Why the Apple Watch exists

For all the company’s effort to divert attention to the design statement the new Apple Watch supposedly represents, for all the trotting out of design chief Jony Ive, one utterance puts the watch in proper context. It comes from the company’s own testers who claimed, after using the watch for a few weeks, they were fishing their iPhones out of pockets and backpacks many fewer times a day.

The iPhone has a weakness! What started as an incredible convenience has become a pain in the butt, an annoying friction in our consumption of digital services. Google has been experimenting with Google Glass for four years. Samsung and Huawei are testing the market with smartwatches of their own. If Apple doesn’t find an answer and someone else does, Apple’s $700 billion market cap could be in trouble. Indeed, when so much of the value resides not in the device but in the services that it delivers, many analysts already wonder how much longer Apple can keep charging princely prices for an iPhone not very different from hundreds of devices running Google’s and Microsoft’s operating systems.

So the Apple watch is not about Mr. Ive indulging his fetish for high-end timepieces. It’s not about Apple reinventing the watch because it doesn’t know what else to do. Not for nothing did Apple’s leaked training materials emphasize using watch inquiries to upsell customers to a new iPhone. Not for nothing was the unveiling tilted toward luxurious versions encased in gold with fancy straps and selling for $17,000. Clearly Apple is looking to use rich bozos to defray the watch’s development costs quickly so it can be rolled out as cheaply as possible to average iPhone buyers.