So the Apple Watch is out today. Actual delivery day, not preorder day, not try-it-on-in-a-store day (you still cant really do that unless you booked an appointment weeks ago). I know because my Twitter feed this morning was just wrist photos, one after another, mostly the $349 Sport in space gray. I did not buy one. I'm not going to pretend that's some principled stand either, I just dont have $349 sitting around right now and I have a weird prior grudge against buying version-one hardware from Apple after what my first-gen iPad put me through.
Funny enough I spent most of my actual launch day doing something way less glamorous: going through techpad's CSS fixing breakpoints, because Google flipped the switch on its mobile-friendly ranking change last Tuesday (the 21st) and I finally got paranoid enough to check whether this blog would get dinged for it. Ran the URL through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool and got a big red "Not mobile-friendly" for my own homepage. On my own blog. About mobile stuff, half the time. Embarrassing.
Turns out my sidebar was hard-set to 300px and never had a viewport meta tag at all, so on an actual phone the whole layout just rendered at desktop width and shrank down to nothing, tiny six-point text, the works. I dont know when exactly that broke, could've been a theme tweak from a year ago, could've been like that since 2013 for all I know. Nobody complains about this stuff, they just leave.
Anyway I burned about four hours last night adding <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> to the header and rewriting the sidebar to collapse under a media query at 600px instead of just... not existing on small screens. Not hard work, just tedious, the kind of thing where you keep resizing your browser window back and forth like an idiot testing every breakpoint by eye because you dont have a real device lab. I do not have an iPhone 6 to test on. I have my old 4S and my roommate's Nexus 5 and that's it, so that's what "testing" meant here.
Back to the watch for a second because I do have opinions. I backed the original Pebble Kickstarter back in 2012, wore it for about eight months, and then it just sat in a drawer because I got tired of charging yet another device every night. That's my whole hesitation with the Apple Watch honestly, not the price, not the software, just battery life fatigue. Apple's claiming "all day" battery on this thing which in my experience with wearables means "fine until 4pm if you dont use it much." We'll see. I'll probably cave and buy one eventually, maybe when the reviews settle and people have had them for a month instead of six hours, because right now every review out there is basically a first-impressions piece written by someone who unboxed the thing yesterday.
The gold Edition at $10,000 to $17,000 is the part that actually annoys me a little, not because I care what rich people buy, but because it means half the keynote and half the marketing push went toward convincing us this is a luxury object instead of a computer you wear. I get why, margins and all that, but it's a weird position for a company that made its name on democratizing good design to end up in.
One more thing while I'm complaining: can we talk about how every article this week has some variation of the phrase "the most personal device Apple has ever made" in the first paragraph? I counted four separate pieces using nearly identical language yesterday. Either everyone's cribbing off the same press release paragraph or nobody's editors are paying attention anymore. Probably both.
If you run any kind of site and you havent checked it against Google's mobile test tool yet, do it today, not because of some algorithm panic (the actual ranking impact from what I've read so far is pretty mild for now) but because your readers on phones deserve better than what mine were getting. Took me four hours. Yours might take twenty minutes if your theme isnt as old as mine.