Google designer Matías Duarte has admitted what many of us have known for a while now: We really don’t need to own smartwatches, particularly of the first-generation variety. Bloomberg reports that Duarte said this week that smartwatches are good for people who are enthusiasts “for fitness or notifications,” but that most people will see them as electric can openers. Or put another way, they’re nice to have but they won’t be a staple of every household in America.
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That said, Duarte doesn’t actually think it matters whether you need a smartwatch or not because tiny connected computers in one form or another are about to become so ubiquitous that they’ll just start to integrate naturally into our daily lives.
“Computers [will] be not just something that you carry on you, but your personal computer will be a series of devices that surround you,” he said. “In the future, smart devices—we’re going to treat them like we treat apps today.”
This is what’s commonly referred to in industry jargon as the “Internet of Things,” in which we’ll have several different devices in our homes that all talk to one another and work together, including our thermostats, refrigerators and washing machines. Whether this brave new world will be run through smartwatches, however, is anyone’s guess.
