Opinion
Apple Watch escapes its iPhone shackles!
Since the release of the new Apple Watch, I’ve become freshly obsessed with the idea of the Watch as the new iPhone. I mentioned the idea of the phone becoming the modern laptop and the Watch becoming the modern phone briefly in my column last month, but since then I’ve also become a semantic bore about it; I came to realise that to kids today, ‘phone’ means small computer, and so there’s a non-zero chance that even if the laptop form-factor stays around for the next 15 years, current under-fives will wind up calling any portable computer a ‘phone’. I’m fine with that – who among us hasn’t referred to buying ‘a hi-fi’ or something that equally mangles an originally meaningful term – though I admit that using a print column to insist on how totally fine I am is a bit suspect.
In fact, I think a potential change in the meaning of ‘watch’ from timepiece to a mini-computer makes even more sense when you think about it from a practical point of view.
What does a watch do? Tell the time. Okay, but why do you need to tell the time? So you know what you should be doing or where you’re supposed to be. The point of a Watch is to aid that. It’s why we added mechanical complications like the date to watch faces. So adding a cloud-connected to-do list or full calendar is actually a totally logical next step for fulfilling the original purpose of a watch.
Of course, the Apple Watch does more than that, and one of the reasons I see it as the new phone is the way it mirrors what made the iPhone such a success: bringing together a bunch of disparate functions and making them easier to use.
Some of this is replacing a whole product, which in the iPhone’s case was cameras, music players and, yes, dedicated phones. And some of this is pulling tasks away from bigger and clunkier devices, like taking email from laptops.
In the Watch’s case, it replaces whole products such as a pedometer, heart-rate monitor, and, yes, watch. And it pulls in tasks from bigger and clunkier devices, like… making phone calls or sending messages. Does the Watch really make these things easier to do? Yes, if you embrace voice control. It seems embarrassing and ostentatious to do right now, but so did using an all- touchscreen phone back in 2007. We forget, but in the early days typing out an email on your ‘giant’ 3.5-inch iPhone made you the equivalent of an ’80s-movie stockbroker yelling into their Motorola DynaTAC.
A few days ago, I saw a woman on a train quietly using Siri to dictate a series of messages. It wasn’t intrusive to me, or embarrassing to her. By now, people get what you’re doing, and in a few years, it’ll seem normal. And then the Watch will have come of age, because just like it became silly to get your laptop out to email when you had your phone, it’ll be silly to get your phone out to send a message.
Voice control is ostentatious now, but touchscreens were too, once