Watch Watch: I don't really care what the Apple Watch does, but if you do, we've got a demo you can watch

Is this thing hideous or what? By comparison Dick Tracy's anciently futuristic wristphone (see below) was a thing of beauty.

by Ken

Since I really want to know as little as I can get away with about the Apple Watch, I'm just going to go with Alexandra Petri on this, in her washingtonpost.com ComPost post "In defense of the wristwatch, after Apple unveils a watch of its own."

I admit that, as long as I'm within range of a computer, I often have a tendency to poke at e-mail oftener than I should. Okay, sometimes every few minutes, but usually that's only when I have a really, really lot of work to avoid. Yesterday, I admit, I was peeking at the e-mailbox more frequently than I should have been, but in fairness I have to say that an awful lot of interesting things were coming in.

And then there were breathless live-blogging-type reports from the Apple press conference. Yes, real-time reports of develoments as they developed at, ferchrissakes, a press conference, a lousy new-product announcement.

I realize that the future of the Modern World is generally held, if less securely in the post-Steve Jobs era, to be more or less the future of Apple's new-product developments. But even though I have been an Apple customer for, I don't know, 20 years?, since I bought my first (used) Mac, I'm all too clearly not on the company conveyor belt.

I do have two iPods, one of which was partial payment for a job I did and the other of which was a gift, but I've never really learned to use them. (In the years when I was listening to music portably it was all on CD. Say, weren't those portable CD players once iSomethings? It seems so long ago.) I don't have an iPhone or an iPad and don't want either. (I have a different kind of "smartphone," which doesn't seem that smart to me, since it doesn't do anything. Mostly it affords me the privilege and pleasure of paying out a considerable sum each month for cell-phone service I never use, but I guess that constitutes pulling its weight.) I know there's such a thing now as Apple TV, but I don't know what it is, and I figure if I don't know what it is, I don't need it.

Come to think of it, I'm also now a couple of decimal generations behind on my Mac OS. Once the "improvements" started being mostly about finger-swiping, which I don't do, and nothing else in the upgrade list looks like it will remotely improve my life, I started passing. Eventually, of course, I'll have to upgrade just to be able to run current software, but I'll deal with that when it happens, just as I have in the past -- in proper panic and desperation.

One thing I learned in the course of those breathless roll-out e-mails yesterday from Apple Central is that the Cupertino kids were finally unleashing a New Product on the world --

THE APPLE WATCH

As with Apple TV, I don't really know what the Apple Watch is and don't really want to find out. The chances that it will improve my life seem infinitesimal.

So I'm going to trust Alexandra Petri's preliminary go-around with the newly announced electronic creature, even though I can see that we're not at all the same kind of users.

For example, she pronounces herself what I might call "time-resistant."

[A]s a committed Late Person, I think the rise of smartphones is bad enough. This watch trend needs to be nipped in the bud. If everyone has Apple Watches, we will all know what time it is. And that would be terrible.

Actually, I myself am kind of time-obsessive. I need to know what time it is, well, pretty darned frequently. And over the years, especially with the advent of wonderfully accurate quartz watches. (I was terrible with the wind-up kind, always winding them either too much or too little, neither conducive to producing regular time readouts of any credibility.) I now own three not-very-expensive watches that suit me just fine and also guarantee that on any given morning, if I can't find where I set down the watch I was wearing yesterday when I took it off, instead of setting off on a mad Watch Hunt, I can just slip on the "alternate" watch, and on those less frequent days when both "regular" watches are in hiding, there's still that third one in the box, assuming I remember where the box is. It's a system that runs like, well, clockwork.

The watch I actually like best, a Timex (I usually have a Timex), doesn't even have a date readout -- just the time. The ones that have a date readout require that extra adjustment on the first of any month following a non-31-day month, and I rarely remember exactly how this is accomplished on any particular watch. Sometimes I realize I'm attempting to duplicate the method used on a watch that went out of my life ten years ago. As for the day-and-date kind, well, that's several grades above my resetting skill level. It's not that I always know the date, or (goodness knows) the day of the week, but I figure there are other ways of getting hold of that information. Like with a calendar.

Still, for all our user differences, Alexandra and me, I note that we approach the advent of the Apple Watch with kindred skepticisms. And she stakes out her Apple Watch position promptly, in no uncertain terms: "No, Apple," she declares. "This time you have gone too far."

You may have made an Apple Watch, but for once, I must say: I do not want what you have to offer. I will not bite the apple, serpent!

You may have designed some fancy new product with all kinds of capabilities. Fine. The Apple Watch can do all kinds of things that a traditional watch cannot. Monitor your heart rate (this seems like something out of “Gattaca”). Tell a touch from a tap (I can barely tell a touch from a tap myself). Track your every movement (if I wanted my every movement to be tracked, I would just violate my parole). Show you text messages. (Not wanting to receive any text messages just now was why I left the house with my watch and not my phone in the first place!) All of these features are very nice, if that is the kind of thing you like.

Alexandra, for one, can produce a list of features of regular watches which, while not identical to my own, is at least headed in a similar direction. We've already touched on one of the things a regular watch does which endears it to her:

Tell you what time it is while giving you no other information.

This last thing is somewhat more valuable than I think we realize. We live in a great age of More Information Than You Require, where if you are not careful, any query can send you down an Internet rabbit hole from which you emerge, dazed, six hours later, having read all there is to read about the 2003 “Peter Pan” for reasons you are unable to recall. Just getting one piece of information from any tool is increasingly rare — and, correspondingly, precious.

That's pretty convincing, don't you think? Here are the other things a "traditional" watch can do which she wonders if the Apple Watch can:

Be slightly, slightly off the correct time in a way that makes you late to everything?

Stop mysteriously one day when you have a lot of things to get to so you don’t notice until you realize it’s been 2:40 for the past several hours?

Fall into water and stop working? (That I bet it can.) [I bet it can too, Alexandra. -- Ed.]

Tell you what time it is, loosely, if for some reason you do not have your cell phone with you?

Either have a digital display, which apparently proclaims to business associates that you “don’t know how to tell time” (a valuable skill in case you ever get transported to 1830 for some reason), or a round face with series of Roman numerals on it, the last holdouts from an empire that has been extinct for more than a thousand years, probably long enough that we should be able to admit freely that XII is a dumb way of writing “12.”

Give you something to look at to tell the meaning of “clockwise” or “counterclockwise,” otherwise baffling and meaningless terms with little relevance to modern life.

Clash horribly with your outfit.

Require a tiny battery that is only sold somewhere in the Far Distant Suburbs and has to be installed by an elderly jeweler who only works during the precise hours you have to be in the office.

Actually, after decades of battery angst, I overcame this source of grief when I stumbled onto a lovely Chinese gentleman who has a watch stall in a storefront on Canal Street. He's so good, I almost look foward to my batteries dying.

With any luck, I'll go before he does -- or at least maybe I'll have stopped worrying about the time so much.


NOW THIS IS WHAT I CALL A WATCH

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