The Apple Watch

by Charles Miller on September 10, 2014

I stopped wearing a watch when I started carrying a phone.

The problem Apple faces is that these days the wrist watch is far more a piece of functional jewelry than it is a thing people depend on to tell the time. Apple have gone some way to address this with multiple faces, sizes, metals and bands, but it will take a significant shift in taste for fashion to look past the fact that at heart it's an oblong block.

Donna predicted before the event that Apple would be getting fashion houses involved in making bands or faces for their watch. That seems even more likely since the reveal.

Much of the appeal of watches as fashion items are their retro-fetishistic throwback to precise arrangements of cogs and wheels, often made visible in the design so wearers can imagine some wizened Swiss genius putting the mechanism together with a loupe and tiny tweezers whenever they check their wrist.

The mechanical precision behind the Apple Watch is likely orders of magnitude beyond that, but it is sealed away from appreciation.

I will probably buy the first generation Apple watch because I am a nerd and I like nerd toys, but I would be surprised if it turned out to be more than a novelty I keep forgetting to put on in the morning.

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