Apple Watch Reaction Divided Into Two Camps

Some are unsure what the point of it is, but plenty of people will buy the gadget because it looks nice, writes Tom Cheshir

Do you want it? During the course of Apple's event, reaction was divided into two camps.

Some very tech friends were still unsure the big question around theApple Watch had gone unanswered: why?

Everything you can do on the Watch you can already do on your phone, which you need to have on you. Why spend £299 on that?

The other camp was everyone else non-tech.

An editor emailed: "Help! I’m actually starting to think I might want an iWatch." (It's not called the iWatch, so interesting to see if people will start calling it that nonetheless.)




Another colleague said: "Gold equals sexy", referring to both the Watch Edition and the new gold Macbook.

And the second lot are who Apple is selling the Watch to.

People who like the idea of wearing a health tracker like the Fitbit or Jawbone, but who do not want a dedicated device, or perhaps do not like the idea of being identified as a quantified selfie.

People who like the idea of notifications on their wrist, but did not know that Pebble has offered this for a long while.

Over at Fast Company, John Edson has written an interesting article on the "functional novelty" of the Apple Watch.

Talking about LED watches of the past, he writes: "It was attractive, not because of its aesthetic, but because it was so new."

The Apple Watch completely succeeds here, in a way I do not think the iPad did.

That felt like more of the same, a bigger iPhone.

The Watch really is the shiniest, newest thing, and after years of increasingly indistinguishable rectangular slabs, that is genuinely exciting.

One of the less eye catching announcements in the event was about the Apple SDK - the kit that independent developers get to build their own apps.

But it is one of the most important, and we were told that since it was released in November, thousands of apps have been created for Apple Watch.

Remember how the early days of the iPhone apps were dominated by fart apps? Now you can have iFart on your wrist.

But when the iPhone was launched back in 2007 (long before Apple opened up its platform to third parties), only the most far sighted futurist could have anticipated Uber, itself now a multibillion business, Citymapper or Strava.

Their Watch-based equivalents will eventually arrive.

They will come because enough people in the non-tech camp buy the Watch because it looks nice.

And so, in the end, they'll be the ones who eventually answer the first camp's question: why?