One Month With the Apple Watch (Order Status Page Edition)

My experiences with the latest advance from Apple that’s disrupting the ecosystems of wearable technology and order and personal fulfillment.

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As a well-known “early adopter,” I feel I’ve got an obligation to share my experiences with bleeding-edge advancements in SoaC-powered wealth redistribution with users who are more on the fence, baffled by the increasing number of options in wearable technology.

A lot of you have lots of money but no time to wade through all the industry jargon; you just have simple questions that you need answered: “What is the Apple Watch?” “Why haven’t I read or heard anything about it?” And most importantly: “Does Chuck have one yet?”

I can go ahead and conclusively answer the last question: No.

If you were hoping that the Apple Watch would finally be the game-changer that makes me satisfied with the number of gadgets I own, you’re probably better off waiting a month or two. Version 1.0 of Apple products are known for being a hint of the advancements and refinements yet to come, more than complete, functional, devices. It’s as if with the Apple Watch, Jony Ive and his team of designers at Apple are giving us a roadmap for the future, announcing to the world: This is what the smart watch will be like, some time in early July when Chuck is actually able to have one.

So the question remains: is it really that insufferable to be waiting for the delivery of an expensive, inessential device, while surrounded by other people who already have theirs? Let’s find out.

How The Other Half Lives

Marketing Apple’s Most Personal Device Ever

Apple had to take a different approach with their first foray into the world of wearable technology. That meant making sure that before the product even hit stores, watch models were made available to the leading tastemakers: the technology and gadget bloggers who’d complain that Pharell and wil.i.am were posting Instagram pictures of their watches before any of the reviewers could get one.

By now, you’ve no doubt seen the “Big Guys” offer up their opinions about the Apple Watch (48mm Steel with the Milanese Loop band, universally), and their experiences with glances, taptic feedback, the Activity tracker, re-charging it every day, and the importance of selectively disabling notifications. By virtue of the mathematical study of combinatorics and the number of words in the English language, each reviewer’s take is, strictly speaking, unique.

You’ve seen a quirky first person attempt to free the device from Jony Ive’s perfectly-controlled environment and present it in a more realistic day-to-day setting: a tech blogger in New York City with a head-mounted camera. You’ve doubtless savored the definitive review from a suave globetrotting secret agent tech blog editor figuring out how this new innovation fits into a busy day packed with meetings and treadmill-running, including an up-close look at how hard it is to execute cross-site web content scheduling in a New York City bar with the double distractions of a watch constantly tapping your wrist, and a full camera and lighting crew having to run multiple takes of video while in a New York City bar. You’ve seen a stop-motion animated version with paper cutouts, for some reason. By now, you’ve even seen the Tech Reviewer Old Guard offer another look back at the watch after using it for a month.

What none of those so-called “professional” reviews will tell you is what life is like for real people who don’t have the product being reviewed. Sure, you occasionally get somebody like Apple insider and sarcasm enthusiast Neven Mrgan making a feeble attempt to relate to The Rest of Us outside Apple’s walled garden clique, but how much can you really say about an experience after only a week or two? How does that experience change after an entire month? [Full disclosure: Mr. Mrgan graciously offered a royalty-free license for me to completely rip off the premise of this blog post, presumably by effortlessly dictating said license into the always-on AI assistant of his futurewatch].

It’s Finally Here

Just Not For You

One thing that none of the reviews mention is how much of the Apple Watch experience is dependent on having not just an iPhone, but an actual physical Apple Watch. The site iMore.com, for example, offers a list of what the Apple Watch can do without an iPhone, but makes no mention of what can be done without the watch itself.

Granted, one site can’t possibly cover every single aspect of the watch (although not for lack of trying), but this seems like an oversight. How do I keep time without an Apple Watch? How is not having the watch changing my health for the better? When will I get one? They’re all questions strangely left unanswered by the “All [sic] your questions answered!” Apple Watch FAQ.

That’s a perfect example of how blog developers are adjusting to the new paradigms introduced by the Apple Watch: They’re not as content-focused as more traditional devices like the iPhone’s reviews. Instead, they’re best consumed as “glances,” not meant to be “read” so much as absorbed in quick seconds-long bursts throughout the day, every day, for months.

The truth is that there’s no amount of parallax scrolling and full-screen looping background video that will provide a truly definitive review of life without Apple’s latest must-have. For that, you need to go to Apple itself.

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That trademark Apple design is evident from first glance: the photographs of other people with their watches bleed right up to the bezel of the laptop screen, putting a subtle but unmistakable emphasis on the object that you don’t have. It’s a perfect example of how Apple makes cold hardware more personal, by telling a personal story: This woman has a watch and you don’t. She is a ballerina. What does she need a smartwatch for? She can’t possibly have her iPhone in range; her pockets are too small. Also the screen is likely to come on frequently as she moves her arms, causing a distraction to the other dancers. Did she not think this through? I wonder if she ordered her watch at midnight instead of waiting. A good night’s rest is very important for dancers, so it seems foolish to forsake that just to get a new watch that can’t even give incoming message notifications. Not to mention that dancers aren’t usually paid well enough to be spending hundreds of dollars on a watch. I bet she didn’t even wait in line for a new iPhone every other year since the first model, like I did. Who does she think she is, anyway?

This is also likely to be your first bit of frustration when dealing with the lack of an Apple Watch: because the title photograph has to do a full round-trip circuit from designer to marketing team to photographer and model to graphic designer to web publisher, it can get hopelessly out of sync with reality. I still find myself reading the notification “The Watch is Here,” and then glancing down at my wrist only to confirm that it’s most assuredly not here. I hope this is fixed in a future update.

The Best Part of Waking Up

Getting Into the Groove of a Daily Routine Without Your Apple Watch

Apple’s attention to detail and design carry through the rest of the experience. There’s no garish “Order Status” menu, for example, instead offering a simple “Store” menu that reveals more beautifully photographed images of the product you don’t have.

It’s only there that you find a friendly drop-down menu takes you to “Order Status.” That will ask you for your password every time you open or refresh the page throughout the day — you’ll be doing this a lot, so I recommend using a password manager like 1Password.

In the month since I ordered an Apple Watch, I’ve really started to notice how I use technology differently throughout the day and in different locations. On the laptop, for instance, I hardly ever use the Delivery Status widget to track the status of my shipment, both because of the decreasing relevance of the OS X Dashboard, and because after 5 weeks the order is still in “Processing” status without a tracking number. Instead, I prefer to go to the Apple Store page, bring up the order status, enter my password, refresh the page, wait a few seconds, and refresh the page again, sigh, then refresh it one more time. I would’ve thought that this would feel like an intrusion, but it’s become such an integral part of my morning routine that I hardly even notice it anymore.

While out around town, not going to bars or important meetings, it’d be a lot more convenient to bring up the Apple Store app on my phone. In practice, though, the app requires me to type my password again every time I want to check the order status, so I end up not bothering. Maybe they’ll fix this sometime within the next 5-6 weeks. In a perfect world, I could have some type of device on my wrist that could give me order updates with just a “glance.”

On the Order Status page, you’ll see the time period in an elegant but still-readable font. Apple still knows how to make the most of the user experience, giving a moment of delight as you see the estimate change from “June” to “5-6 weeks.” These displays are made possible by “complications,” a term Apple is borrowing from the hardware industry to describe things like doing a huge marketing push for a product release that depends on faulty haptic feedback engines from overseas manufacturers.

Apple makes it really easy to go back to the main store page from the Order Status page, so you can get a beautiful, detailed look at all the various models and colors of watches you don’t have. It’s fun for running “what if?” type experiments, such as “Could I cancel my order and instead get one of the dainty models with a pink band? Would that ship any faster?”

There’s also support for Apple’s new “Force Touch” technology, in which you give a long, exasperated sigh followed by a sharp slamming gesture on all of the keyboard’s keys simultaneously, or pressing a closed fist firmly and repeatedly on the laptop’s trackpad. This gives helpful feedback in the form of Safari crashing. It definitely takes some practice, but in my experience, it became second nature the more often I saw my colleagues unwrapping their just-delivered Apple Watches near my desk.

I Regret Reading a Gadget Blog Post (and I knew I would)

The Cold, Hard Sting That Can Only Happen When You Physically Open Your Wallet

Even though the watch is only available online and who the hell writes for a technology blog but still has to physically open his wallet when he buys stuff online?

He Should Try Apple Pay
Unless Maybe He Also Bought a Really Expensive Wallet, And He Just Likes the Way It Feels

As a mobile software developer in San Francisco, I’ve already seen how the release of the Apple Watch has changed my routine. During my morning workout (two reps climbing up BART station stairs, followed by an intensive 1.5 block walk), I enjoy listening to podcasts that keep me on the bleeding edge of the most disruptive of apps and innovators. (ICYMI: My essential travel gear). (I recommend Overcast for podcast-listening, even if you’re going truly old-school and changing podcast tracks on your Bluetooth headphones by manipulating actual buttons on your touchscreen-enabled wireless mobile computer).

The gang at SixColors.com has been active on various podcasts, letting me know about their experiences after initial unboxing, two days, four days, a week, and several weeks later, while traveling, writing, and recording podcasts. In addition to the roundtable discussions where groups of people discuss how the watch I don’t have yet has changed their lives, I’ve gotten answers to the questions you don’t usually think about with some cursory product review. For instance: what if you have two watches, and you can’t decide which of them you want to keep? And: now that we’ve all had the opportunity to get used to our new watches, what would we most like to see in the new version?

Another highlight: an account of the podcaster whose significant other isn’t much of a technology devotee and wasn’t that interested in the watch, became interested after seeing the podcaster use his for a few days, ordered one, received it, and is giving her first impressions. It’s a magical time, as if entire generations of wearable technology are happening all around me as I watch the Order Status page. Whole waves of Gawker Media-led backlashes are whooshing by with the lasting permanence of burrito farts, the only constants being me, a web site, and a refresh button.

After five weeks, I find I have a lot in common with Mat Smith, who wrote for Engadget a confessional thinkpiece entitled “I regret buying an Apple Watch (and I knew I would).”

Like Smith, I was initially unmoved by the announcement of a new device from Apple. I, too, had bought a Pebble watch but quickly got out of the habit of wearing it. I’ve gotten the first versions of other Apple products and often been surprised by how dramatically and how quickly they’re made obsolete by the next release. I, too, write rambling stuff on the internet that frequently makes me come across as an insufferable asshole. And I also find myself reluctantly falling back into the role of “early adopter” for the sake of completely irrational impulses — in my case, an animated Mickey Mouse watch face that taps his foot every second; in his case, enjoying buying unnecessarily expensive stuff that makes him look cool.

It was important to him to have the sapphire face and stainless steel body, whereas I have large wrists, so it really stands out when I roll my eyes and make a wanking gesture while reading the rest of his post.

We ordered different models of the watch, because we have different needs. He tried on the gold version and was invited to look at himself in a mirror, while I managed to get 10 minutes bending over a bench in an Apple store by scheduling an appointment a couple of days in advance. He fell in love with the Milanese band, while I could only justify getting the cheapest model by telling myself it was a birthday present for myself. He doodles tiny pictures of cocks to colleagues and concludes it’s not a life-changing device; I see colleagues with watches and go back to reading blog posts written by, apparently, sentient, literate cocks.

One More Thing

Adding a Semi-Pithy Coda About Consumerism to What Should Have Been a Short and Silly Blog Post to Make it Unclear How Much of Any of This Is Intended to be Sarcastic

This Is Why People Don’t Read Your Blog

For decades there’s been a tendency to be dismissive of Apple devotees as being cultish and image-obsessed, with more money than common sense. As Macs and iPhones got more ubiquitous (and cheaper), enough people caught on to the fact that good design actually has real value. There are, no doubt, plenty of people who put “shiny” and “has visible glowing Apple logo” high on their list of priorities, but I think they’re finally outnumbered by those of us who just want something that’s really well made. (And who’ve bought enough cheap computers for the sake of saving a few bucks to realize that it ends up costing more in the long run when it needs to be replaced). Now it’s only the cranks in forums and blog comments that insist on complaining about the “Apple Tax.”

When Apple announced a gold edition of its new watch, that was rumored to cost over ten thousand bucks, there were fears that it’d bring all the old class warfare back to consumer technology: the company was now explicitly targeting status-obsessed rich people.

As I look at photos of models tying up their toe shoes, or draping their watch-bedecked arms over other models to make out with them, or stopping mid-jog-through-the-Hollywood Hills, and I see the three clearly-delineated castes of watch available, and I commit a few hundred bucks to the “lowest” caste of thing that I didn’t even want a few months ago, and I get increasingly resentful of the people who already have their inessential thing, and even more annoyed when they have the more expensive version of the thing I don’t yet have (even though I wouldn’t even want the more expensive version), I’m just glad those fears turned out to be completely unfounded.