Some unorganized thoughts about A. Watch
I’m excited for it, not even as a watch, just as a new class of diminutive computer. Before the iPhone it was hard to imagine something smaller than a laptop being nearly as useful, and I think the same will be true of the watch looking up at the phone. I believe that technology becomes stratified rather than becoming obsolete, which is why we still make use of mainframes and laptops alike. Not to mention stone tools, the printing press, morse code, vinyl records, film etc. They may fall out of the mainstream, but when a technology crosses a certain threshold of usefulness it never really goes away, it just becomes part of a spectrum.
When Apple shows the slide of their product family (ever increasing to the left in smallness) some view it as a sort of evolution-of-man in reverse, with the smallest thing intended as the top of the food chain. I think a better way to look at it is a stack of sieves with increasingly fine layers of mesh; pour a task in the top and it gets caught at the layer that matches its size. Everyone has their own individual task-sifting needs and can choose their mesh sizes accordingly, the watch being merely the newest finest layer available. It’s easy to imagine an Apple Ring in the future, transmitting nothing but touches and heartbeats.
During the event Phil Schiller said something I thought was important, that the size of the new MacBook is defined by the size of the keyboard. The size of the keyboard is of course defined by the size of our two hands, as the iPhone is designed for the size of one hand, as the watch is is designed for the size of one wrist. It completes a continuity of human-oriented sizing, and it’s a subtle cue that these machines exist to serve us and not the other way around.
It’s also important to analyze the watch as an article of conspicuous consumption. It was sort of amazing to hear Tim Cook say that anything made by Apple would “start at ten thousand dollars,” even though it was widely expected for the gold version. The collision of worlds between technology and luxury has been a learning experience for both sides. Many Apple users ignore the status aspect of their products, choosing them simply because they’re often the best tools available. The gold watch makes it no longer possible to ignore Apple ownership as a status symbol, and I feel that realization is uncomfortable. For technology people, it’s a reminder that increasing sophistication comes at a social and environmental cost. For luxury people, it’s an indication that they’ve ignored technology as an aspect of their world for too long.
I have zero data to back this up, but my hunch is that buyers of super expensive “heirloom” watches rarely actually treat them as heirlooms. The kind of wealth and horological interest that drives the purchase of one heirloom watch seems like the kind that drives the purchase of many. The rest of us imagine that one precious gold watch handed down from parent to child over generations, but I suspect if that you’re rich and into watches you’ve probably got more than one, and you might even buy them seasonally. A quick glance at high end watch marketing reveals plenty of language designed to develop brand loyalty and create repeat buyers, and the sheer size of the industry suggests it’s working. (What this says about humanity is another matter.)
My point is only this: we keep seeing that technology is more useful the more closely it conforms to our weird human proportions and behaviors, including our sense of stylistic consequence. A watch is only useful if it’s worn, after all, and we’re naturally more particular about what we wear than what we carry. It remains to be seen if the Apple watch is a success as a computing device, but its place along the trajectory of personal technology seems very natural.
I just don’t need a gold one.
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