Apple Is Chasing Luxury And It's Painful To Watch – 3

These articles are noteworthy for what exactly they say about the new Apple product that is the pretext for their existence.

They tell us about things like the elegant way the watch's box opens (FT), the sound a band makes as its clasp closes – “It makes this fantastic k-chit,” Ive is quoted as saying (Vogue) – and the very fancy high-end materials employed for expensive Watch versions – "gold hardened in a novel process of compression" (The New Yorker).

Ive's Watch is undeniably beautiful.

While its price will start at $350, these articles are way better at explaining why the versions that will cost in the thousands will work as luxury and fashion than why you and I need to have a less-expensive one to go with our iPhones.

The worst fear for an Apple-watcher (or Apple investor) should be that all this hullabaloo about luxury is a deliberate distraction concocted by Apple from the possibility that the core functional advantages of the watch are simply not very impressive.

After all, other cool and very functional digital watches are already on the market or about to be launched, like LG's much-anticipated Urbane models, which won't always even require connection to a smartphone.

Apple may be signaling its own lack of confidence in its own product by so relentlessly touting the "luxury" of it. [We learned much more about the details of the Watch following the big show the company put on in San Francisco on Monday March 9.] Or maybe Jony Ive is just more interested in luxury than he is in tech.

That would be something an Apple investor should worry about.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Watch succeeds long term.

However, it seems likely that only future versions will live up to the hype. After all, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad all took time to ramp up to their economy-altering potential and impact.

At launch none of them were freighted with anything like this level of expectation or attention. That's partly because Jobs was still alive and observers of tech knew he sometimes hit it and sometimes missed it.

Now Apple CEO Tim Cook and Jony Ive are being asked to prove they are Jobs' worthy heirs, and that they can grow this enormous company substantially with new product categories.

In reality, even without a near-term smash hit watch Apple will do fine for the foreseeable future, because the company's ongoing success in phones, tablets, computers, and services is epochally substantial and still growing.

But if the watch does eventually settle successfully into the tradition of world-altering Apple products, it will be because it is relatively affordable, well designed and technology-centered around software that does things we need to have done.

It will not be because it is gorgeous or expensive or craved by those on the wrong side of the world's inequality divide.

It will be because, like all great modern technologies, it helps in fundamental ways to reduce the significance and pain of that divide.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-luxury-apples-watch-beside-point