So today's one of those two-clock-changes days, except it's really one clock change and one calendar reminder that's been sitting in my head since I saw the invite go around a couple weeks back. Daylight saving kicked in this morning: clocks jumped forward at 2am, which means I lost an hour of sleep I definitely needed after staying up too late reading MWC recaps — and tomorrow Apple's doing their event out in San Francisco that they, somewhat cutely, titled "Spring Forward." I don't know if that's supposed to be a coincidence or not but it's landing exactly on the weekend where half the country is already grumbling about the actual spring-forward, so either someone on Apple's events team has a sense of humor or nobody thought about it at all.
Anyway. The clock thing first, because it's annoying me more than it should. My phone fixed itself sometime overnight without me touching it, same with my laptop, but the stove in my kitchen is still sitting there an hour behind and probably will be until sometime in April when I get fed up enough to actually stand there and hold down the buttons. Same with the clock in my car, which has never once been set correctly since I bought it because the button sequence for adjusting it is buried three menus deep and I refuse to look it up again. I did this same complaint last year almost to the day, I'm pretty sure, and I'll do it again next year. Some things about having a house full of little electronics just never get better even as everything else supposedly gets smarter.
On the Apple thing: I'm mildly interested but not holding my breath for anything that changes my mind. We already know the Watch exists (they showed it off back in September), so tomorrow's really just about pricing and when you can actually buy one, from what I can tell. I've got a real opinion here and it's not a popular one on the parts of the internet I read: I don't think I want a smartwatch. Not this one, not the next one. I like my watch being a watch. It winds, it doesn't need charging, and if I drop my phone in a puddle my wrist isn't also affected. Maybe I'll eat those words in a year, that's happened before with stuff I was sure about, but for now that's where I stand.
The bigger tech news of the last week, if you missed it, was all coming out of Barcelona at Mobile World Congress. Samsung showed off the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge on Sunday, and everyone's talking about that curved-edge screen on the Edge model like it's the second coming. I played with one at a friend's place who'd seen photos and was hyped about it and I'll be honest, I don't get the appeal yet. It looks neat in product shots, sure, but the actual functional case for a screen that wraps around the side of the phone hasn't been explained to me in a way that isn't "notifications peek out the side," which feels like a solution hunting for a problem. HTC put out the One M9 the same day and it got a lot less attention, which feels a little unfair given some of the camera stuff they were touting, but that's how these launch weeks go — one product sucks up all the oxygen in the room and the other just quietly exists.
What strikes me about this stretch of the calendar is how much of it is just scheduling. Samsung picked the day before MWC officially opened to make sure they'd own the headlines. Apple picked a Monday in March that happens to be the day after everyone's clocks move. None of this is accidental, and none of it is really about the hardware being ready on some particular Tuesday. It's about attention, which I guess is the actual product every one of these companies is selling regardless of what's in the box.
I've got coffee going and a call in twenty minutes according to a clock I still haven't corrected, so I should probably go deal with that before I show up an hour early or late depending on which timepiece I trust. Same time next week, whatever that actually means around here for the next few weeks.