Rene Ritchie's Apple Watch Review

Rene Ritchie on his two week experience with Apple Watch:

The Apple Watch, poetically, is a gizmo you can get wet and need to feed after midnight. But it’s absolutely a first-generation gizmo. It needs to be constantly tethered to an iPhone, apps are just extensions, the interactivity model could use some refinement, features some rounding out, and it’s proven incredibly hard for Apple to get enough of them to market in a timely manner.

Yet even now, in this first generation, the utility far exceeds the limitations. I may not need an Apple Watch, but I want one. I could wait for generation two or three but I’d lose a year or two in the waiting, and I’d lose being part of the discovery process that will get all of us to the inevitable future. I really don’t want to miss out on that process.

This is exactly how I feel. No smartwatch will be a necessity for the foreseeable future. But then again, what watch is? Everything about watches included the Apple Watch is about adding a tad bit of utility to an otherwise unused space on your body. Sure, you can wait a generation or two for everything to get better, but as Rene says, if you do, you’ll miss out on the journey of understanding why this product exists in the first place. Not everyone cares about that, but some do.

It’s also important not to treat this as a product that is essentially useless until version two or three. That’s not the case at all. It’s young with lots of room to grow. That, in my opinion, is the best way to view it.