The Apple Watch is a stupid idea, and it shows Apple is falling behind in innovation

Sometime next month, Apple will start shipping its least exciting product in a decade. I expect it to sell like hotcakes initially. But I also expect that when historians look back in a decade or two, the Apple Watch will be seen as one of the company’s greatest misfires. It is a mistake that betrays just how far behind other tech companies – including Asian ones like Xiaomi – Apple has gotten when it comes to ambition and innovation.

Apple’s dumbing down the smartphone experience…

To begin with, the Apple Watch is a bad product. It is essentially a very dumbed-down version of a smartphone for your wrist. It can receive and send a bunch of different message types. It can do some basic fitness tracking stuff. And if you’re lucky, it can do all of that stuff for maybe half a day before you take it off and have to charge it again, because the battery life is reportedly terrible.

The best products solve a problem for consumers (even if it’s one they didn’t know they had). The iPod, for example, was a response to the problem that portable CD players were clunky and existing MP3 players weren’t at all user-friendly. But the Apple Watch is not a solution to any problem. Nobody was clamoring for a dumbed-down iPhone with terrible battery life that you can strap to your wrist.

True, nobody was clamoring for an iPad before that got released, and Apple did make that work. But the Apple Watch will be different. The iPad came at the perfect time: computers were being replaced by mobile devices, and mobile phone data services and wifi were so ubiquitous that building a truly mobile computing device that wasn’t based on a phone made sense. The technology was ready, and so was the market.

But smart watches are not in a similar place at all. Battery technology isn’t good enough to keep them running for very long, so you’ll have to take off the Apple Watch constantly to charge it. Location-based technology isn’t ubiquitous enough (even in the US) to make many of the cool potential applications of a smart watch (imagine waving your wrist to pay at the shop) anything more than a fantasy right now. Speech recognition isn’t good enough to make voice input a truly reliable replacement for typing out a message by hand (which isn’t possible on the Apple Watch’s tiny screen).

That’s not to say the Apple Watch won’t sell, of course. It is aesthetically attractive, it will be available in limited quantities, it comes from a well-liked brand, and it’s inevitably going to be expensive. As a luxury item, it will do well. Especially in markets like China, where showing off your wealth to the world isn’t considered tacky (at least by some), people are going to buy an Apple Watch just so they can use it in public. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good product. It isn’t.

…and missing the bigger picture

And while Apple is making an elegant but not-so-functional smart watch, other tech companies have set their sights much, much higher:

Google is looking decades in the future with research into things like virtual reality and self-driving cars. Baidu is working on “deep speech” and artificial intelligence. Xiaomi (and a lot of other tech companies) are working towards a “smart home” system that unifies and networks all the devices in your house for easy remote control from anywhere. LeTV is building an electric smart car. Alibaba wants to deliver things with drones. I could go on.