New York Magazine:
I’m part of the latest tech trend, a bona fide phenomenon in Silicon Valley that is inspiring the kind of pants-wetting excitement usually reserved for new iPhones and Grand Theft Auto games. I’m talking about smartwatches—the tech world’s quixotic attempt to mount minicomputers on your wrist.
I’ve been wearing two smartwatches for several days apiece, and so far, it’s been an enlightening experience. Though not necessarily a hopeful one.
Obviously it depends on what the particular smartwatch does but in my talks with “average” people, the headline answer so far has been “No.” That being said, it brings to mind the classic (and probably apocryphal) Henry Ford line of, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
The smartwatch as of today is not a real product.
It is simply the manifestation of the fear certain companies have of missing out on the next important category of consumer electronics.
I not only don’t wear a smart watch, but I don’t wear a regular watch either.
do not want.
I wear a normal, non-gigantic, non-Kanye watch. Until smartwatches can maintain the same size and at least a week battery life (my current watch gets about 2-3 years on a battery) then nope.
People are silly enough not to wear watches. Watches are the easiest thing to wear and infinitely more useful than the digital display of your iPhone which sits in your pocket most of the time, because of their pinpointed use and ease of access. A smartwatch is something everyone will need/love/have soon enough. Think about it this way – People who had analog wrist watches upgraded to analog+date, then to simple digital and then to multifunction digital. The next step will soon be here and well in use. Those who say otherwise can just wait and Watch.
I decided to write about this article myself. Thanks for pointing it out. Here’s a link -> http://www.nitinkhanna.com/yes-nymag-people-want-smartwatches/
A majority of young people don’t wear watches.Granted, the figures I found make it a small-ish majority at 60% of 16-34 year olds, but still a majority. I’m 48 and stopped wearing a watch a long time ago once I had another way to tell time. I ended up smashing/scratching a lot less watch crystal, too, since I tended to bang the damn things on everything around me.
The smart watches coming are going to have to do something really amazing and do it well in order to get people back to wearing watches as anything other than jewelry for special occasions. (I have a watch I wear when I dress up. Granted, it’s a Monty Python watch, but that’s about as close to being fancy and pretentious as I’m going to get. 🙂 And I haven’t dressed up for anything in over a year.)
Go back 8 years, and I bet you the same %-age of folks didn’t want a smartphone either.
A good product will change people’s minds and their lives, and as it does, people being of basic herd mentality, will want the same in their lives.
All Apple has to do is get the smartwatch right and that segment will be their perpetual oyster!
“People are silly,” you misspelled “not everyone is exactly like me.”
I had an analog watch. I “upgraded” to a digital, then to a multi-function digital… then upgraded again to a simple analog watch. And I loved it.
But then I got rid of my watch entirely because it had a tendency to bang things.
I’ve had the tendency to bang things since a long time and I’ve gone through many watches because of that. Doesn’t mean we give up on this important functional part of our wear. And yes, not everyone is like me. But people are silly too. 🙂
The banging things was a problem, since one of the things it seemed to bang was my laptop.
And I can’t really argue with that last point. Everyone is silly. 🙂
I expect there’ll also be a small cloud of Brooklyn nerds who hover around Topolsky, who also believe they want these things.