“The Apple Watch is a watch in as much as a DVD player or a microwave is a watch,” Adrienne LaFrance writes for The Atlantic. “That is to say, there is a clock on it—and, okay, fine, you wear it on your wrist—but its raison d’être isn’t to tell time.”
“What, then, is its main purpose? Another way of thinking about this question is: Why would anybody buy this thing? The people who say they won’t usually say something like, “But I already have an iPhone.” (Plus: It’s expensive!)” LaFrance writes. “Already having an iPhone is sort of the point, though… A couple months ago, my friend Andrew Phelps, who is a product manager at The New York Times, described to me the usefulness of the Watch in a way I’ve been unable to stop thinking about since: It is ultimately a device that helps you decide whether to look at your phone.”
“People already have a habit of checking their phones mindlessly—so much so that the phenomenon of thinking your phone is vibrating when it’s not is a thing we have a name for (phantom vibration syndrome),” LaFrance writes. “The idea of turning that compulsion into a habit that requires only a glance is appealing, questions of etiquette aside. It’s also already natural, skeuomorphically speaking. Or, to put it the way Jack Riley did in a recent Nieman Lab article, ‘the wristwatch has the advantage of a hundred years of mass market adoption.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
With iPhone, Apple changed the fabric of our everyday lives: All around the world today, you see people constantly pulling phones from pockets and staring at them. With Apple Watch, Apple will change behavior worldwide once again. A quick glance at your Watch and you’re off. No more smartphone zombies. Watch and see. – MacDailyNews Take, January 30, 2015