One big question that we’ve asked about both the Apple Watch and smartwatches as a whole is, “What good are these things actually for?” The New York Times’ fashion writer Vanessa Friedman has been wearing an Apple Watch for weeks and has decided that Apple’s first wearable computer just isn’t worth her time for a fairly sensible reason: She thinks wearing a computer on her wrist makes her look too geeky.
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“No matter how attractive the Apple Watch is in the context of other smartwatches or smartbands, no matter how much of an aesthetic advance its rounded corners and rectangular display, it still looks like a gadget,” she writes. “Especially on someone, like me, with relatively small wrists.”
Smartwatches are going to get smaller and thinner over the next several generations, of course, so we expect that this will be less of an issue as Apple and other hardware manufacturers refine their craft. All the same, Friedman also questioned why she should even want to have a computer strapped to her wrist in the first place.
“Seeing somebody staring at her wrist (or merely sneaking a surreptitious glance at it) telegraphs something else entirely: (1) rudeness or (2) geekiness,” she explains. “This doesn’t seem to have bothered the tech writers, most of whom wrote persuasively positive reviews of the gadget, primarily based on what it could do for you. And it is certainly more subtle than Google Glass, though I am not sure that is saying much.”
This is really where Apple’s developer community will come in handy — if people see really useful applications for the Apple Watch coming out, they’ll want to have them regardless of whether they feel geeky using them. While third-party Watch apps have been a disappointment thus far, we expect they’ll improve greatly with the release of the new Watch SDK that Apple unveiled at WWDC 2015 this year.
Check out Friedman’s whole take on why she’s dumping the Apple Watch by clicking here.
