Why Does the Apple Watch Exist? Who Knows

An attendee takes a picture of Apple Watches on display at the Apple event in San Francisco, on March 9, 2015. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Yesterday’s event provided a few key details about the Apple Watch. We learned how much it will cost, and when we’ll be able to buy it. But there’s still a very big hole in the center of the Apple Watch picture. Tim Cook and associates showed off a grab bag of features, but they once again failed to give any overarching sense of why this thing exists. What is the Apple Watch? How will we use it? Where does it fit in our lives? In what ways does it replace our phones? In what ways does it complement them?

It may be the case that Apple doesn’t need to answer these questions for the watch to be successful. But it’s starting to seem like Apple might not have answers for them at all, and that’s troubling.

Clearing a High Bar

It’s instructive to look back at the last time Apple jumped into a new product category. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in January 2010, he began by explicitly positioning it in relation to the devices we already owned. “All of us use laptops and smartphones now,” he said. “Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? The bar is pretty high. In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks.” He offered a few examples: Browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, ebooks. “If there’s gonna be a third category of device, it’s gonna have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. Otherwise it has no reason for being.”

That’s the missing piece. What is the Apple Watch’s reason for being? What are the things it’s better at than a smartphone?

Yesterday, Apple reiterated the three tent pole Apple Watch use cases it first mentioned last fall. Timekeeping. Fitness. Communication. The first is a gimme (though Mickey Mouse is seemingly doing all he can to muck that one up.) Fitness is important, certainly, but it’s hard to say the watch is revolutionary on that front. Apple had hoped to use advanced sensors to track things like stress, but they turned out to be too finicky, which leaves a fairly basic activity tracker, much of whose functionality is already possible with the iPhone. (Also: If you want to get us all on a health kick, why not just put those pretty circular activity graphics on iPhone lock screens?)

That leaves communication, to my mind the least convincing of the major use cases. During the event, we saw Apple Watch software lead Kevin Lynch scrawl an unfortunate looking flower to his wife and listened to him conduct a wrist-borne call with his dog groomer. We also saw him spend a good ten seconds poking through a WeChat menu to send a stamp that had no apparent bearing on his friend’s initial question. Tim Cook provided the obligatory mention of the unprecedentedly intimate act of sending someone your heartbeat.

Let’s be clear: The Apple Watch will introduce a few novel ways to communicate with friends and family. Some of them might be quicker than on the iPhone. But in no universe is the Apple Watch better for communicating than an iPhone. Sending a canned text message response might be useful when you have your hands full, but it’s different from writing a message yourself. Sending someone an animation of your heart beat may be intimate, but it’s not as intimate as talking to them on FaceTime.

What’s Its Relationship to Our Phone?

This gets to the heart of the problem with Apple Watch, or at least with how Apple’s talked about it. Apple hasn’t defined the watch in relation to the phone. We already carry our smartphones around all day; the fact that the watch piggy backs off the iPhone’s radio is an admission of this fact. Now, Apple’s trying to put a second device on our body without giving us a clear sense of how it complements the first.

When you want to send a text, which device do you turn to? Was the Apple Watch built as your go-to messaging device, or a sometimes good-enough one? Just like we mark emails as read on our phone and get back to them at our computer, will we read texts on our watch and reply to them later on our phones, when we have the fully emoji keyboard at our disposal? What’s the hierarchy of these devices? How do they fit together? If you have your watch-wearing hand in your pocket with your phone, and they both buzz, do you still pull your phone out? There’s little sense of how this juggling act will play out.

Another Distraction Machine?

Certainly, there will be plenty of times when it makes sense to read a message on your watch. Glancing at your wrist will often be faster than fishing your phone out of your pocket. Indeed, people who have used the Apple Watch told TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino that they were checking their smartphones significantly less because of it.

And this alone could be a killer app! At a point where many of us are becoming concerned about our obsessive relationship with our phones, the watch was a chance for Apple to plainly say, “hey, here’s a device that will let you spend less time looking blearily at a screen and more time looking at trees or books or the people sitting across the dinner table from you.”

Nope. Nooope. Apple

But Apple hasn’t said anything to that effect. Maybe because it would be weird for Apple to be reminding us that its flagship product is keeping us from looking at trees and books and the people sitting across from us in the first place. Or maybe because Apple just doesn’t see our ever-escalating screen-gazing as a problem.

No moment during yesterday’s event better exemplified Apple’s ambivalence on this topic than when Tim Cook enthusiastically showed off Instagram for the Apple Watch. This was madness. It was very nearly parody. What comes after browsing your friends’ photographs on a 6″ display? Spinning a tiny wheel to scroll through your friends’ photographs rendered at postage stamp scale on your wrist.

The demo was dumb, but not just that. It suggested a certain obliviousness on Apple’s part about the ways this thing could go very wrong. The nightmare scenario for the watch (for us, not for Apple) is that it simply becomes another distraction machine, an even more irresistible place for dipping into the content streams that already flood our lives. We have no indication of Apple’s outlook on this possibility. Here’s a genuine question: If in six months we’re all constantly fiddling with our Apple Watches, would that make the product a success or a failure in Apple’s eyes?

A Jumble of Experiences

When Jobs explained the iPad in the context of phones and laptops, he wasn’t just explaining where the new device fit in Apple’s product line-up. He was explaining where it fit in our lives. He even plopped down in a cushy Le Corbusier chair on stage to show us the iPad at its finest. “It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had,” he said, pulling up the website of The New York Times. “Way better than a laptop. Way better than a smartphone.”

Even Apple’s hand-picked audience would’ve guffawed if Tim Cook had claimed that the Apple Watch offered the best experience for browsing Instagram. But then, Apple hasn’t really suggested that the watch is about providing “best experience” for any one thing at all. Maybe someday it will emerge as the best experience for staying healthy or the best experience for authenticating identity online. For now, all know now is that the Apple Watch will bring a bunch of new experiences. They will be served up in addition to the myriad experiences we’re already familiar with from our phones. Figuring out how to make sense of them all is apparently up to us.