The Apple Watch is Flawed. So, Fix the iPhone

The Apple Watch is Flawed. So, Fix the iPhone

he reviews for Apple Watch are in. They are mixed: It's a little buggy, maybe too complicated for the novice, who needs it, oh — that battery life. Also, it keeps sending pesky notifications that we used to be able to ignore back when ignorance was bliss.

Every first generation device is inferior by "future you" standards. The list of original iPhone shortcomings would shock the contemporary user: You couldn't cut-and-paste or send email attachments or have more than eight browser pages open at once (and you had to manually close one to make any room).

More serious are usability issues. "It just works" might as well be Apple's motto. Babies use the iPad without any training. So do grown ups who get night sweats from the mere thought of using a computer. And even people who use 1% of the iPhone's features love it and appreciate learning new things gradually about something they find immediately accessible and useful.

Which leaves us with notifications, or what I think of as Apple's "rationale dilemma." Watch is a powerful productivity tool that extends the usefulness of the smartphone in a way that is almost as important as the introduction of the smartphone itself. Trouble is, there's a "but," and it's called notification fatigue.

Steve Kovach at Business Insider did all the legwork for me. The sorry state of smartphone notifications is a common theme among many initial reviews, he said, including this one by Bloomberg's Joshua Topolsky:

The notification scheme is a little maddening at first. Apple sends a push notification every time you get a corporate e-mail, personal e-mail, direct message on Twitter, message on Facebook, and for interactions in countless other services. Each of these notifications pings the watch. For every message, there is a sound, a vibration, or both. (You can mute them.) If you’re a busy person who communicates constantly on your phone, this gets overwhelming fast. I found myself turning off notifications from entire apps, which seems to defeat the purpose of the watch in the first place. Mercifully, Apple has included a way to clear all those notifications: Just Force Touch on the list.
Wrangling notifications is going to be essential for the idea of the smartwatch to survive. The trouble is that this is neither sexy nor obvious, even to people who should get it immediately. Like basically any moaning Apple Watch reviewer who has concluded this is a smart watch bug instead of a smartphone opportunity.

Apple isn't helping. Pay no attention to that man on the stage of Apple's two Watch rollout events. Tim Cook is selling Trojan Horse dreams with bright lights, bells and whistles, like the prominent features of a car you'll use disproportionately less than cup holders and the gas pedal.

But he's doing it for your own good. Cook knows you don't understand that something as simple as filtering noise is the killer app of a smart watch which could then be the delivery system for so much more. So he tells you about taking calls on the worst speaker phone you'll ever use and fingerpainting on the world's smallest touch screen to get you excited by highlighting genuine marvels of engineering that may not be entirely useless but are childish.

Actually live with a smart watch — I've worn one for four years — and it's very clear that mundane is awesome. As ridiculous as it may sound, yes, not having to reach for your phone all the time is unspeakably liberating for a power user.

But we are a long way from perfection, and perfection will not come from how a smartwatch processes notifications (though Watch's custom taptic feedback is a great supplement) but how the phone sends them.

In this respect, smartphones remain in their infancy. We can change ringtones and text sounds and maybe set up lists that alert us to mail from only certain recipients. We can turn off some notifications entirely, or all of them for blocks of time. But we can't, with any of the specificity smart watches are teaching us we need, make notifications do our bidding.

The problem isn't the smart watch. The problem is with smartphone. Smart watches are, literally and figuratively, the messenger. Let's not kill them.

Smart phones will need to learn new tricks for smart watches to win the day.

Apple has the usual Apple advantage: they own the hardware and software and police the App Store. None of this seems particularly daunting. The question is whether Apple's bait and switch — come for the cool features, stay for the life-altering paradigm — will time out properly.

I think it will, if for no other reason that there is no chance Apple will give up easily. But in a year, if Apple hasn't dealt with the Watch equivalent of no cut-and-paste, I'll start to get worried.