Back from the long weekend and my brain still isn't really in gear, so tonight instead of doing anything productive I just sat here refreshing a liveblog for two hours. The D11 conference kicked off tonight out at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg's thing, and like every year the opening night slot went to a big-name exec doing the on-stage interview. This time it was Tim Cook.
I've never been to one of these conferences and probably never will, but I have a weird soft spot for reading the liveblogs anyway. Theres something almost more interesting about the liveblog than the actual polished writeup that shows up the next morning — you get all the half-finished sentences, the "wait he just said something" moments, the reporter typing faster than they can think. Its messy in a way I like. Real-time and a little dumb, the way actual conversation is.
Anyway, the wearables question came up, obviously, because it always does now. Ever since the iWatch rumors started circulating earlier this year every single interview with an Apple exec turns into a game of "will you confirm or deny the wrist computer." Cook did what Cook does, which is talk around it without really saying anything. Something about how there's a lot of room in that whole category and a lot of experimentation happening industry-wide right now, nothing that sounded like an actual announcement. Which, fine, I didn't expect one. Nobody watching expected one. But it's funny how many column inches get generated out of a guy declining to answer a question.
Heres my actual opinion though, since apparently I have one: I don't want a smartwatch. I've worn the same Casio since I was probably fifteen years old and the entire appeal of it is that I never think about it. I don't charge it, I don't pair it with anything, I replace the battery every three or four years at the mall kiosk and forget about it again. The idea of strapping something to my wrist that needs to be plugged in every night sounds like a downgrade dressed up as an upgrade. Maybe I'll eat these words in a year if whatever Apple or Google or Samsung ships turns out to be genuinely great. But right now, from where I'm sitting, the whole category feels like it's being willed into existence by rumor blogs more than by any actual demand from actual people.
The other thing that stuck with me from the liveblog was Cook talking about Apple TV, still calling it a hobby, but the kind of hobby that keeps growing every quarter whether they market it or not. Thats been his line for a couple years now and it's starting to feel like a bit, honestly — at some point "hobby" stops being an accurate description and starts being a dodge, same as the wearables non-answer. I get why he does it. If you call something a real product line you're implicitly setting expectations for it. If you call it a hobby you get all the upside with none of the pressure. Smart, in a corporate-speak kind of way, even if it's a little transparent after you've heard it enough times.
Nobody on stage brought up Glass tonight, which surprised me a little given how much oxygen that topic has been sucking up all spring. Maybe that's a Google conversation and not really Cook's to have an opinion on, or maybe Mossberg just didn't get to it in the time they had. The session ran long as it was.
Its a weird kind of event to follow from a couch three thousand miles away, honestly. You're getting secondhand jokes, secondhand pauses, secondhand crowd reactions typed out in real time by someone who is presumably also trying to drink the free conference coffee and not spill it on their laptop. I don't know that I learned anything tonight I couldn't have gotten from tomorrow's summary post. But there's a specific kind of pleasure in watching something happen as it happens, even filtered through somebody else's keyboard, even when the news itself amounts to a guy in a black t-shirt declining to confirm a rumor. D11 runs through Thursday, so there's more of this coming, and I'll probably keep the tab open.