The Semiotics of Apple Watch Glancing
After what seems like a time out, there’s been a resurgence of chatter about the Apple Watch. We passed the six month anniversary of the release date. Some intrepid Apple Watchers have put together an upcoming one-day conference called Glance. The folks at Wristly, a research group on the subject that releases new surveys weekly, recently published one pointing to data about why folks have stopped using the Apple Watch. John Gruber tossed a daring fireball into the mix by mentioning on a podcast that he no longer wore his Apple Watch.
All of this amid reports that the Apple Watch will be a big seller this holiday season. Apple won’t release numbers yet, so that remains a meaningless guessing game. That means every one gets to fill the Internet with speculation. That trend is toward the negative. XX Reasons Not to Buy an Apple Watch This Christmas flicker across the Internet like holiday lights increasing utility bills.
It’s not all bad news. There are stories of the Apple Watch being used to help folks be more productive, lose weight, improve their health, and even save a life.
The Apple Watch has its fans. (I’m one.) It has its detractors. It has its benefits, and it has its faults. Most who actually look beneath the surface reactions seem to be coalescing around a view that Notifications and the Health and Activity features are the attraction points. But the experience so far has illustrated in bright colors that new gadget categories probably deserve a more skeptical wait-and-see examination, instead of a giddy glance.
The semiotics behind a watch, any watch, smart or dumb, is all about the Glance. A quick look, you have the info you need. No muss. No fuss. Apple even adopted this as the name of one of the device’s features. But the Apple Watch, even with the advent of watchOS 2.x, still requires too long a stare with several of its features to fulfill that expectation. There’s muss and fuss.
Performance issues still annoy, as do connectivity problems with the corresponding iPhone. These two are interrelated and combine to turn what should be a quick glance into what feels like the beginnings of a hypnotic trance. Native apps were supposed to bring about a new freedom from the supposed tether to the iPhone. Some arrived. Most haven’t come close to fulfilling what many thought were the expectations hyped by Apple. Did Apple really not understand the limitations?
Another feature, allowing Native apps to display Complications on the watch face, also seems to have missed the promised target. In my experience even some of the indigenous apps from Apple (as distinguished from native 3rd party versions) have trouble updating Complications to make them truly glance acceptable. Again performance and connectivity issues are the most likely culprits.
Even time keeping seems to be a bit odd at times. At least three times in the last month, the Apple Watch’s vaunted “stand-up” feature has given me credit for standing in 12 out of 12 hours. Bravo. Except in each of those instances I’d only been awake for about 10 to 10 and 1/2 hours.
And then, there’s what appears to be some inconsistency with Health and Activity monitoring. I’ve had some issues that I’m still working with Apple Support to try and nail down. I’ve seen reports others have as well. The key here is consistency and that appears lacking or consistently inconsistent. To be frank, I’m actually surprised that Apple Support still seems to be in early learning stages about some features of the Apple Watch.
When Tim Cook starts doling out hints that Apple’s efforts in the Health and Fitness area might lead to things “adjacent” to the Apple Watch in order to steer clear of time consuming FDA regulators, it doesn’t take more than a glance to discern a deeper meaning reading between those lines.
From a fashion standpoint, I can’t imagine the Apple Watch being more than a one-season hot ticket that lands in a dead jewelry drawer once the user gets frustrated with the upkeep. The Apple Watch requires an awful lot of fiddling and tweaking to get its functionality tuned just so. The initial set-up process is time consuming and not well defined enough to show progress. Those giving the Apple Watch as a Christmas gift would be well served to open the package and set things up in advance in the way they might assemble a bicycle the night before. Installing apps is a hit or miss proposition with some apps installing automatically after an update to the corresponding iOS version and some not, regardless of the setting on your watch.
Some see the challenge Apple has with the Apple Watch as one in a sequence of less than “Apple-like” product launches in 2015; possibly indicating scattered focus. That might be the case. But in looking at the Apple Watch specifically, I believe the difficulties stem more from a lack of understanding of what this version one gadget was and what it was capable of from the outset.
The first version of the Apple Watch may indeed point towards the future, a shape-shifting commodity Apple seems to be selling a lot (too much?) of these days. Being a geek, I’m still along for the ride with the Apple Watch. I’ll tolerate the muss and the fuss. For John and Mary Jane Q. Public that might be a different story. This wouldn’t be the first Apple product that launched without a clear definition of its role. It may be the first Apple product to launch when the window of time for discovering that definition in the marketplace may close more quickly than even a furtive glance allows.
