If you’re thinking of getting into the punditry business kids, well, for starters, don’t. But if you just can’t help yourself, try to remember that your personal experience may not reflect everyone else’s.
Writing for The Guardian, Alex Hern explains “Why I have finally taken off the Apple Watch for the last time.” (Tip o’ the antlers to @Rixalabur.)
FINALLY. He’d been wearing it for nine months. He could have had a baby. Instead he just wore some stupid watch.
Remember how Apple said the Watch was their most personal device ever? Well… yeah.
It took me nine months to realise it, but the only useful thing about Apple’s £479 smartwatch was the weather notifications
For you.
Towards the end of May, I took off the Apple Watch I’d been wearing for nine months. I’ll never put it on again.
Sung to the tune of “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again.”
It is perfectly fine to discuss your personal experience with the Apple Watch, and most of this piece is pretty reasonable. The Macalope must, however, show you his big but. (No, don’t get up.)
BUT… there is, however, a problem with making broad generalizations. For example:
It would be boring to go through every feature point by point to explain why it’s useless.
Boring and entirely self-centered. Which, OK, are part and parcel of each other.
Let the Macalope be very clear here: If you are sitting down to write a piece about why you are very dramatically not using a thing anymore (and he is quite certain there are no fewer than 300,000 pundits currently working on such pieces at any given time) consider for a minute experiences outside your own.
The Macalope has already linked to pieces by Steven Aquino and Molly Watt explaining why they still rely on the accessibility features of the Apple Watch. Rachel Viniar still wears her Watch for other reasons.
No one can force you to continue to wear an Apple Watch if you find it useless. Your experience, however, does not magically cancel out everyone else’s. You are not The Lathe of Heaven, Randy. That picture has always been of a horse. The picture of Mt. Hood is in the Tuesday/Thursday room. The rooms just look alike. It’s not really that hard a concept to… Well, I see our time is up for today.
Having detailed his personal experience, which runs up against some very real problems with the Watch, Hern attempts to walk away from what he thinks is an explosion without looking back. Except it’s more like a sizzling fajita platter and the waiter at the Chevy’s wants to know where he’s going.
The future of the watch can’t be the same iterative improvements that Apple has pulled off with the iPhone, iPod and iPad.
Time, you see, has stopped. It is the end of history. The good news is we will never die. The bad news is, nothing will ever get better. And we’ll have to keep reading people complaining about it.
The interface is just too ill-thought-through to work, even if the device itself is sped up significantly.
Stick a fork in it.
You do know they’re still working on Windows 10, right? And if someone has hope for that…
Whence comes such a child-like sense of wonder about the possibility of the future?! The funny thing is, the one thing Hern does like about the Watch, a third-party weather complication, was a feature that was added after the launch. Surely that’ll never happen again.
Presumably Hern doesn’t use Apple Pay. Or Maps. Or exercise. Or set timers. Which, maybe he doesn’t!
But that doesn’t mean that other people don’t.