Apple Watch Review: The Smartwatch Finally Makes Sense. The future on your wrist, even with flaws.

I’ve got a utilitarian view of the year’s most-hyped piece of bling. Sapphire crystal and $10,000 gold alloy aren’t what make the Apple Watch the first smartwatch worth buying.

What’s valuable is your time. The Apple Watch is a computer built to spend it better. And if you can tolerate single-day battery life, half-baked apps and inevitable obsolescence, you can now wear the future on your wrist.

Smartphones gave us the wondrous ability to take the Internet anywhere. But they’re not always productive. In fact, they’ve become like cigarettes, leaving us itching for the latest affirmation from Instagram or Twitter. I found I spend 4.3 hours each day looking at my phone—good grief, even on vacation.

So the company that invented the iPhone has a solution: Buy another gadget! That irony didn’t escape me a week ago when I began wearing an Apple Watch, on loan before they become available on April 24. Do I really need another connected screen blinking, beeping and buzzing all day?

I’ve found the Apple Watch isn’t a replacement for the iPhone, but it’s the right screen for many important things. I only look at it in blips, for rarely more than five seconds. It shows me the weather with one finger swipe. It gets physical, gently tapping my wrist when something important needs my attention and lighting up when I lift my arm to look. It nudges when I’ve been sitting too long.

Well, then you can enjoy your teletype there grandpa.

That's actually truer than you know. My cell phone is a nine year old flip model, my watch is a mechanical Breitling which I bought used in 1997 and which I'll probably be able to hand down to my son, and I own no "tablets" of any kind.

Could you get ios 8 to run on your 4 year old iPod Touch? Sure, but it would be so slow that it would be unusable.

Of course there's no reason why that should be so, except for cynical planned obsolescence.

in the interest of disclosure, I use a 20 year old Mac every day, along with the stuff I *have* to use at work, but BTW, I have no interest in owning a so-called smart phone (possibly in the same way I used to have no interest in owning a cell phone), and the Apple Watch appears to me to be a solution in search of a problem, appealing to the Koolaid drinkers. The incoherent, inchoate animus directed to Apple -- allegedly for reasons that apply at least as strongly to all other brands -- remains both distasteful and a puzzle.

big glass of reality:

Samsung circling the drain:

Samsung Galaxy S6 Review: The iPhone 6 Has Met Its Match
[and yet...] Apple beats Samsung to become world's No. 1 smartphone maker
iOS grows to 73% enterprise share in Q4 2014, Android drops to 25%, and Windows Phone stays flat
[iPhone 6 profitably sold at $249, and yet...] Apple Took 89% Of Q4 Smartphone Profits With Android OEMs In A Race To The Bottom

haters gonna hate:

Apple Products are Inferior to Android.
Smartphone Debate Ends With Stabbings [illegal immigration topic]

this was the most intriguing announcment in the recent big reveal from Apple (when I work, I work in health care):

and here's some good news for all you LINOs (Libertarians in Name Only) out there:

[Vermont Socialist Bernie] Sanders blasts U.S Corporations for Dodging Taxes

and bravo!

Forget the Apple Watch -- here's the Apple II Watch

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