Perspectives – The Turning Grille

I go back and forth on the Apple Watch, but my first reaction was “I don’t get it.” Why would I pay $350 for something that doesn’t do anything significantly different from my iPhone? Especially when I don’t wear watches anymore? Why am I not excited about this? Do I just not get it?

This perspective helps clarify my thoughts: Where Steve Jobs called computers a bicycle for the mind, Jorge Arango calls the new Apple Watch a unicycle.

Unicycles share a few features with bikes, so you’d be forgiven for thinking they are similar. They are both human-powered and use similar components—wheels, pedals, saddles, etc. However, they serve very different purposes. Bicycles amplify human energy to allow the rider to travel farther and faster. Unicycles, on the other hand, are not transportation. They are entertainment. We stare in bemusement at unicyclists not because of the distance they cover and the speed they sustain, but because they can remain upright in a tottering one-wheeled metal pole with a seat on top. (Sometimes while juggling knifes!)

Read the rest. It’s pretty bang on.

Oh, and FWIW, I think Apple Pay is probably the most underrated announcement from Apple last week. That’s the thing that has potential to drive significant changes in behavior. If I had to bet, I’d say Pay will outlast and outperform Watch.

I’ve had this piece open in a Safari tab for months and I regret that I’ve taken so long to read it. Adapted by Frank Chimero from the talk he gave at the Build conference in November, 2013, What Screens Want is an outstanding essay, both visually and conceptually. Ostensibly about responsive design and web and interaction design generally, the piece ends up getting at the heart of what this design is all about: making technology work better for humans. It’s about how we’re current trapped by a vision of the web that’s about commerce and transactions and not at all about making the world a better place.

We used to have a map of a frontier that could be anything. The web isn’t young anymore, though. It’s settled. It’s been prospected and picked through. Increasingly, it feels like we decided to pave the wilderness, turn it into a suburb, and build a mall. And I hate this map of the web, because it only describes a fraction of what it is and what’s possible. We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention. That’s one of the sleaziest things you can do.

If you care about creating a better internet, take the time to read What Screens Want. It’s well worth it.