"Don't Buy A Watch That Makes You Wait"

Nilay Patel writing for The Verge:

But then I look at the Apple Watch and it’s so obviously underpowered. We can sit around and argue about whether speeds and feeds matter, but the grand ambition of the Apple Watch is to be a full-fledged computer on your wrist, and right now it’s a very slow computer. If Apple believes the Watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch’s processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves. It’s a hard road, but Apple is obviously uniquely suited to invest in ambitions that grand, with billions in the bank, a top-notch chip design unit, and the ability to focus on the long-term.

The “grand ambition” of the Apple Watch is not to be a full-fledged computer on your wrist. In fact, Tim Cook pretty much said this when he unveiled it in 2014:

What we didn’t do is take the iPhone and shrink the user interface down and strap it on your wrist.

I don’t disagree with Patel that the Apple Watch can be slow, but it’s not really slow where it’s most important. Notifications, Health Tracking, and Complications work just fine on the Watch. Would I mind if they were faster? Of course not.

Patel goes on to pose this question:

Are smartwatches computers, or not? And if they’re computers, how fast do they have to be to be useful computers? The most interesting thing about the Apple Watch is how sharply it throws those questions into relief.

I’m going to argue that smart watches are computers, but not in the way we might think of computers. Like the iPod, which technically was a computer, we weren’t infatuated with how fast it brought up a song or played a video. The mistake Apple made was giving the Watch too much functionality to start. Yes, the Watch is a computer. But my TV remote is a computer, too. There are different levels of computers: some that truly require speed, and some that don’t. The Apple Watch doesn’t need to be insanely fast to be a hit. It needs to be independent and offer a better user interface.