Apple Watch Review: Bliss, but Only After a Steep Learning Curve | Hacker News Reader

Apple Watch Review: Bliss, but Only After a Steep Learning Curve

nytimes.com

43 pointstysone14 comments

> my wife told me that I seemed to be getting lost in my phone less than in the past. She found that a blessing.

This is the first time I've heard the value-add of the watch over the phone phrased in a convincing way.

This is such garbage:

> Similarly, the most exciting thing about the Apple Watch isn’t the device itself, but the new tech vistas that may be opened by the first mainstream wearable computer. On-body devices have obvious uses in health care and payments. As the tech analyst Tim Bajarin has written, Apple also seems to be pushing a vision of the Watch as a general-purpose remote control for the real world, a nearly bionic way to open your hotel room, board a plane, call up an Uber or otherwise have the physical world respond to your desires nearly automatically.

Sorry, but how does being able to open your hotel room or call an Uber from your watch, instead of your phone, some kind of new revolution? Are there people who enter their hotel rooms or hail an Uber so often (i.e. multiple times in a single hour, every day) that pulling out the phone is an action worth optimizing?

There's a lot of potential in near-field communication features...such as a hotel door unlocking as I walk past it. But that has nothing to do with a wearable device; that could be accomplished with a phone as it is.

Did you use the Apple Watch? Why are you trashing a product review? At best you can be cynical or suspicious that he is over selling it. Don't you read a review to see what they thought of it?

Sorry, when you ask, "Why are you trashing a product review", are you suggesting that a product review is beyond critique? And if so, what is the purpose of your comment, except to critique a product-review-critiquing-comment?

To answer your question about using the Watch: no, I haven't. Which is why I haven't trashed the watch, but rather, trashing the OP -- who has used the Watch -- for coming up with gushing grandiose justification for the product rather than just talking about his experience with the product. It's as if he wants us to overlook the problem (as detailed in his own review) that the Watch itself may not be a revolution...but just wait and see

I'm all for speculating on the bigger picture, including inside a product review. But this speculation is just trash, which is why I'm critiquing it. He throws around the word "bionic" as if it didn't mean anything, and then he tries to dress up the activities of opening a hotel room or calling an Uber as tasks that will be profoundly changed by the paradigm of the Watch.

> Why are you trashing a product review?

Because reviews are not above criticism and he obviously saw something stupid in it ...

"OK Google, call a car."

/first

It's the usual Apple par with the rest of the best, but with slick shiny UI and great build quality.

The Google example is cool, even if, like the Watch, it is just slightly removed from just doing it through the phone. But the point is that that experience can already be built...but the physical form-factor is not the issue. First of all, you have to have intelligent and fast voice-command interpretation, which Siri is not up to yet. Second, people have to be OK with their device -- whether it be phone, watch, or Google Glass contact lens -- listening to them at all time. Is that tradeoff worth it just to be able to not press a button at the time you need to call a car? Questionable...but again, it's not really something particularly specific to the idea of wearables.

I think the author is describing how the smartphone became revolutionary for uses that were beyond its initial incarnation.

If you look at the sentence in context, the preceding paragraph says it is the smartphone that "became the basis of a wide range of powerful new tech applications, from messaging to ride-sharing to payments." I think the author was trying to say that having the world respond to your "desires nearly automatically" might open similar "new tech vistas." That's how I read it anyway.

Also, please consider the new Hacker News guideline against gratuitous negativity.

I understand the reasoning behind curating a community to promote the kind of discourse users desire, but the type of self censorship that this comment promotes unsettles me.

I feel like the "negativity" that HN is so concerned about could be dealt with through down votes. The "gratuitous negativity" edict feels Orwellian, and I question its value vs unintended consequences.

> Also, please consider the new Hacker News guideline against gratuitous negativity.

I'm glad for that guideline, but I didn't read the parent comment as gratuitous negativity, but as a legitimately posed criticism. That was my read.

As it happens I read the excerpted section differently when it was in context, but all that means is I disagreed with the parent's statement.

FWIW

Why is it garbage ? I am very much looking forward to being able to open my car and house doors using my iPhone. And in the case of my car those keys are very, very expensive to replace.

It is not inconceivable in the future to just take your phone and your watch and leave your wallet and keys entirely behind. This would work just fine in Australia for example where NFC is ubiquitous.

I think they'd need a major revolution in reliability and battery life before I'd consider leaving my keys and cash behind. As far as I know, all major smartphone brands and OSes will randomly crash, drain their batteries, or otherwise malfunction far too often to replace such essential items.

I'm surprised (or perhaps I shouldn't be) that the one review to make it to HN so far is the one that is gushing the most about this watch.

Yes it's the NY Times, but this is a tech gadget. I would have expected a NY Times review to be lower down the pecking order here.

edit: Refreshed HN and now I see the Verge review. Oops.

Weird, I saw the Verge review at first, but after refreshing I see NY Times

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