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Comment by pklausler | Hacker News Reader

The idiom "elephant in the room" means "a difficult-to-discuss problem that we all know we have to talk about but that we're all pretending doesn't exist". I don't see how the title here is relevant for the linked article, which is a dull summary of low sales of "smart" watches and how most of them are Apples.

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I thought the same thing. I thought the "elephant in the room" was going to be something like: "smartwatches will never have feature parity with normal watches". For example, they will never have a battery life of 3 years.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the news atomic power units made from nuclear waste that have 1 billion times the Wh of an AA battery.

Never say never!

I've found some people misunderstand and misuse the colloquialism in instances where the phrase "800 lb gorilla" would be more appropriate. This seems to be one of those cases.

Maybe. But the "800 pound gorilla" idiom refers to a beast that can do whatever it wants to do with impunity, and I don't see how that applies to this story either.

If I understand the author's intent correctly—and I'm not sure that I do—I think the idea is that diversity in the market is dying off, and Apple is on its way to becoming the 800 pound gorilla.

That really stinks. I don't like Apple's idea of what a smart watch should be. :(

The 800 lb. gorilla in the elephant room made of glass.

You're beating around the bull in this China shop.

(yeah yeah it's a Reddit -like comment but this whole thread should probably be downvoted)

Why can't we have a little fun on HN? Maybe we should have a flag for "humor" and let people opt in to seeing comments flagged as such.

I'd rather see HN focused on being a site for substantive, in-depth commentary rather than a slew of one line comments attempting to be witty (and failing), a la Reddit and Slashdot.

But is the gorilla reaching out to pick low hanging fruit?

> how most of them are Apples.

No, most of them are fitbit's but they don't fit with his narrative so they don't count.

FWIW, some people seem to (use the phrase "The Elephant in the room" to) just mean "The big obvious thing that no one is commenting on."

And some people use the perfectly well defined word "literally" to mean "figuratively". Because some people are idiots.

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