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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

I love how they reason it away in the article:

"Considered separately, the active use app, clock, and fitness numbers sound very low, but the reality is that people will passively wear the Apple Watch for most of the day, actively interacting with it only for short periods of time."

Essentially they're saying, "People will buy an expensive watch that does all this extra fancy stuff, but really they won't bother much with the extra fancy stuff - because who actually wants to fiddle around with something on their wrist for any protracted length of time?"

I think Apple has enough die-hard fans, who will buy almost anything they make, for it to be hard for them to do something that will register as a genuine complete flop... but I think the Apple Watch really could struggle to get much traction amongst the masses, and I don't just mean the expensive gold model.

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If you used your iPhone at full power all day, it would be dead in three hours. If you left it in standby, it would last for days. Most people do a combination of these things, leading to the battery life averaging out to be around one day of normal use.

Is that essentially saying people bought an expensive phone that does all this fancy stuff but don't bother with it because they don't want to fiddle with something in their hand for any length of time?

Try flooring the accelerator on your car and see how long the tank of gas lasts. Compare it to idling away a full tank. Do people shy away from hot-rodding their engines just because they don't want to fiddle with the throttle, or because doing the speed limit and accelerating slowly tends to suit their needs just fine?

The aforementioned article about the Apple Watch talks of "heavy application use" and suggests it might only last 2.5 hours. If you read, for example, http://www.trustedreviews.com/iphone-6-review-battery-life-a..., it suggests "heavy use" of the iPhone 6 (at 50% screen brightness) yields about 14 hours of battery life. That's a pretty significant difference.

While it's easy to say "it's more compelling to do stuff on a phone than it is to do it on a watch, so you'll naturally use the phone more", that rather makes me wonder why I would bother buying the watch, especially when you actually need the phone as well.

Time will tell how people use these devices and whether the battery really holds up to a reasonable person's usage. And, of course, it seems likely (though not certain) that later generations will have improved battery life.

Because of the big screen, it's easier to browse the web on a tablet than on a phone. Easier than that is a laptop. A PC has an even bigger screen than that! But people still use phones, mostly for the minor convenience of having it in your pocket instead of in a bag, but also for the unique interactions it provides.

I use my PC for eight hours a day straight. I use my phone for maybe 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, maybe an hour long call once or twice a day. Is there anything wrong with that? Should I be using my phone more? I mean, why would I spend all the money on having a powerful phone when I'm only using it occasionally?

That's the logic you seem to be putting towards this watch. I'm not going to defend the battery life, it's totally crap. I'm just arguing against the logic. You seem to be saying if you're not using the device constantly, it's not worth having. I don't use my car constantly. I don't use my phone constantly. I don't use my Pebble constantly. But they're nice to have for their own reasons. The point of the watch is not to use it 100%, all the time. It's to use it when it makes sense to use it. Heavy application use isn't what it's designed for.

Still, I agree the battery makes it useless even for the intended functionality.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. It just seems to me that it's a lot of money to spend on something that you aren't intending to use all that much (regardless of the battery life problem). You have a phone in your pocket that works quite well for many tasks; do you really need to spend a bunch more money on a fancy watch that does some of the same things as your phone, via your phone, in possibly a less useful way?

I really don't know, perhaps Joe Public will see it very differently to me; certainly those of my friends who don't work in tech, but overwhelmingly do own iPhones, I have spoken to about the Apple Watch seem fairly uncertain as to its general usefulness.

>While it's easy to say "it's more compelling to do stuff on a phone than it is to do it on a watch, so you'll naturally use the phone more", that rather makes me wonder why I would bother buying the watch, especially when you actually need the phone as well.

While this is true, no body is browsing the web or watching a video on their watch. People are doing quick checks of stocks, the weather, firing off a text message on their watches. The use cases overlap significantly but smart watches fill the niche of "I don't want to pull my phone out to check the time/if I have texts."

Watches are things you use in brief bursts. They are no less valuable for that. Like fire extinguishers, the value lies in being available and responsive whenever. I don't rate my bottle opener by how much time I spend using it. Just the opposite in fact.

How much money did you spend on your bottle opener, may I ask?

$10,000

I'm not sure what point you're making there. But in an attempt to end the thread in a fun way, here's a watch that opens bottles. If it's good at both those things, it will take but a few seconds a day to get good use out of it.

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/happy-hour-watch

Sounds like a typical first generation new device from Apple.

Generally, 1st generation new devices have low benefit to cost ratios, are trying to enter a market with the absolute minimum requirements, and the successive generations will include some kind of hardware bit that makes the device much more useful.

It does fancy stuff, but the fancy stuff it does consists of things that either alert you to something (and thus are over after a second), or that let you do some simple (and quickly done-with) interaction without having to pull out your phone.

Despite "smartwatch" sounding like "smartphone", there's really nothing you'd want to do with its UX that could last an hour.

Remember Windows SideShow[1]? It was a technology to allow OEMs to do things like putting an extra display on the lid of a laptop, that would indicate things when the laptop was closed and mostly asleep. That's what the watch is for: indicating things when your phone is closed and mostly asleep. If it indicates something interesting, you don't continue interacting with it; you take out your phone.

I'm not saying this to defend Apple's product in particular; it's probably far too expensive to get the right adoption in its market, and is more like an initial market-testing experiment in the same way Google Glass was.

But passive/reactive UX is a great idea, generally. The constant complaints about being stuck in a cubicle staring at a screen, or teenagers staring at their phones all day, are precisely because that's where our alerts are, and we don't want to miss them... but it's also where a bunch of engaging+distracting stuff is, so in the process of trying to stay on top of our alerts, we get constantly pulled back into engaging with the engaging stuff.

Imagine if, to check your email, you had to log into World of Warcraft or Second Life and wander over to your virtual mailbox on your virtual driveway. Lots of potential for distraction during that, right? But waking up your phone or your laptop, with its manifold social apps and games and media to consume, is nearly as bad.

Technologies with passive or reactive UXes allow us to treat technology as something poking its head into your door and asking a question, rather than something you need to "submerge into" like some sort of virtual reality.

I look forward to the day when every $5 Swatch watch gives you your phone's alerts. At that point, the glowing rectangle will become only a productivity device: something for creation, live collaboration, or media consumption; something you intentionally engage with for defined periods. But not something you need to context-switch back to every three minutes to see if you got an email, and end up reading HN while you've got it open.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow

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