I’ve had my 42mm Stainless Steel Sports Band Apple Watch for 3 days now. This is the first product category from Apple that I think just isn’t for me. I’m as surprised as you are.

I use my iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Time Capsule, Apple TV, Apple Pay, iCloud, iTunes Match and Photos synced in the cloud all on a daily basis. I love each one of them. I appreciate what each is good for and use them to their full potential. The Apple Watch taps into all these categories and yet I still can’t see the benefit for me. 

I should probably have prefaced this by saying that I’m not a watch guy. I haven’t worn a watch since elementary school and as comfortable and beautifully designed the Apple Watch is, it still feels like a shackle on my wrist as opposed to something I want to wear. I may be in the minority but for those who don’t mind wearing a watch I still don’t see the benefit.

The Apple Watch doesn’t solve any immediate problems. It augments an ecosystem in a much more personal way and I can totally appreciate how sensitive Apple was in their approach. This is new territory for them and they went all in with no holding back. If you look at the build up to the release it had just as much a fashion centric aura around it as a feature set one. The Apple Watch does so many things in a new way and Apple did a great job trying to communicate such a diverse tool as best they could.

At the end of the day the Apple Watch is meant to be off and unnoticed for the majority of the day. As such the main benefit I see for anyone is the ability to drastically reduce the amount of time you have to reach for your iPhone when a notification comes in. Here in lies the problem for me. The only notifications I have enabled on my iPhone are iMessage and Calendar alerts. That’s it. No Mail, Social Media, News or anything third party Apps want to push out to me. For others who get dozens of notifications a day I can see the watch perhaps being of some value. I’m not going to take or make calls on it. I’m not into constant health monitoring and I don’t need third party apps bastardized to a narrow field of view on a display that’s meant to be looked at for no more than 2 seconds at a  time.

Having said all this I know the way Apple works and I know that they have more plans for integration with the watch than any of us know about. Perhaps once those come to light the Apple Watch will make more sense but for now, in it’s current iteration, with the current feature set it just isn’t something I want to wear on a daily basis.