 Oh boy, it's the Apple Watch. There's so much to say about the Apple Watch. It's Apple's first new product in five years, and it's the first one developed after Steve Jobs died. There's a lot riding on this thing. Apple introduced it at a celebrity-filled event last year so huge they built an entire temporary building for it. You can spend anywhere from $350 to $17,000 on it. It's crazy. It's a big deal. So what's it like? First, the Apple Watch doesn't look anything like Apple's other products. It's rounder and friendlier than the iPhone or the MacBook. It really looks more like a first-generation iPhone than anything else. It's also pretty heavy. It's just under three ounces, and it feels like one solid object in your hand. It's just way nicer than any other smartwatch out there. It also has more stuff. Unlike Google's Android Wear, which basically extends your phone, the Apple Watch feels like an entire little computer on your wrist, and that's both good and bad. Unlike every other smartwatch, the Apple Watch is all about physical controls. It literally has buttons and knobs, and it takes a while to figure them all out. There's the digital crown scroll wheel, which is also a button, the screen itself, which uses a new technology called Force Touch to act as another button, and there's a side button, which is especially confusing, since it looks just like the iPhone's sleep button, but actually opens the communications app. Apple's making a big deal out of the digital crown, which lets you smoothly scroll and zoom on the watch without your fingers getting in the way of the screen, and it's definitely nice to have. After using the watch for a while, I looked for the crown on my phone. But you can also just scroll through lists on the watch just fine with your finger, and in general, anything you can do with the crown, you can do on the screen. The back of the watch has a raised area for the optical heart rate sensor, and it's also where the magnetic charging cable connects. The cable is nice, but I wish Apple had included a nice dock like Motorola does with the Moto 360. Of course, all of the real action with the Apple Watch happens on the screen, and the retina display is beautiful. It has super bright colors, great viewing angles, and inky blacks that make it seem like it blends right into the sides of the watch. It's great. My only complaint is that it's not laminated super close to the watch face, and there's definitely a small air gap that you can see from time to time. Once you start using the watch, it's pretty obvious that there's actually three different things going on. The first and most important is that the watch face is an entire little smartwatch platform all by itself. It's where you're going to spend the most time. There's really only a few basic templates, but you can customize the details on almost all of them. There's not really a great digital watch face, though, and you can't create your own or buy new ones like you can with Android Wear. It's a missed opportunity, and Apple has to be working on it. But the watch face is really about two things, notifications and glances. When you get a notification, you'll feel a slight tap on your wrist, but the screen won't light up. When you actually look at your wrist, the watch will first show you what kind of notification you've got, and if you keep looking, it'll show you the actual information that came in. This is great if you get a lot of notifications, and you're almost certainly going to get a lot of notifications because the iPhone app that controls everything comes set to full blast by default. So we're really looking forward to launching this new thing. We're thinking a lot about the future. We want to bring in food and technology and kind of think about how we can, you know, spin that into a really great package, and we were wondering if The Verge was interested in collaborating with us. So this is an email from a coworker who is not this coworker. I don't have time to answer this right now because I want to pay attention, so I'm just going to dismiss it for later. So we thought that, you know, this was something that could be a really great collaboration for the Eater and The Verge, and we were wondering if you guys had any thoughts on it. Yeah, there's so much... This is an Instagram-like. And here's the real problem with the Apple Watch right now. The settings for how you control what notifications go from your phone to your watch aren't very granular. It's all or nothing for every app you have on your phone. So I'm getting all kinds of notifications I don't want, and to turn them off, I have to go through a huge list and pick which ones yes or no. And so really all I'm doing is knowing more about what's happening on my phone than ever before. Is there somewhere that you need to be right now? I really want to talk about this. I think it's such an exciting project. There's so much we could do together. Yeah, absolutely. Another thing that we're thinking about is the modern kitchen. This is another texture in my life. So now I'm not paying attention to Sonia. I'm not paying attention to my friends and family, but I'm more aware of how many people that I'm ignoring than ever before. I'm not sure that I like it. If you miss a notification, you can just go back to the list from the watch face and take it from there. But you'll sometimes notice that notifications slow things down, which is a theme on the watch. It's a little underpowered. It's the same with glances, which are basically little status screens you can open from the watch face. You can quickly check your heart rate or figure out your location or look at the weather. Apps on your phone can install glances, so I can see what the top trends on Twitter are or look at mass transit options using transit. It's cool, but glances don't update in the background, so you have to wait for them to load from your phone. Anything that loads data from your phone takes a while to happen on the watch, especially if you're loading location data. If you want to send a quick message to someone, you click on the side button to open a communications app, which is really just a favorites list. Once you pick a contact, you can either call them right from the watch, send them a text or emoji, or poke at them using digital touch if they also have an Apple Watch. Digital touch is pretty cool, but it's kind of more of a demo than anything else. You can send little drawings and taps and even your heartbeat, and they'll play back in real time for your friends and then disappear. I had fun sending my heartbeat to people, but other than that, I'm mostly stuck to texting. Apple also has weird ideas about emoji. You can send the standard ones, but you can also send one of three animated custom images that are exclusive to the Apple Watch. I'm not sure why this smiley face has a tongue. I'm not sure why this heart is exploding, and I'm not sure why this mime's hand is giving me nightmares. This is by far the strangest part of the Apple Watch. I had a lot of fun with it, but I also think I freaked a few people out with this thirsty rando. Beyond the watch face and the communications app, you can click the digital crown to open the home screen and launch apps. It's a world of possibility, but it's also where the watch definitely feels the slowest. Apps in the watch right now load remotely off your phone, and they feel like it. Uber and Twitter take forever to load, anything that needs to grab location data from your phone is extremely slow, and in general, you're going to look at a lot of waiting screens. These apps also don't offer that much functionality. Think of them more like remote controls for the apps on your phone. You don't really need them. Apple says true native apps are coming later this year, and hopefully they'll do more. The Apple Watch also has Apple Pay, which lets you pay anywhere you can pay with an iPhone. All you have to do is double tap the side button and wave the watch over the payment terminal. Once you've got the watch in your wrist, all you have to do is unlock your iPhone with Touch ID and you're ready to go. That was actually pretty cool. The watch stays authenticated until you take it off, which means it's even faster than paying with an iPhone. This is Apple at its best, with hardware and software and services all working together, and it's by far my favorite feature of the Apple Watch. One of the biggest features of the Apple Watch is health tracking. It can measure your steps, it can count your calories, and it can even remind you to stand up every so often. The heart rate sensor on the back takes your pulse automatically every 10 minutes, and you can set goals for movement and exercise throughout the day. The three rings in the activity app fill in as you get closer to those goals. If you hit the gym, you can open the workout app and select from a few presets to guide you through a workout. But once you set a preset in your goals, the watch will give you little taps to mark your progress. But it's really only geared for cardio, walking, running, an elliptical, exercise bike, a stair stepper, a rower. Anything that's not cardio doesn't really get picked up, so weight lifting, yoga, things that don't make your heart rate go up don't really get accurately tracked by the watch. None of this is as advanced as other fitness devices, but it is all right there on your wrist. Apple expects third parties will build apps to expand on these basic capabilities over time, which will definitely give the Apple Watch a leg up over other platforms. But wait a minute. All of this seems really interesting as a tech gadget, but the watch is supposed to be a fashion item as well. Is it actually cool? I went and asked the fashion editors at Rack.com to find out. Is there a lot of interest from your readers, from young women who read a fashion magazine? Is there not a lot of interest? What's the vibe? I think that there's a certain kind of person who wants to know what's happening, wants to have the latest product immediately because it makes them feel really savvy. I feel like that's dissipating a little bit though. That person who has to have the iPhone first, I don't know that they're going to feel that way about the watch. Well, this is not luxury. It feels very much like two separate objects that were not designed in tandem. It feels like you very much have a computer sitting atop a band, which is not the point of a watch. In terms of whether the fashion world will adopt it or not, I don't know that they're going to adopt it as a design object. I do think this is a watch that makes you feel important, and people who work in fashion like to feel important. Is this cool? Does it stand a chance of being cool? I think that if it gets adopted all over the place, fashion people are going to find a reason to love it. I don't think that they're going to love it as a beautifully designed object. I believe in the future of this. I'm not into this first version, but I believe in the future. I think there could be something here. That's the Apple Watch. It's so much more powerful than every other smartwatch, and it's infinitely more stylish, but it's still a smartwatch. It can do a lot, but it definitely can't replace your phone, and it really can't do much that your phone can't do. To be honest, it's a little unfocused. It's like it has half of every possible feature. It's a first real step towards what seems like a revolution in wearable computing, but it's definitely just a first step. So should you buy it? I'm not convinced anyone actually needs a smartwatch yet, and there's nothing about the Apple Watch that really changed my mind. But there's certainly enough here to be interesting, and it's definitely the nicest smartwatch out there. But it's also one of the most expensive. So if you're going to get one, I'd only recommend the Sport model for $350 or $400. You'll get all the same functionality as the more expensive versions, and Apple's definitely going to improve this software a lot over the next few years. But spending any more money than that right now seems silly. The Apple Watch is interesting right now, but I'd bet next year's model and the one after that will be the ones to actually buy.