Yes, iPhone Users “Need” An Apple Watch
It’s like a seatbelt for your life
Nearly every positive review I’ve seen of the new Apple Watch Series 4 — as well as virtually any new version of a tech product — contains three largely useless caveats. They are:
1. This product is not perfect.
2. It’s not worth upgrading from last year’s model.
3. Most people don’t really need this product.
I imagine that tech writers include these caveats to show that they are thoughtful, critical people who are neither paid-off shills, gushing/irrational fanboys, or clinically insane people unable to remember a time before electronics. It’s hard to think of any other reasons why reviewer after reviewer feels the need to qualify their writing with these caveats, since no reasonable person would claim that these are true of any product. No product (tech or otherwise) is perfect or ever will be, and the only people who would seriously consider replacing year-old electronics are A) Tech enthusiasts on plans specifically designed to facilitate yearly upgrades B) Rich people, or C) People who are greedy and/or don’t pay for their devices.
When it comes to the issue of “need”, the obvious answer is that the only thing humans “need” are breathable air, food, water, and shelter. So the whole premise of whether you “need” any modern product is inherently a false one, since people without those products won’t die spontaneously. You don’t “need” a refrigerator. You don’t “need” a smartphone. You don’t even “need” shoes. People survived for thousands of years without these things. They are not necessary for survival.
But if we’re going to use “need” when talking about tech, we should define “need” not as whether something is necessary for life, but if having it will greatly improve the quality of your life. If it can lengthen your life. And, when needed, it can save your life.
Based on that definition, I feel comfortable telling you that if you are an iPhone user, you need an Apple Watch. And if you don’t have an iPhone but want the benefits of a smartwatch that’s as good as the Apple Watch, you’re currently out of luck.
Apple Watch’s Three Main Functions
When the Apple Watch was first introduced on September 9, 2014, it was a famously unfocused device. That’s probably why it was pitched as something that could do many of the things an iPhone could, complete with the kind of App Store that made the iPhone a mass-market phenomenon. Instead of saying what the Watch was best for, Apple basically said, “You like the iPhone, right? It’s like that, but smaller and on your wrist.” But when the Watch finally got onto users’ wrists, it quickly became clear that the Watch — woefully slow and underpowered with a small screen, a confusing UI, and no native third-party apps — was definitely not a tiny iPhone. It didn’t seem to excel at anything, and what it could do it usually couldn’t do well. The Watch’s lack of clear purpose also explains why Apple decided to pursue the high-end luxury watch market with its ill-fated, ill-advised $10,000 gold Edition model, which is now just an expensive bauble since it no longer receives watchOS updates.
Flash forward to Apple’s 2018 September Event. As Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams strode the stage preparing to unveil the Apple Watch Series 4, he described the Watch as not a do-everything miniature iPhone, but a device that focused primarily on three things — connectivity, fitness, and health. This illustrated how much Apple has learned about the Watch in the four years since it debuted, and that experience has led to a newfound focus on the areas where the Watch, as a wearable device on the wrist, truly excels in ways the iPhone can’t match. Coincidentally, 2018 also marked the end of the high-priced Edition line.
That three-function focus is notable for three reasons:
1. Being able to stay in contact with people and receive messages, calls, and notifications, even when your iPhone is not nearby, is one of the Watch’s key features.
2. While “fitness” is a necessary aspect of “health”, Apple recognizes that the two are not the same thing, and they should be separated into two distinct categories.
3. That Williams described the Watch as “an intelligent guardian for your health”, showing that tracking your fitness and guarding your health are different things.
It’s within these three reasons that we find what makes Apple Watch a necessity.
The Watch At Work
In my last post about the Apple Watch, “With Series 4, the Apple Watch Era Begins”, I mentioned how I was initially surprised by how often I’ve seen waiters and retail workers wearing Apple Watches. On a waiter’s paycheck, an Apple Watch is a pretty significant purchase, especially if they opt for a top-of-the-line model. But as Mike Murphy of Quartz found by interviewing a wide range of Watch wearers who work in the service industry and/or on their feet, the reason why it was worth the money is easy to understand: “The Apple Watch keeps them in touch when they can’t be on their phones at work.”
In virtually every job, looking at your phone when you’re on the clock is frowned upon, and you might get scolded if your boss catches you doing it. Many jobs don’t allow you to have your phone near or on you while you’re working for safety reasons or to avoid distractions. But being at work — where you spend roughly half of your waking hours — shouldn’t mean you should forego staying in contact with your family or being notified if an emergency arises. If you have people in your family with serious medical conditions, having to wait until your lunch break to look at your phone could be the difference between life and death. Or maybe it’s something more benign, like your child missing their bus after school, which could become a bigger problem if they don’t have any other way to get home unless you make other arrangements. A few hundred dollars (the Watch Series 3 now starts at $279) is definitely worth the peace of mind that you won’t miss any important messages and will be able to address them immediately.
And when it comes to connecting with people, let’s not forget the many stories of people who used their Watches to call for help in emergency situations when their phones were out of reach.
So if you are one of the hundreds of millions of iPhone users who work in the service industry and have families, or you value having a lifeline on your wrist in case of an emergency, you need an Apple Watch.
Get Fit (Or Die Not Trying)
A recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that nearly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. That’s 160 million people, including 30% of children under the age of 20, 75% of American men, and over 60% of American women. A 2017 study authored by the Cleveland Clinic and the New York University School of Medicine concluded that obesity-related illness has shot ahead of smoking as the number one killer in America, responsible for as much as 47% more life-years lost than tobacco. In most cases, increased fitness and a healthy diet are the best ways to reduce our dangerously expanding (and expansive) waistlines.
While the Apple Watch cannot (yet?) monitor what and how much we eat, it has proven itself as an able fitness tracker arguably since its first model (Series 0), and it got way better when Apple revamped watchOS in version 2.0 to be more fitness-focused. If you Google “Apple Watch weight loss success stories”, you’ll find pages of testimonials from people who were able to lose weight using their Watches despite having struggled to lose weight by other methods for years. Some examples are Apple blogger Jim Dalrymple of the Loop (40 pounds in 10 months), Britain’s Eve Stansfield (100 pounds and 10 dress sizes in about a year), Cole Richardson in Arizona (105 pounds in 16 months), and a pack of Cult of Mac readers. I’ve always kept myself in pretty good shape, but my Nike+ Series 2 (along with changes to my diet) has helped me lose roughly ten stubborn pounds. And after almost exactly two years of wearing my Watch every day, I’m quite proud of this digital medal I recently earned for reaching my active calorie Move goal 500 times.
So how does the Watch succeed where so many other weight loss methods have failed? Because improving your fitness and losing weight ultimately comes down to a change in lifestyle, which means changing your status quo behavior and maintaining those changes every day until it first becomes a habit, then your new normal. To do this, especially in the early weeks, it greatly helps to be reminded often of your commitment to those changes, encouraged to carry them out, and rewarded for doing them in order to keep you from sliding back to your previous unhealthy habits.
This is exactly what the Watch accomplishes. Once you set your Move active-calorie burn goal (which doesn’t count calories burned from simply being alive), the Watch will keep track of how many calories you burn through physical movement, letting you know if you are ahead or behind your normal calorie burn pace, and encouraging you to complete your goal if you’re within striking distance near the end of the day — for example, by recommending you take a brisk ten-minute walk.
The Watch also encourages you to get 30 minutes of exercise a day and be less sedentary by reminding you to stand and move around a little for at least a minute every hour. Each of these goals is signified by a colored ring, and closing your rings is accompanied by a satisfying, spark-filled animation and a congratulatory message, with special medals rewarded for maintaining streaks or besting previous records. Apple has built an ad campaign for the Apple Watch around “Close Your Rings”, and Watch owners use #CloseYourRings on Twitter to share their accomplishments and efforts to achieve their fitness goals.
For decades, diet, fitness, and medical experts have told us that losing weight and getting healthy isn’t caused by fads, crash diets, and bursts of extreme behavior or depravation, but through perseverance and a change in lifestyle — which is precisely why the vast majority of diets fail for people. By putting the onus on individuals to constantly remind, motivate, track, reward, and police ourselves in a way we are not accustomed to, regression to our unhealthy status quo, and ultimately failure, are virtually assured for all but the most focused, dedicated, and strong-willed people. This failure leads not only to disappointment and the low self-esteem and self-blame that follows, but also resignation that a person’s unhealthy state is just the way things are because they have “tried everything” without achieving their goals.
If you are overweight or obese, losing weight can be a matter of life and death, the difference between dying early and being around to watch your grandchildren grow up. By being right there on your wrist every day, giving you a chime or a tap to encourage and remind you of the changes to your life you want to make and how to achieve them, the Apple Watch can make sure you stay around.
Your Health Guardian/Terminator
By calling the Apple Watch “an intelligent guardian for your health”, Jeff Williams signaled that the Watch’s mission is expanding in a meaningful and groundbreaking new direction, while also reaching out to millions of new customers who may have never entertained owning wearable technology. While the Watch’s ability to track your heart rate throughout the day has saved the lives of several people by alerting them that they had a dangerously elevated heart rate, the Series 4’s new heart rate sensor has added the ability to detect both a dangerously low or irregular heart rate, which could be a sign of atrial fibrillation. Williams also announced that the S4’s new accelerometer can now detect if you have taken a hard fall, and if you remain motionless and don’t reply to a prompt asking if you are okay for more than a minute, the Watch will automatically call emergency services and send a message to your emergency contacts with your location.
With these new features, the idea of the Watch as health guardian becomes clearer. Now, with no extra effort on your part, the Watch will proactively look out for you whenever you have it on your wrist to make sure you’re not hurt or having an issue with your heart. One can only imagine that Apple will continue to add more health monitoring features like this in the future that look for an expanding number of medical conditions and situations as you go about your day. And did I mention that the S4 now has the ability to take an electrocardiogram, measuring your heart’s electrical impulses to assess its health, telling you if it thinks you might have a condition that requires further testing, then providing a report you can share with your doctor? A feature like this shows not only Apple’s ambitions for entering the healthcare space, but that they have the talent, vision, and technology to be a gamechanger.
While hearing about the S4’s new health features, I was one of probably millions of viewers who had the same thought: “Maybe my parents/grandparents should get one of those.” As our loved ones age, we worry more and more about their health and safety, and we feel guilty that we do not have the time or resources to do more. But a device like the Apple Watch might be able to do more than we ever could, monitoring their health in ways we can’t, and always having the time, patience, and awareness to be there for them at the exact moment they need assistance. It makes me think of this scene from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where Sarah Connor explains why a Terminator — a machine — is a better guardian for her son than any father could ever be.
But who is to say that only children and older people need a health-focused guardian watching over them? Couldn’t we all benefit from having a machine quietly, unobtrusively, and privately making sure we’re okay when there’s no one else around, monitoring for health problems invisible to the naked eye? Someday, as robots and wearable technology take on a bigger role in keeping us alive, I’m sure we’ll all wonder how we ever did without them.
A Seatbelt For Your Life
As I’ve thought about why iPhone users need an Apple Watch, as well as the concept of “need” itself, I find myself returning to seatbelts. Despite flashing symbols and beeping protestations, a car will still work if you’re not wearing a seatbelt, and chances are very good that nothing bad will happen to you if you go out driving today — and practically any other day — without one. Until 1968, cars in America were not required to have seatbelts, and it wasn’t until 1984 that New York became the first state to pass a law requiring that all vehicle occupants wear them. Millions of people worldwide rode in cars without seatbelts for decades, and the vast majority of them lived full lives. In nearly every sense of the word, and laws not withstanding, you don’t need to wear a seatbelt.
That is, you don’t need a seatbelt…right up until the exact moment you really need a seatbelt. At that moment, a seatbelt could become the most important thing in the world, and possibly something you literally can’t live without.
Starting with Series 4, that’s very much what I think the Apple Watch has become: a seatbelt for your life that you strap onto your wrist every morning. In addition, the Watch is a lifeline for those you are closest to, ensuring that they will always be able to reach you in case of an emergency, especially while you’re at work. And by helping you lose weight, the Watch is saving the life of your future self by preventing obesity-related illness.
But maybe you’re still unconvinced that you need an Apple Watch. If you don’t think you need one, I can’t tell you you’re wrong.
However, my wife, who is not a luddite but doesn’t share my enthusiasm for technology, was also unsure that she needed a Watch when I bought her a Series 3 almost a year ago as an early Christmas present. Since then, she’s fallen in love with her Watch and its many features, and it’s contributed to her exercising more regularly and losing weight so she can get the satisfaction of closing her rings. But a few weeks ago, her Watch’s screen cracked while we were away for the weekend. Fortunately, she had signed up for AppleCare+, so she was able to order a replacement for her S3 free of charge when we got back home and have it mailed to her in just two days. However, due to some confusion with FedEx, the delivery was delayed by an extra day.
If you ask my wife if she, or anyone, needs an Apple Watch, she would probably say no. But she’ll also be the first to tell you that those few days without her Watch were rough ones.
