So the big rumor bouncing around the tech press this week is that Apple has something like a hundred engineers quietly working on a wrist-worn device. The New York Times ran the story Sunday, and by Monday everybody and their cousin was writing "iWatch" think pieces, complete with mockup renders that nobody involved has actually seen. Supposedly it uses curved glass, supposedly it does health tracking, supposedly, supposedly. I want to be clear up front: I don't buy it, or at least I don't buy that it's going to be good.
Here's my problem. I've had a Pebble on my wrist since the second week of January (paid $150 for it back during the Kickstarter, waited about nine months for the thing to actually ship) and now I finally get to complain about it in real time instead of in the abstract. And it's fine! It's a neat little e-paper screen that buzzes when I get a text so I don't have to dig my phone out of my coat pocket at my desk. That's basically the whole feature set. It does not want to be my computer. It does not want to run apps, browse the web, or replace anything I already own. It wants to be a very good notification light, and it mostly succeeds at that.
Which is why I'm skeptical every time a company gets pitched as being about to reinvent the wrist. We've had "smart" watches before (Sony's had one for two or three years now, Microsoft tried SPOT watches back in the mid-2000s and I genuinely forgot that happened until I was writing this sentence) and none of them stuck because a watch screen is the size of a large postage stamp and touchscreens on postage stamps are miserable to use with actual adult fingers. Rumors this early always describe the platonic ideal of a product: infinite battery life, gorgeous curved glass, built-in health sensors, no mention of the part where you have to charge it every night on a little dock next to your bed like some kind of pet.
I'll say this though — if anyone's going to make a wrist computer people actually want to wear, Apple's at least got a track record of shipping the boring parts well. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, it was just the first one where the scroll wheel didn't feel like garbage and the sync software didn't crash every third launch. So if this thing is real (and it might not even ship this year, or ever, rumors are rumors), the interesting question isn't whether they can cram a screen onto a strap. Anyone can do that. It's whether they can make me want to look at my wrist instead of my phone, which is a genuinely hard design problem and not a "let's put curved glass on it" problem.
Unrelated tangent, but it happened the same day as the SOTU last night, so it's stuck in my head: the President signed an executive order on cybersecurity hours before the speech, about sharing threat info between the government and companies that run stuff like power grids. I only caught about ten minutes of the actual address because I was making dinner and burned a pan of onions doing it, but the cyber stuff got maybe ninety seconds of airtime and I doubt most people watching even clocked it. Feels like the kind of thing that'll matter more in three or four years than it does this week, which is usually how policy stuff goes — nobody notices until the thing it was quietly preventing doesn't happen.
Anyway. My actual prediction on the watch thing: it's at least a year out if it's real at all, and when it lands the reviews are going to spend the first two paragraphs on the hardware and the next six complaining about battery life. Put a pin in this post and yell at me in the comments if I'm wrong. Also if anyone else has a Pebble and has figured out how to stop the vibration motor from sounding like a dying bee, email me, because I have not solved that one.