For all the hype it created, the Apple Watch is actually a very subtle product – and we don’t mean the $17,000 18-Karat Yellow Gold version. It was designed in the signature style of Apple, with sleek features and almost unremarkable.
Apple Watch seems to be the answer to the ever-growing curb of how much the average user spends on their smartphone. It started slow, in 2007, with the iPhone launch; the no-app-store version was upgraded so much that four years later, in 2011, users spent a little more than a half an hour a day using apps.
Come 2013, an hour of each day was eaten away by apps, with estimations showing that the curb would point to the average iOS user spending almost 7 hours a day on checking apps in 2020!
It sounds absolutely crazy, and something definitely had to change before that point was reached, simply because we work with limiting factors such as human attention and time. The iPhone did a great job allowing developers to feed us apps we didn’t even know we wanted.
We are so enticed by the little ding that announces a new notification, that our brains are already trained to drop whatever we were focused on and go check what’s new. And even if the push notification did not interest us, it’s easy to switch to Facebook and spend more than 10 minutes just scrolling.
Bottom line: we are being overfed by digital information. Most of the social media platforms have already reached this conclusion and have developed their algorithms to show us less content, because we simply cannot take it all in. Everybody loves a stroll, but no one cares for the forced march.
Tech companies are trying out new ways of limiting their content before customers become critically overstimulated. In this kind of context, Apple Watch has room to thrive.
Apple Watch does not have a leading app to entice more users, but it doesn’t need one. What it does instead, is help you check your iPhone a lot less.
Even for the users who don’t apply great discipline to the apps that push notifications, Apple Watch only interrupts you for about a second; if the notification isn’t important, you are less likely to go check it and be dragged into the vortex of apps you have on your smartphone.
This is what Apple Watch does: it reduces the duration of each interruption of your day-to-day activities, encouraging you to stay more focused. Its features are designed as an assistant, not a master of your task.
It also has plenty of applications as a remote control, especially when it comes to audio. Listening to music, podcasts or whatever else is easier, as you avoid the temptation of being sucked into the abyss of your phone.
Apple Watch will soon become our antidote to the user’s iPhone attachment, helping them reduce the mental clutter caused by the constant information that we are being fed. It might seem contradictory with the company’s policy of keeping you connected, but without it, the cognitive load that your iPhone implies would soon make you crazy.
Image Source: Customer Service