\u201cThis isn\u2019t a vision quest or zen retreat. It\u2019s a goddamn piece of hardware.\u201d<\/p>\n
So said a friend of mine as he expressed\u00a0his frustration with using his new\u00a0Apple Watch. And he was right. It is<\/em> just a piece of hardware.<\/p>\n The problem is there are lots of different kinds of hardware, with all sorts of differing capabilities and ways to use them. You need to know what\u00a0kind of hardware an Apple Watch\u00a0is<\/em> before you can use it\u00a0comfortably\u2026or, for that matter, decide\u00a0if\u00a0you care to use it\u00a0at all.<\/p>\n More than anything else, an Apple Watch\u00a0is an iPhone\u00a0peripheral, designed to give you quick access to some (not all, just some) of the information, and some of the capabilities, that your\u00a0iPhone provides. An Apple Watch\u00a0does this by acting like a wristwatch.<\/p>\n And that leads us to its\u00a0interaction model.<\/p>\n The wristwatch interaction model has never been about interacting deeply<\/em>. It has been about giving you\u00a0bits of information, quickly, while you\u2019re doing something else. With\u00a0a traditional watch, you look at it, see what time it is, then get right back to what you were doing. If you get sucked into fiddling with it, trying to get things done<\/em> with it,\u00a0you\u00a0are\u00a0doing it wrong.\u00a0The only times you do\u00a0much more with a watch than check the time (or maybe,\u00a0for owners of advanced wristwatches, start and stop a timer) is\u00a0when you are\u00a0winding it or setting it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the basic interaction model on which the\u00a0Apple Watch builds. You may spend some time from time to time setting it\u00a0and winding it (that is, configuring its various options and charging it), but, beyond\u00a0that, for the most part you just use it to quickly check the time (or weather, or current stock prices, or your schedule, or your location, or your pulse, and so on) while you\u2019re doing something else.<\/p>\n