solid gold Apple Watch would cost $10,000, or possibly more. The company has always made high-end products, but they've also been within reach on a middle-class income.
This is ridiculous; a boneheaded tin-eared decision that invites derision and the conclusion that Apple is a company for the one percent. If it weren't Apple we were talking about, the brand could be forever tarnished by such a move. The risk is that any Apple Watch will make you look like a tool now; guilt by association with gilt.
Even leaving the infamous gold watch aside, what we've got here is a device that barely even works without an iPhone to run its services from. Sorry, Samsung Galaxy owners who were hoping to dip a wrist into Apple waters, you're out of luck unless you adapt your entire tech ecosystem at once.Finally there's the Apple Watch app, which we've now learned will be mandatory on every iPhone. This chips away at the one great advantage of iOS over the Android ecosystem, that you aren't forced to look at a "skin" of self-serving apps by the company that sold you the phone.
Installed without your say-so, with no possibility of deleting it, the Apple Watch app does nothing but run ads for the Apple Watch until you get an Apple Watch. It all sounds a lot like the controversial automatic installation of U2's latest album on every iPhone Music app. And that, at least, you could remove.
None of which is to say that Apple doesn't have a hit on its hands. It's too soon to tell whether the company is going to sell out the five million watches it has apparently ordered up. Maybe I'm in the minority; maybe you've all been dying for a tiny iPhone extender on your wrists that you have to recharge every 18 hours.
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