Watching the watches
I spent an entire short flight last week reading the middle third of the Jony Ive profile in the New Yorker, and here’s the passage that’s breaking my considerable writing-in-public hiatus:
“[Cook] went on, “We always thought [Google Glass] would flop, and, you know, so far it has.” He looked at the Apple Watch on his wrist. “This isn’t obnoxious. This isn’t building a barrier between you and me.” He continued, “If I get a notification here, it will tap my wrist”–with silent vibrations. “I can casually look and see what’s going on.” We were in a conference room at One Infinite Loop, a few doors from Jobs’s old office, and I noticed that, at this moment in the history of personal technology, Cook still uses notifications in the form of a young woman appearing silently from nowhere to hold a sheet of paper in his line of sight.”
I last wore a watch in about sixth grade, and only to prove the fallibility of teachers who insisted I wouldn’t always have a calculator with me. (Had just one of them alluded to the reality-warping utility of statistics, and proven it with a chi-square distribution or five minutes on Benford’s Law, they’d have seen a change in my work ethic that otherwise waited until college.)
If I’m going to start wearing a watch again soon, it’ll happen because of notifications, even though I don’t remotely believe what Tim Cook’s asserting. I was at a lunch a couple of months ago with a guy wearing an Android Wear watch, and by an order of magnitude, he spent more time glancing, poking, and swiping at his watch than I’ve ever seen someone do with their phone in a social setting over a similar period of time.
The experience was a reminder that looking at one’s watch in the middle of a conversation is the definition of interpersonal rudeness. It may be slightly more subtle than checking a phone, but it sends exactly the same message, that you are not the focus of the person with whom you thought you were talking.
My hopes for the watch depend on Apple wanting to solve the problem of filtering and winnowing notifications to a degree that they haven’t even hinted at. What I want most from the phone is not the notifications that I need to see, but freedom to defer the notifications that are not worth the interruption of a conversation, or the loss of focus from work I’m trying to finish.
If I can have confidence that a notification I can feel in my pocket, but not on my wrist, can be safely deferred, then the Apple Watch can pay for itself at any remotely plausible price. If it can’t, I’ve already got a calculator.