Why I Won't be Buying the Apple Watch
Apple dropped their new “innovation” last week at their Spring Forward event. I am not an Apple fanboy, but I do love my 13” Macbook Pro Retina; I think it’s the best piece of hardware they’ve made that suits my needs. Yet I watched the whole keynote because I was excited to see how Apple was imagining their watch to be. Sadly, I was disappointed. I had no plans of buying the Apple Watch before the keynote, and Apple didn’t manage to change that. If anything, they made me more reluctant of not only their products, but the company itself.
1. I have the original Pebble watch. It does everything I need from a watch.
It shows me time. It shows me notifications. I can pick and choose the apps that are able to send notifications to my watch. They have decent apps. Their developer platform nice. I even made an app for Pebble. And the biggest “feature”, wait for it… it shows me time. In a simple, no-BS way. I don’t really need anything else from a screen on my wrist, and I definitely don’t want to be connected to the world even more than I already am.
2. It doesn’t have a USP.
Macbook had a great finish, a great hardware. iPhone has a gorgeous display. Apple Watch has… something… Maybe they didn’t tell us. Oh right. You can get notifications.
The Apple Watch looks like and works like any other way on the market. Not a great sell. Especially, considering…
3. It is way too overpriced.
Just like all Apple products, the Watch is way too overpriced. Starting at $550 and going all the way up to a ridiculous $17,000. But unlike other Apple products, there is no justification for the price. The looks are OK (Moto 360 is beautiful), the bee-hive UI is lame (IMO). I would not pay 2.5x for a watch that has the same, if not less, utility and would go obsolete in 15.5 months.
4. Needs to be charged every night.
Seriously? I charge my computer multiple times a day, my phone every night and now I’ll need to remember to charge my watch otherwise I wouldn’t be able to make phone calls from my wrist. No thank you.
My Pebble is great and gives me 4-5 days of charge and charges to 100% battery in about an hour. It’s magical.
5. Their ecosystem is too closed.
Again. Typical Apple and the reason why I am not using an iPhone - their devices’ ecosystem is too tight and only gives you 100% utility when all devices are used concurrently. That means your $2500+ investment going obsolete every year. The Watch needs an iPhone to be useful (other than time and basic fitness tracking, but you can get that from the $99 Pebble).
Android Wear has a much more open ecosystem of developers and consumers and even the best of the Android Wear watches cost less than half of the basic Apple watch.
I am not saying that these would be the reasons why the Watch will fail. In fact, the Watch might be a success. It won’t become mainstream but Apple won’t be losing any money. I just don’t see myself shelling out $600 to get one of my own.