“What’s that, you say? You don’t want an Apple Watch? Let’s talk about that,” James Lileks writes for National Review. “People seem obliged to offer substantial, reasoned arguments why they don’t want one — and that seems proof that Apple’s cultural position is enormous… Apple invents something, and the world is riven into two camps. Those who desire, and those who decline. The former group is regarded with less interest than the latter, since those who want the Watch are assumed to be devotees of Apple who would pay $199 for a white plastic brick used to prop open doors.
“The people who don’t want them — ah, they’re the ones who make for good copy. They’re the rebels now,” Lileks writes. “You don’t want an Apple Watch, you don’t. But reject it for the right reasons — and that’s not because it’s another screen that takes you away from dealing with humanity, because that’s not what it is. To understand what this thing will become, there’s one thing you need to understand: It’s not a watch.”
“It sits where watches sit, and in its resting mode it shows the time, but it’s not as if Apple said, ‘Hey, let’s make a timepiece! Get on that. Also, after you’re done, figure out what else it could do.’ It’s a personal servant that tells the time when nothing else is going on,” Lileks writes. “It is Dick Tracy’s two-way radio, and a telegraph, and portal to whatever music you want to hear, and a telephone, and your wallet, and a remote control. The last item has the most potential, and will create new paradigms — to use that awful word — that we’ll get used to and accept without much trouble, because it will simply replace a bunch of devices.”
“Smartphones command your attention; they suck you in, provide you with so many other things to do or see or check or post or scroll. The thing on your wrist is for doing and dismissing,” Lileks writes. “The Watch is different, because telling time is not the function. Saving time is the function.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yessiree, Bob… er, James.
As we wrote back on January 31st: All phones are cumbersome to the same degree. They have to be pulled out, woken up, and poked at. Apple created… a world of iPhone/iPhone knockoff addicts. Apple will change the world again with Apple Watch, replacing iPhone zombies and iPhones on and under dining tables and everywhere else (you know, the stuff the older set complain about: “People nowadays, always looking at their gizmos, nobody can even have a conversation”) with quick glances of the wrist – like in the days of yore.
As we wrote on January 30th: 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.
Just like the tens of millions who said they didn’t want or need an iPhone, who are now on their fifth iPhone, so it’ll go with Apple Watch.