For the first time in a long time, I stayed up beyond midnight this week to watch the latest product launch from Apple. The item of interest was not the new iPhone; I have the 5s and plan on skipping a few generations before buying a new version (unless something really special comes along, in which case the 5s will be “stolen” if I can get a good price for it).
What kept me up was the promise of a watch.
As usual, the presentation venue was full of devotees that would applaud a turd if it had an Apple logo on it; and their enthusiasm reached orgasm pitch as Tim Cook uttered the phrase made famous by Jobs: “just one more thing”. The thing was of course the watch and it was a partially interesting. Beautifully designed and constructed, if a little bulbous; and with some quality strap options. It also told the time. But then it went downhill by offering a wide range of other functions most of which seemed initially really clever and cool, until you realised that you would only use them once to show off how clever and cool you are; and then you would never call upon them again.
There was an emphasis on fitness, with trackers that would tell you, for example, how many hours of the day you had spent sitting down (presumably spent searching for more cool functions on your new watch). I found this rather worrying; it’s bad enough having my wife telling me to get off my arse and exercise more, I don’t need something on my wrist reinforcing her directives.
For these, and many other reasons, I don’t think I am a potential customer for this new toy. My watches tend to be plastic and relatively cheap, a Swatch would be an extravagance. I like a watch that tells me the time in Thailand; and that is all. The current time in Paris or New York is of no interest or relevance to me; neither is a stopwatch, a dive time calculator or a menstruation alert. So an Apple watch that measures my heartbeat and sends that as a throbbing heart graphic to one of my contacts would not only piss off my wife; it is also not in the top ten thousand functions I would look for in a watch. Thanks, but no thanks, Apple. Now, how about some updated computers; you know, those things you used to make.
The presentation finished with a musical number by U2. It was not clear how a song had any relevance to the product announcements; and because I was tired and because U2 have not done anything interesting since Achtung Baby, I turned off my dated Apple computer and went to bed.
The following morning I awoke to discover that I, along with several billion other iTunes users, had been gifted the new U2 album. Brilliant marketing, or desperation now that Bono and his appalling sunglasses have a dwindling number of famous people prepared to let him stand next to them and spout shit? Who cares; let’s just load it onto our new Apple Watch and stand in the road with the watch to our ear as we listen to it, as the built-in health monitor advises us that we are about to die of pretentiousness. It’s the future apparently; just not my future.
Comments 🔗
2014-09-12| Richard H saysI remember when a “watch” was an expensive, fragile, imprecise ticking object that had to be treated with great respect, wound every 30 hours or so, adjusted equally often and probably needed repairs every few years. Then (with a brief hiccup when we had aberrations like the Sinclair Black Watch, with a short battery life, a button you had to press to make it wake up and a tendency to die from static if you wore a nylon shirt) it became a cheap and robust device that gave a continuous time display, could be shamefully abused and would still go on telling the time for several years until its battery died, and you’d probably bought a new one out of sheer boredom before then.
And now?
2014-09-12| jon sutton saysMy menstruation alert usually comprises being hit across the back of the head with a rice bowl, accompanied by an ear-piercing shriek
2014-09-13| Grant saysAh now. If you had “the watch” the menstruation alert would give you time to duck…