Something, Something, Apple Watch.

Oh, yeah. There needs to be substance in a wearable blog post. Not just product names.

Wearables are the next big product category that is driving innovation. The advances being made in screen clarity, battery life, and component miniaturization are being felt across the rest of the device market. I doubt Apple would have been able to make the new Macbook logic board as small as it is without a few things learned from trying to cram transistors into a watch case. But, are we the people sending the wrong messages about wearable technology?

The Little Computer That Could

If you look at the biggest driving factor behind technology today, it comes down to size. Technology companies are making things smaller and lighter with every iteration. If the words thinnest and lightest don’t appear in your presentation at least twice then you aren’t on the cutting edge. But is this drive because tech companies want to make things tiny? Or is it more that consumers are driving them that way?

Yes, people the world over are now complaining that technology should have other attributes besides size and weight. A large contingent says that battery life is now more important than anything else. But would you be okay with lugging around an extra pound of weight that equates to four more hours of typing time? Would you give up your 13-inch laptop in favor of a 17-inch model if the battery life were doubled?

People send mixed signals about the size and shape of technology all the time. We want it fast, small, light, powerful, and with the ability to run forever. Tech companies give us as much as they can, but tradeoffs must be made. Light and powerful usually means horrible battery life. Great battery life and low weight often means terrible performance. No consumer has ever said, “This product is exactly what I wanted with regards to battery, power, weight, and price.”

Where Wearables Dare

As Jonny Ive said this week, “The keyboard dictated the size of the new Macbook.” He’s absolutely right. Laptops and Desktops have a minimum size that is dictated by the screen and keyboard. Has anyone tried typing on a keyboard cover for and iPad? How about an iPad Mini cover? It’s a miserable experience, even if you don’t have sausage fingers like me. When the size of the device dictates the keyboard, you are forced to make compromises that impact user experience.

With wearables, the bar shifts away from input to usability. No wearable watch has a keyboard, virtual or otherwise. Instead, voice control is the input method. Spoken words drive communication beyond navigation. For some applications, like phone calls and text messages, this is preferred. But I can’t imagine typing a whole blog post or coding on a watch. Nor should I. The wearable category is not designed for hard-core computing use.

That’s where we’re getting it wrong. Google Glass was never designed to replace a laptop. Apple Watch isn’t going to replace an iPhone, let alone an iMac. Wearable devices augment our technology workflows instead of displacing them. Those fancy monocles you see in sci-fi movies aren’t the entire computer. They are just an interface to a larger processor on the back end. Trying to shrink a laptop to the size of a silver dollar is impossible. If it were, we’d have that by now.

Wearables are designed to give you information at a glance. Google Glass allows you to see notifications easily and access information. Smart watches are designed to give notifications and quick, digestible snippets of need-to-know information. Yes, you do have a phone for that kind of thing. But my friend Colin McNamara said it best:

I can glance at my watch and get a notification without getting sucked into my phone

Tom’s Take

That’s what makes the wearable market so important. It’s not having the processing power of a Cray supercomputer on your arm or attached to your head. It’s having that power available when you need it, yet having the control to get information you need without other distractions. Wearables free you up to do other things. Like building or creating or simply just paying attention to something. Wearables make technology unobtrusive, whether it’s a quick text message or tracking the number of steps you’ve taken today. Sci-Fi is filled with pictures of amazing technology all designed to do one thing – let us be human beings. We drive the direction of product development. Instead of crying for lighter, faster, and longer all the time, we should instead focus on building the right interface for what we need and tell the manufacturers to build around that.