A Hard Case to Make ⇥ theverge.com

And I’m not talking about the physical case of the Apple Watch. Josh Dzieza, the Verge:

But how do you get up on stage and say that the best thing about this new gadget is that it lets people use this other gadget, the one you spent the last eight years turning into a fetish object, less frequently? Of course you still need an iPhone for the Apple Watch, so it’s not like the watch threatens to replace the phone — but rhetorically it’s a tricky argument to make. You’d have to acknowledge that people can have fraught relationships with their phones, and that their attachment to them is deeply ambivalent. True, I feel relief when I check my phone and anxious when its battery dies, but that’s a very different type of obsession than the sort Apple encourages in its lavish videos of cold-forged steel watch cases. It’s much more compulsive and dependent. Making the best pitch for the watch would mean acknowledging that devices can be burdens, not just tools for empowerment.

Brilliantly said. This is what Apple failed to articulate clearly at Monday’s event. It’s not that they don’t know what the use case is, but if they can’t find a way to communicate this, it becomes a little like Twitter, insomuch as it’s impossible to explain it in a nutshell, but quickly becomes indispensable. Maybe word of mouth from real-world use will be what it takes.