The Apple Watch
My experience has been really mixed. I’ve avoided writing about it mainly because I think the experience is largely going to be personal – and its an experience worth trying. Then I stumbled across this interview with William Gibson:
What are your thoughts on Apple’s introduction of a product that, in a very specific way, is attempting to occupy the place once held by wristwatches? Is the Apple watch a watch at all?
I backed Pebble’s original Kickstarter, then wore Pebble exclusively for the better part of a year. Fascinating experience. It’s not “a watch”, as I assume the Apple, which I’ve yet to try, also isn’t. The fundamental difference between a watch and a smartwatch is that a watch’s central functionality is to tell time in isolation. That’s the essential core goal of the science of horology, really. A watch can perform its functions perfectly from within a Faraday cage. A smartwatch can’t: its function is to be a node in a distributed network. That was easy to see in the first Pebble: it had all the physical gravitas of the cheapest Bic pen, but, eventually, it had amazingly varied functionality, via connectivity. The Apple looks like jewelry. It’ll aspire to heirloom status but I doubt it will ever be that. Attempts to render smartphones as power jewelry fail. The Apple watch, I imagine, will be a dead platform in a few years, no more collectible than old iPhones. Because it’s nothing, really, without access to a system, and the system constantly outgrows it, evolves beyond it.
How have you found it?
The Shift
One of the greatest shifts occurring as a result of the rise of mobile devices is how we go about completing everyday tasks.
Checking our bank balance, paying a bill, upgrading an account, applying for a credit card – all are examples of activity we once dedicated time to. We planned to visit a branch. We filled out application forms and waited. We sat in front of a browser and dedicated attention to completing a task.
Now, many of those tasks are things we do while we are doing something else. Riding on the train or bus; sitting in a meeting; or when the Ads roll at the cinema or on TV. As we shift those tasks into other activity, we compress the time we are willing to dedicate to completing them.
Those that are winning in mobile have typically simplified processes to be so simple and easy you can do them while doing something else – and, ensured that the task can be completed in the average TV ad break.
Simple, easy and speedy are the watchwords for winners in the dominantly mobile economy.
