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“You’ll still be able to do with Apple Watch what you do with your current watch: tell the time (and if you want, the date) at a glance and trust that it’s accurate.”

...if you return your watch to a charging station daily.

He goes on:

That said, compared to a traditional watch, daily charging is terrible.

Before entering into the smartphone market, I charged my cellphone less than 100 times per year. Now, I have to charge my smartphone at least once a day. It's a tax on my lifestyle that I don't mind paying.

I hated the daily charging of my smartphone at first. Now, I plan my day and commutes with respect to a battery to ensure I have enough charge for me to interweave the technology in my pocket with my experiencing of the analog world.

I suspect I and others will make the same allowance for a smart watch and the Apple Watch will be a very profitable device for Apple.

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> I suspect I and others will make the same allowance for a smart watch and the Apple Watch will be a very profitable device for Apple.

I'm still skeptical, the smartphone provided a tremendous advantage, namely that you had the internet with you, always. That made it easy to get over the tradeoffs. I'm still unconvinced that the tradeoffs a smart watch has will be compensated.

Doesn't it seem a little weird that you adapt your life around your gadgets rather than vice versa?

No? If the relative benefit is greater than the relative cost, it would make sense to adapt. It would be like going from a horse and buggy to a car and complaining about having to (gasp) stop in the middle of your journey to fill your tank up with gas. Sure, that one little piece of it is annoying, but owning a car is much more advantageous for transportation than a horse.

Humans are much better at adaptation than (so far) the things we build. I remember being surprised at how many things I was doing through a smartphone UI - and then I realised it's not because that's the only thing I can do, it's because that's the only way these services can understand me.

I never quite understood the complaints about smartphones not having a multi-day battery life. As long as it makes it from morning to bedtime and charges to 100% overnight, what's the problem? Obviously if it can't make it to bedtime on one charge, that's a problem, but nightly charging makes no real difference. I imagine the watch will be similar. A one-day battery life for a watch is kind of absurd, but it doesn't seem like it'll matter.

One exception to this is people who just never take their watch off. I did this for a couple of years. Having to charge it every night would have been a problem then. I don't know that people do this in large enough numbers to be significant though.

If you travel, it's one more thing to carry. Plus, I occasionally forget to plug the phone in to charge at night. My current smartphone makes it through two days without charging, though.

That's a good point. You'd probably want to carry the charger anyway (unless it's just an overnight trip and your phone lasts many days) but even just the travel itself can put extra demands on the phone, because of time zone changes or watching lots of videos or whatever. A phone that's perfectly acceptable because it can last 18 hours in normal use can cause problems if you're taking a 14-hour flight and playing with it the whole way.

One example is forgetting to plug it in at night and then in the morning the phone is dead. Luckily my phone is more like 1.5 days so I can get by with remembering to charge it at work a little in some cases

Except if you forget to plug in your smartphone at night.

Or if the new OS update or a misbehaving app increases the battery drain.

Or if after a few years the battery life is shorter than the time between unplugging it in the morning and plugging it in at night.

Or if you travel and are unable to charge the battery while you sleep (e.g. on a train).

And so on.

I use a Blackberry with a 3-day battery life. Many people have portable or add-on batteries for their phones.

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