I didn't buy an Apple Watch last night. But I stayed up for it anyway, which in hindsight is a weirder thing to admit than actually buying one would've been.
Preorders opened at 12:01am Pacific, which for me on the east coast meant 3:01am, which meant I was sitting in the dark with my laptop lit up like an idiot instead of sleeping like a normal 30-something with a job. The Apple Store app wouldn't even load right at first, just sat there spinning, and Apple's own site was doing that thing where it shows you the product but the "buy" button just isn't there yet, like a restaurant that seats you before the kitchen's open. Twitter was full of people doing the exact same thing I was doing, refreshing and complaining, which at least made the whole thing feel less pathetic.
Once it did load, the sticker shock was still real even though I'd known the numbers for weeks. $349 gets you the Sport, the aluminum one, the one that's basically "I want a smartwatch." $549 and up gets you stainless steel and a fancier band. And then there's the Edition, the gold one, which starts at $10,000 and goes up to $17,000 depending on the band. Seventeen thousand dollars. For a first-generation piece of electronics that Apple will almost certainly replace with something better in eighteen months. I get that it's a luxury flex and not actually aimed at people like me, but I still can't get over the idea of dropping that kind of money on a device with a battery that Apple hasn't even told anyone the real lifespan of yet.
Here's the part that actually got me though: I watched the shipping estimate for the base Sport model slide from "available April 24" to "ships in June" in something like the span of forty-five minutes. I had it in a cart just to see, not committed, and every time I refreshed the estimate had crept back further. By the time I gave up and went to bed it said June, and I've seen people since saying theirs said June before they'd even finished checkout. That's either an incredible flex of demand or a genuinely bad inventory plan, and honestly it's probably both. Apple's very good at making scarcity look like desire.
So why didn't I buy one. Partly the money, sure, I don't love spending $350+ on a version 1 of anything, I learned that lesson with the original iPad and its total lack of a camera. But mostly it's that I already wear a Pebble, and nobody talks about the Pebble anymore, which bugs me a little. It's plastic, the screen is black and white, it looks like a toy next to whatever Apple's making. But the battery lasts a week. A week! Not a day. I can wear it in the shower. It buzzes for texts and calendar stuff and that's genuinely all I use a watch for, and it does it without me thinking about charging it every night like one more phone. Apple Watch reviews aren't even out yet, nobody outside Cupertino has really used one for more than a demo-floor five minutes, and everyone's still going to buy it anyway on faith. Including, probably, me, eventually. Just maybe not at 3am on release night with a credit card in hand.
The other thing nagging at me is the band situation. There are something like six band styles at launch and I already know I'm going to end up wanting the Milanese loop, which is one of the pricier options, on top of whatever the watch itself costs. That's such an old trick — sell the thing, then sell the accessory that makes the thing actually nice — and I fall for it every single time with every gadget I own. My desk drawer is basically a graveyard of phone cases I bought because the default one felt cheap.
Anyway. If you preordered one, I want to hear how the wait actually goes, because June is a long time from now and I have a suspicion it's going to slip again before anyone's watch shows up at their door.