I am an older person and I freely admit this might limit my vision especially as related to new technology. On the other hand my age allows perspective on new technology as I have used most of the computer technologies developed from 1975 onward. Recently my Apple Representative gave me a personal demonstration of what the Apple Watch could do and, as I stood there listening to him, I realized that my current wrist watch was 17 years old and has cost me around $7.00 per year to own and know what time it is. The Apple Watch is fantastic; it lets you check e-mail and texts, know your pulse rate and stock prices and weather forecast and generally be connected to all sorts of information. As the Apple Rep said, "You don't have to take out your iPhone."
There was a day when computer technology was work and was expensive. I still have my 1987 Macintosh SE, and it still works - as does the dot matrix printer that goes with it. I recall the Mac system update that allowed more than one application to run at a time (Multifinder), and this was magic. I still have my first external hard drive; 40 megabytes at a cost of $849 dollars in 1987. ($1,596 in 2014 dollars - all for 15x less information that will fit on the cheapest flash drive on the planet.) I would use it today except that it won't hold even one image from my digital camera and none of my modern computers has a SCSI connection. As strange as this sounds this was all good at the time, especially because my first computing was done on punch cards; run the cards through the reader, let the mainframe computer process them, walk across campus to get the dot matrix printout on that giant wide paper with holes in the sides only to realize I had made an error in the run commands - walk back across campus and correct the punch cards and then walk across campus again and see if I did it right. The personal computer was a revolution. There were growing pains of course and I remember reading an academic journal article that concluded that people who preferred a white background on computer screens (Mac computers) were less intelligent than people who preferred blue or amber screens (DOS PCs, soon to become Windows PCs). I was one of the less intelligent people and still am, and I can't help wondering why all screens now have a white background.
When the internet arrived I remember how speedy the 1200 baud modem seemed. Prior to the internet, personal computing was, well, personal. The internet gave us connectivity to/with others. Now let's fast forward to the modern age where we are all connected if we want to be. How we have changed; more connectivity and instant accessibility. And perhaps less thought in communicating and more communications of less value. More is not always better and faster is not always better. I read the Facebook posts of my friends and wonder why they wrote some of them. That being said, many of them do matter; the things of whole life and a way to tell many people at one time. This efficiency has its place although I would prefer an e-mail, but that's just me.
This brings me back to the Apple Watch. If I was a more connected person I might appreciate what it could do for me. And in addition to connectedness it could tell me my heart rate, blood pressure and the number of calories I had consumed. It could help me find my way to a destination without having to go to all of the trouble of looking at my iPhone or reading a paper map. In a few years it could help me remember to take all of my medications and Geritol on time. But for right now it seems like just another gadget, a conduit to more noise.
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Full disclosure: I bought Apple stock on the day Steve Jobs announced the iPod and iTunes, two disruptive and transformative technologies. I still own the stock.
