No News Is Bad News
“No news is good news,” right?
Usually, yes. But as far as the popular idiom goes, Apple Watch seems the exception that proves the rule: The last few weeks have seen a major dearth of Apple Watch-related news, and that’s a very bad thing.
Two weeks ago, the top story all week was a pregnancy test in an Apple Watch box. Last week, it was about a kid who had an urgent medical issue that his Apple Watch helped him identify and treat. The latter is certainly more impactful and meaningful than the pitifully trite former, but neither story is something that should dominate Apple Watch reportage for more than a day, especially with the launch of watchOS 2.
Indeed, with said launch, we expected a flood of pre-approved, imaginative new native apps. Those are trickling in slowly, but there’s still nothing of any real merit to present, critique, or dissect. The integrated Complications for third-party apps that support them are hit or miss, and while there’s some utility there to be sure, there’s nothing to write home — or, in my case, work — about.
Yet.
And that’s just it: This device is going to take a lot of time to catch on. It’s already performing up to Apple’s probable expectations for the first generation, but its ebb and flow in the public eye is an issue, leaving coverage scant and empty by mainstream standards. Apple has stopped advertising it heavily in the wake of more important things, and the company needs to integrate its coming iPhone 6S, Apple TV, and iPad Pro pushes with the wearable in order to maximize mindshare. Yes, Apple Watch already leads the smartwatch world in that regard, but — to buck another idiom — enough is never enough when it comes to Apple and profit potential.
At any rate, lately I’ve been forced into rethinking how to cover this thing. Yes, the emphasis will be on apps and their implications going forward, as we both preview and review the best ones to hit the App Store. (And developers, remember: We invite you to use our custom, free utility to show off your work in an embeddable fashion unavailable anywhere else.) But critical discussion of the device has hit critical mass, and there’s very little left to say until Apple and the many clever third parties out there go out of their way to give us more. Right now, I’m feeling like a poor man’s Hunter S. Thompson, forced to go gonzo with this thing without the array of drugs to make the mundane actually interesting.
So get ready for some personal use stories and more scatterbrained, conspiratorial, speculative posts, because right now, the Apple Watch blogosphere is deader than Pebble.