We’re at the start of a conversation of what our post-post-PC’s are going to look like. Google tried mansplaining a loud “ACTUALLY” with Glass, Microsoft showed up in dad jeans and a Member’s Only Jacket. Apple’s introduction is, naturally, more elegant, a suggestive but unforgettable touch on the wrist.

Apple’s watch is very much in the tradition of other new ideas like the iPod, the Macbook Air, and the iPad. It refines existing ideas, is a bit ahead of itself technically, perhaps a bit thicker or more ungainly or underpowered than it would like to be, but hints at a certain inevitability.

The watch is also a more fully developed idea in many ways than other first-gen Apple devices. Consider the iPhone rollout, with the compromised antennae designs and chintzy plastic casing of the first few generations. They didn’t just release the watch as aluminum and glass models with a set of bands ranging from $49-$99, which they may well have been able to do a year ago. Recall Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone 4, with the obvious pride in the craftsmanship and the refinement of the actual object, not just the ideas behind the glass and multitouch. Apple believes, knows really, the watch needs that same level of refinement, plus a certain personalness, to truly succeed as an idea and do more than merely sell a bunch of quasi-disposable devices.

That they’ve embraced fashion is something I’m cautiously optimistic about. Apple has always been fashionable, so it’s not a huge step, and in the service of empowering more than just the nerds, I’m all for it. The continuum of style and fashion and haute couture, however, is certainly going to be difficult to manage.

We all know where this is going, we’ve known since we were kids with our comics and dorky sci-fi books. The computers are disassembling and reconfiguring, first they moved off the desk into our pants, soon they’ll be on and in us. I’m (mostly, pretty sure) this is a good thing! Even if it takes a few refinements and some social realignment to get there.

Today, though, I can’t figure where this fits in my life, and I’m someone who’s owned the first-gen of every product Apple has released this century (I waited in line an hour for the first iSight camera). Maybe it’s because I’m a dad now with income that’s hardly disposable. Maybe it’s because I own several mechanical watches that I never wear because they don’t quite match my personal style and not a single Apple watch is something I’d consider a complement. Maybe because I’ve become increasingly wary and weary of the surge of notifications and the drain on my own cognition and mindfulness and I’m skeptical that another device is going to help solve that.

Mostly, I’m having a difficult time seeing how the watch today lives up to the ideal of a bicycle for the mind. It seems mostly to want to take on the parts of my mobile devices that I consciously turn off. The health tracking features are intriguing but also a bit niche and, in order to add value beyond my mobile, would mean the watch needs to be on me all the time, even while I’m sleeping.

It would be hard to talk about the watch and not mention the luxury Edition version, which ranges in price from $10,000 to $17,000. For those of us who grew up and into careers excited about the promise of using technology to empower, the Edition is uncomfortable territory, to say the least. There’s nothing new about selling baubles to the ultra-rich, and it certainly feels gauche in this new Gilded Age. That Apple has managed to invert Warhol’s Coke1 and put the same $350 device in a $17,000 case is only worth celebrating if you are a champion of conspicuous consumption.

The Edition watch is hardly Apple at its best. If anything, the Edition feels like a manifestation of the kind of empty criticism Apple has endured for decades: that they hermetically seal commoditized components in a veneer of design, packaged with slick marketing and a powerful brand. I hope the Edition becomes truly limited and is dropped in future generations.

There’s very little in Andy Warhol’s prolific career that I find worth admiring and I hold special disdain for this oft-repeated Coke quote. It’s probable that somewhere right now a billionaire and a bum (I doubt Mrs. Obama allows them in the Oval Office) are each having a Coke, if not necessarily a smile. Of course it’s also a lie that this is some form of equality, the billionaire knows it, the bum certainly knows it, and Warhol probably knew it, too.
Really, it’s little more than apologia for the mid-20th Century rise of mass production, mass marketing, and the power of a strong brand, all of which explain why anyone drinks Coke or knows the name Andy Warhol.
That Warhol wrote this at the beginning of the 40-year period leading to our current age of inequality is perhaps coincidental but hard to ignore. ↩︎