On September 9th, 2014 Apple unveiled their iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch to the world. It was a really poorly kept secret that Apple was working on a wristwatch, so nobody was really surprised when Apple came out with their new designs. All we didn’t know what to what extent Apple was going to go with the technology.

They released more details on Apple Watch. The more I learned about the device the less I found myself thinking it was a good idea. There are so many places where this new watch is a problem.

Humans Have Limited Attention

We haven’t learned how to properly cope with the iPhone and now Apple is going to release an even more disruptive and attention-stealing device on the population. I’ve heard stories of crackdowns in Chicago where the police were pulling over people who were using their mobile devices while they should be driving their motor vehicles, and then learn that on the heels of the crackdown that the police recorded nearly everyone was breaking the law. Pulling over those people would have effectively shut down the entire highway! We just do not have the proper respect for all the technology in our lives, we cannot cope with these bright shiny attention-stealing devices while we are in command of an even larger device that requires our undivided attention at all times. So now Apple is going to put something even brighter and shinier on our wrists and we’re going to have what little attention that is left between our vehicles and our mobile devices divided again by this cleverness strapped to our wrists.

The tight integration between iPhones and Apple Watch will make our addictions to these devices even more challenging to master as well. Many people I know have a very hard time disconnecting from their devices anyways, now that there is an intimate extension of that device that we wear? I can only see this getting worse for those people who want others attention when we are all physically together. I’ve heard anecdotal stories where entire families sit in one room but nobody talks to anyone else because they are all besotted with their technology. What will this mean when the technology is always with us and on our wrists?

Haptics

The Apple Watch, a wearable device includes technology that includes haptics, or the sense of motion or vibration, both in the user interface with the light tap versus the deep press and the vibrating device buried deep into the watch itself. This will only worsen our abilities to control our attention and in itself is a place where we are going to have trouble. The watch can be paired to another watch and send heartbeats across the network, it’s Apple’s romantic notion of intimate communication. I can foresee a paired watch between a married couple and the husband feels his wifes pulse quicken, he worries that she’s having a stroke or a heart attack and rushes home to find a strange car in his driveway and a strange man in his bed. Cheating spouses is just the tip of the iceberg, this watch could be used to cheat in so many other places – cheat at the Casino with a complicated card-counting or odds-calculating routine piped into the players Apple Watch, or exam cheating by looking at the watch and seeing the letters for the answers appear as drawings on the Apple Watches screen.

How will these situations play out? For cheating spouses, there are the courts, so that’s rather a dull thing, but for the others I could see a new no-watch policy being extended to driving vehicles, entry into a casino, and standardized testing events like the SAT.

Nothing for the Sinister

The one thing that I noticed after discussing the Apple Watch with someone I know who is left-handed, that the device completely abandons functionality for the left-handed amongst us. It’s a hard choice Apple has made. Either you build a right-handed watch and a left-handed watch, or include handedness configurability in your design. It’s obvious after looking at the demo pieces that Apple has nothing set aside for the left-handed of us and have left a significant part of the population out in the cold. They could still use the device, but it will be much more awkward for them to actually use the device. I can see the detraction of non-handedness to be a compelling reason to not go ahead and purchase an Apple Watch.

Another Power Hungry Device

The Apple Watch is power hungry. It needs to charge nightly in order to continue to function. I find myself looking at the function of my wristwatch, a Seiko 5 Analog Automatic and immediately find what I have on the end of my arm, this watch, to be much more useful and compelling than this Apple Watch. My Seiko, if I care for it properly will never need winding as the mechanical automatic winder will never wear down or degrade or stop working. My motions feed the watch, and as long as I wear it every day, just living my life means that my watch will continue to count out seconds and sweep out the minutes and hours. My Seiko cannot do all the things that the Apple Watch can, but it can do the one thing a wristwatch should do very well and that is keep track of time. So far my Seiko has retained proper time for the few months I’ve had it. There is no technology in there that is synchronizing it to atomic time, and there is no need for that precision in my life. A watch that is bound to the power grid seems to be a risk to me, and since the most recent power outage, which for me was last night, the idea that my fancy Apple Watch could run down and just be a chunk of expensive metal and glass really concerns me.

Welcome to the Apple Silo, Penthouse Level

The Apple Watch creates an entire new floor to the Apple lifestyle silo. People are usually drawn in with a consumer device, like an iPod Nano or an iPhone, and then they are buying Macs and now the Apple Watch. I have to admit that Apple has a very good compelling company story, and they are leveraging this story magnificently well. They know that one Apple device usually turns into another, and before you know it you are knee-deep in the Apple Digital Lifestyle. The watch requires the iPhone to function, this is a very bold and possibly hazardous step for Apple to take. All the rest of their devices are independent devices, but this one, this Watch, is utterly dependent on an iPhone to function. I think this is the first fundamental break with the legacy of Steve Jobs and represents a really dangerous case for Apple. They are betting sales on pre-existing devices. That is either very ballsy or really stupid. This will only reinforce the cultural divide between people who flaunt this luxury versus people who do not. If you have an Apple Watch, then you necessarily have an iPhone. I can see this becoming a new and really upsetting hazard in big cities. Before it was a mystery what was plugged into a pair of headphones, it could have been anything from a cheap transistor radio, to a cassette Walkman to an iPod or iPhone. Now it’s really something quite different. If you see someone with an Apple Watch, you know that their iPhone isn’t far away. You are advertising that you have an iPhone to everyone who notices your watch. In small communities where theft and robbery isn’t a problem this won’t even show up on the map, but I foresee in bigger cities like Chicago and New York, that this will take on a new life all its own. A new spate of “Apple Watch” theft events. People getting mugged because of what they have on their wrists marks them out as being ripe for the plucking.

Price

The Apple Watch comes in three editions. There is the plain edition, the sports edition, and the luxury edition. The different editions put an embarrassing irony to the features that the phones are sold around, the replaceable wristbands most specifically. Why couldn’t it have just been one watch with different bands for different editions? Make the initial purchase for the core device and then let people swap out wristbands for the luxury components of the deal, if you want a canvas strap, a rubber one or a gold one, let those be options. Instead of that, there are three distinct Apple Watch varieties.

Then there is the price. $349 for the Apple Watch! In our society, what middle-class person would dangle such an expensive bit of technology on their wrists? Again I’m drawn back to my Seiko 5. The comparison of prices for what I need in a watch is all the reason enough to turn my back on the Apple Watch. My Seiko 5 cost me $70, that’s five times cheaper than the Apple Watch for a device that will never run out of power for as long as I don’t run out of power! It blew my mind, when I saw the price tag on the Apple Watch. I figured this could have been a jubilee celebration from Apple, they have billions of dollars buried in their company treasury, they could have made the Apple Watch a loss-leader for their iPhones, priced it at $70 and it would fly out the doors. Apple would lose money on each unit, but they’d make it up on the back side with all the cultural silo’ing that comes with using a device like an Apple Watch which necessitates an iPhone to go along with it.

Apple is betting that their Apple Watch will play as much as their iPads and iPhones did, selling millions of units. It may sell, and it very well may sell well, but I don’t think that $349 is worth this sort of technology. If it could do more, or if it was independent of the iPhone that might have helped, but it’s expensive, hazardous, and risky. I can’t see it really shining in sales numbers like the other devices did. Apple should have set it’s very lofty estimates for sales of the Apple Watch much lower. It’ll likely have the same sales numbers as the iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

I won’t be buying the Apple Watch. I have everything that I need already. The iPhone I have is enough, and my Seiko 5 does a magnificent job and you can’t beat the features or the price. I can’t imagine anyone I know actually going ahead and buying this thing, but we will see how that all pans out next year when it’s available for sale. This is going to be a hurdle that Apple doesn’t jump over gracefully.