Brandon Donnelly

3 responses to “You never really own it. You simply look after it for a few years.”

1. 

   Myron Nebozuk

   August 20, 2023

   My social group used to collect and trade historically and technically interesting guns. That’s no longer possible in Canada if your “intersection” is physics and aesthetics. We’ve moved onto watches: Pateks, Rolexes, Omegas and a few other brands. Not a single one of us own a so-called smart watch. Although I’m the only architect in this group, I suspect that the less is more ethos is strong in this group.

   I might however get a smart watch if someone develops a feature that can tell me when my Husky has crossed the Arctic Circle to join his brethren.

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2. 

   Jakob P

   August 21, 2023

   I used to own a Casio watch that needs close to zero maintenance: It synchronizes daily with long-distance radio transmission, it can live entirely on solar power and never needs to be charged, it had an eternal calendar and an extra watch hand to show another timezone. Tts watch hands gently glow in the dark quite a bit after sundown by emitting UV rays that it soaked up, or something. Also it had a comparatively sturdy build with sapphire glass and stainless steel, but still minimizing thickness as good as possible.

   It did one thing exceptionally well: to show the time whenever one looks at it, and to stay out of the way otherwise. It was not a cheap watch, but also not an expensive collector’s watch.

   Apple completely destroyed the availability of this mid-market kind of device. All the models you can buy nowadays are either cheapo entry-level watches without radio synchronization or solar power, or models that are huge and in your face. Somehow everything consumes much more power than 10 years ago and instead of increasing battery times, we now have to charge not just phones daily, but also watches weekly. You look at your watch and it’s black, it needs to move so it knows that you’re looking at it.

   I’m not upset at Apple for popularizing a new category of devices that people find useful. I am, however, sour about the rest of the industry for chasing whatever Apple is doing and abandoning the markets that they’re already leading in. It seems there’s only a market for cheap crap, and a market for overpriced collector goods, and all the other good stuff gets left behind in an effort to replicate Apple tech.

   Apple has graciously bestowed onto us such questionable developments onto us such as a uniform 30% app distribution tax, low-travel laptop keyboards, removing useful ports in favour of profitable wireless devices (e.g. earbuds), and the aforementioned expectation that mobile devices don’t need to last long because you can always charge them overnight.

   Sure there’s much useful functionality that didn’t use to exist and people love handing over extremely personal data to large companies because gamifying one’s life is fun. But let’s spend a moment to mourn all of the alternative developments that could have happened if it weren’t for the industry being Apple-centric. We could keep making energy-efficient, maintenance-free devices that keep shrinking in size and improve their functionality only as far as their solar power budget allows.

   I would have liked to see this future, in addition to the one where some people upgrade their carbon-heavy gadgets every few years and old functionality stops working because Google shuts down FitBit services that conflict with their new plans. But it appears there’s only space for one possible future, and it’s the one that’s the most in your face, the one that uses all resources that we can spare to make a splash. I am reluctantly joining that maximalist future because it’s the only one we get to have.

   But I still hope that we can retain a few nice things every now and then, slowly improving them and keeping them around instead of complete abandonment. The watch story at least had a somewhat happy ending: Casio is still making this kind of watch *only for sale in Japan* (apparently that’s the only remaining market for this stuff) and importing into Canada is feasible. It’s a little better than the previous one I had. A little thinner, a little easier to use, and no regressions of note. I just wish this kind of stuff got even a fraction of airtime as the latest Apple feature.

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3. 

   Kirk LeMessurier

   August 23, 2023

   Really enjoy the blog, Brandon (my first time commenting). I love(d) the idea of an elegant watch but once mine stalled and I stored it, procrastinating, for over a year I got used to not wearing one and liked it since my smartphone by then had become my timepiece. Then I got hooked on Apple Watch for the same reasons as you – steps and stats et al. The only perspective missing for me here is the environmental downside of all this disposable technology.

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