I have been wearing an Apple Watch for many years and I love it. I love tracking my workouts. I love seeing my altitude when I’m snowboarding. And I love using it to pay for almost everything. Today I also learned that when you dive into a body of water, it’ll tell you the temperature of said water and your depth. It’s all pretty incredible and, of course, it’s only going to get better.

Like clockwork (bad pun), new features are continually being added and that means that the watch I have on my wrist right now will likely be obsolete in a matter of a few years. This is a good thing because it means the tech is continually getting better. But it’s also a bad thing because it means my current watch doesn’t have any real longevity.

Legacy watch companies like Patek Philippe have sold us on the idea that a watch is something you keep for a lifetime and then pass down to the next generation. And there’s something wonderfully romantic about this idea, which is why people do/did it.

But today, Apple Watches alone outsell the entire Swiss watch industry. Meaning, most people have moved on from this romantic idea of a watch. We want new diving features! And there’s part of me that feels sad about this. My parents got me my current watch and it would be nice if I could tell that to the next generation of our family.

So the rumors were right. Apple released a watch today. There will be 3 different “collections”, but lots of flexibility in terms of how each can be customized. There’s a big emphasis on health and fitness monitoring. Prices start at $350. And you’ll need an iPhone. Though you won’t be able to get one on your wrist until next year.

Who knows whether or not it’ll catch on in the same way that iPod and iPhone did, but I think it has a damn good shot (more on this below). They’ve clearly put a lot of thought into both usability and the whole fashion side of the equation, which obviously needed to be done. Given that most people today use their phone for the time, the watch market strikes me as being heavily about style.

In case you were wondering, here’s the watch market size as of 2013 (courtesy of Benedict Evans):

A lot of you might be skeptical about the need for a computer on your wrist (remember those watch calculators from the 80s?). But I think this time is different. Consider the number of people that now walk around with their phone in their hand and/or immediately pull it out whenever they have a free moment. We’ve become reliant (okay, addicted), to notifications and information.

But in many of those cases, the smartphone isn’t the most efficient medium to be delivering those messages. Just like it’s not ideal to have to reach into your pocket to figure out what time it is, I think the watch could emerge as a new and better medium for a bunch of other pieces of information. And the big one could be location-aware or contextually-aware notifications.

Here’s a tweet from Dennis Crowley – founder of Foursquare (Swarm) – talking about that exact thing:

For the record, still think that *contextually aware* notifications are the key to interesting wearables

I have been wearing an Apple Watch for many years and I love it. I love tracking my workouts. I love seeing my altitude when I’m snowboarding. And I love using it to pay for almost everything. Today I also learned that when you dive into a body of water, it’ll tell you the temperature of said water and your depth. It’s all pretty incredible and, of course, it’s only going to get better.

Like clockwork (bad pun), new features are continually being added and that means that the watch I have on my wrist right now will likely be obsolete in a matter of a few years. This is a good thing because it means the tech is continually getting better. But it’s also a bad thing because it means my current watch doesn’t have any real longevity.

Legacy watch companies like Patek Philippe have sold us on the idea that a watch is something you keep for a lifetime and then pass down to the next generation. And there’s something wonderfully romantic about this idea, which is why people do/did it.

But today, Apple Watches alone outsell the entire Swiss watch industry. Meaning, most people have moved on from this romantic idea of a watch. We want new diving features! And there’s part of me that feels sad about this. My parents got me my current watch and it would be nice if I could tell that to the next generation of our family.

So the rumors were right. Apple released a watch today. There will be 3 different “collections”, but lots of flexibility in terms of how each can be customized. There’s a big emphasis on health and fitness monitoring. Prices start at $350. And you’ll need an iPhone. Though you won’t be able to get one on your wrist until next year.

Who knows whether or not it’ll catch on in the same way that iPod and iPhone did, but I think it has a damn good shot (more on this below). They’ve clearly put a lot of thought into both usability and the whole fashion side of the equation, which obviously needed to be done. Given that most people today use their phone for the time, the watch market strikes me as being heavily about style.

In case you were wondering, here’s the watch market size as of 2013 (courtesy of Benedict Evans):

A lot of you might be skeptical about the need for a computer on your wrist (remember those watch calculators from the 80s?). But I think this time is different. Consider the number of people that now walk around with their phone in their hand and/or immediately pull it out whenever they have a free moment. We’ve become reliant (okay, addicted), to notifications and information.

But in many of those cases, the smartphone isn’t the most efficient medium to be delivering those messages. Just like it’s not ideal to have to reach into your pocket to figure out what time it is, I think the watch could emerge as a new and better medium for a bunch of other pieces of information. And the big one could be location-aware or contextually-aware notifications.

Here’s a tweet from Dennis Crowley – founder of Foursquare (Swarm) – talking about that exact thing:

For the record, still think that *contextually aware* notifications are the key to interesting wearables