DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME

It’s gorgeous and smart... but what’s it for? For now, Apple’s terrifyingly expensive toy lacks that killer app

Yes, the Apple Watch is gorgeous. Of course it is. Gorgeousness is to Apple what beige checks are to Burberry. Style-wise, it’s a quantum leap ahead of any previous ‘smart’ wearable (a category where most competitors fall at the first hurdle – they are neither smart, nor wearable).

It’s helped immensely by controls built into the crown of the watch, rather than relying on a tiny, awkward touchscreen – one of those clever, yet unassuming little innovations for which Apple is justly famous.

It’s the sheer power of Apple’s brand that will sell it, though. Apple could have brought out a sweatband with no functions whatsoever, and it would have still sold.

So far, there’s not really a ‘killer app’ to sell this. There’s no equivalent of what mobile internet and apps such as Facebook were for iPhone.

With the early apps on test, it buzzes to bring you the petty annoyances of the modern world – emails, texts and messages on social networks. This helps you to keep your phone in your pocket, which is oddly liberating. But one can easily achieve the same more cheaply... using willpower.

Fans of ‘ proper’ (ie, Swiss) watches are even less likely to swoon over it. The expen- sive Apple Watch models – the prices range up to €15,600, for a gaudy device that will be out of date in a year – will be of interest solely to footballers and flash-in-the-pan pop stars. Grown-ups will still wear watches with clockwork inside, which tick.

Apple Watch is the best of its kind so far – but like the other smartwatches I’ve tested, it’s a talking point, a bauble, rather than an essential. The gadgets feel like the product of a tech industry increasingly aware of the fact that they need to think up a new consumer craze, and fast.

Apple will, no doubt, refine the functions of Apple Watch rapidly, and developers will add apps to turn it into something useful. So far, though, there is little inkling as to what these functions might be.

Apple made its billions from refining ideas – its own, and other people’s – and what we see today is an early stage of evolution. This is a hairy hominid waiting for homo sapiens to come and replace it.

Personally, I suspect that smart watches will become a part of everyday life – but only once you DON’T need a phone within shouting distance (Apple Watch, like all its rivals, requires a smartphone within Bluetooth range). For now, it’s a delicious little gizmo – but not an epoch-defining one as the iPhone was eight years ago.

‘It’s a delicious little gizmo but not an epoch-defining one as the iPhone was’