What is the Apple Watch Project?

Since Apple announced last September that it would begin shipping high-fashion computers that sit on your wrist, the anticipation has been furious. Would this be as big a move as music players were? Tablets? Phones? What would it mean for Apple? What would it mean for us? How many would Karl Lagerfeld buy?

Now that the wait is over everyone is weighing in. Everyone. All the professional reviewers have rendered their verdict, taking pains to emphasize that their judgements are provisional. Most like it, with reservations.

But the reviews that really matter — the ones that will determine not only the true success of the watch but, more important, will report the meaning of a powerful computer in constant contact with our skin — are those of the people who actually paid money to use the watch. They have no agendas outside of sharing their experiences. And they are posting those experiences on Medium.

So we at Backchannel had an idea. Why not set aside a place on Medium where we can collect these impressions? And so we’ve done it. We’ve gathered a bunch of good Apple Watch writing that’s appeared on Medium, and there will be more to come. We welcome all Apple Watch users to contribute, either with original posts or responses to the ones on this page.

We’ll put a special spotlight on the ones that garner the most recommendations. So please hit that heart icon for posts you enjoy.

What’s more, we’re going to try to take the best passages from these posts to create an uber-take (sorry, Travis). How will we know which are best? You will tell us — by highlighting the sentences you feel best capture the Apple Watch experience. Or ones that are particularly clever.

You can do this, of course, whether you own an Apple Watch or not.

A couple of weeks ago, a contributor to Backchannel posited that a crowd-sourced interview of a presidential candidate (on Reddit) was superior to that of a pro (on CNN). Can the members of the Medium community top Walt Mossberg, Marques Brownlee, and the Verge’s Nilay Patel, whose self-described “definitive review” was Proustian in length?

With your help, we’ll find out.

As for Karl Lagerfeld, he’s already Instagrammed his custom $25,000 gold Apple Watch. The first, we assume, of many. Hey, Karl…what do you think of it?