This post is about about smartwatches. Well let’s face it, it’s a post about the new watch Apple showed off the other day. For a year or so now people have wondered whether smartwatches would be the next big consumer electronic device. Now that the Apple Watch is about to be released into consumers hands that question might soon have an answer.

It’s of course too early to say for sure but the more I think about it the more I feel that smartwatches won’t be anything close to the market movers that smartphones and tablets have been. I do think they will become ubiquitous, but they are going reach that ubiquity by becoming cheap and limited in scope. Expensive smartwatches will still exist, but I’m not really sure what how much reach they will have.

Now almost as soon as I type these words I can hear the obvious counter argument. There were people who were skeptical about both the iPhone and the iPad and they were quite famously proven wrong. For what it’s worth I wasn’t personally doubtful either device (a lot of people weren’t) though I certainly didn’t predict quite how successful they would become (I was one of those weirdos who checked email and browsed the internet on his old flip phone but I felt like a bit of an outlier). However I think there are very understandable reasons why these two devices were so successful…reasons that don’t seem to apply to any current smartwatch. There are also one other very Apple specific reason why the success of the iPhone might not be mirrored by the Apple Watch.

The thing that made the iPhone and other smartphones revolutionary is pretty straightforward. I’ve written about this earlier but there is a great deal of value of being able to bring the powers of the PC and the internet wherever you are:

It’s worth thinking about why the smartphone revolution happened. Smartphones are less powerful than traditional computers, but their advantage is that they allow you to bring the capabilities of a computer wherever you go. This of course means that you can do many tasks traditionally done on computers while out and about, but it also opens up opportunities to do things which wouldn’t make sense to do on a PC or laptop (think about apps like Uber, Foursquare or Instagram for instance). Most importantly of all though, it changed the way we use many existing applications because it allows us near constant access to the internet. Going online isn’t something you do every so often any more but is semi-continuous state, and this has changed the nature of how we interact with computers in general. Facebook, Google Maps, Twitter, Yelp etc aren’t occasionally referred to references but constant companions. Having a computer in your pocket means you also have the internet in your pocket, and that changed everything.

As for the iPad, it’s biggest criticism, that it was just a large iPhone, was in fact it’s biggest strength. iOS was already a proven and well supported platform and the larger screen meant that it was able to do many tasks better (sometimes much much better) than smaller screened phones could.

Taking all this into consideration, what is the value add that comes from a smartwatch? Unlike the leap of bringing the power of the connected computer from your house to your pocket, it’s taking a much smaller step of bringing it from your pocket to your wrist. There certainly is value in the ability to check your notifications and perform a some other actions without needing to reach for your phone. But since it only takes a couple of seconds to pull your phone out of your pocket that value seems somewhat limited.

It’s also worth noting that while smartwatches will allow you to keep your phone tucked away some of the time, you’ll still need to take it out often. As screens get smaller the types of interactions you can do become more limited (the inverse of this is part of the reason why the iPad was as successful as it was and why smartphone with large screens are so popular now). There are still many tasks that are far more easily done on a smartphone screen than will be on a smartwatch. Both Google and Apple are designing ways to compensate (such with voice recognition) but it’s worth remembering that they are working at a deficit to get to where smartphones already are. And it’s hard to see how a smartwatch will ever be as good as smartphones for something like reading.

My main point is that at any given moment the biggest competitor to any smartwatch is actually the phone it’s tethered to. For any action you might take, the advantage of being able to keep your phone in your pocket needs to be weighed against the disadvantage of using such a small screen. In many cases the tradeoff will be worth it (notifications, fitness tracking etc) but in a lot of situations the answer isn’t so clear. Any interaction you do on a watch face would need to be pretty painless in order to be preferable to the relatively minor hassle of pulling your phone out.

As an aside it’s worth noting that as far as UI goes, unlike the iPad the Apple watch is definitely not a smaller version of the iPhone, nor is Android Wear a smaller version of a Nexus. They both bring entirely new UI paradigms to the table, ones that have barely if ever been tested on the public. It will interesting to see who’s interface comes out as the better one (the answer is probably Apple’s but…well I’ll get there in a bit).

Of course there is the possibility that smartwatches will be able to do some tasks better than smartphones. However at the risk of making a foolish prediction I’m actually a very doubtful about this. The main issue is that almost any piece of technology you could fit in a smartwatch you can already fit in a smartphone, generally with better specs. This means that most applications that can be done on a smartwatch can also be done on a smartphone as well (and often done better). The one exception I can think of might be fitness tracking…or specifically certain types of fitness tracking that allow for constant monitoring of vital signs like heart rates (as the Apple Watch would presumably allow you to do). Theoretically you could put a heart rate monitor on a phone but you couldn’t get a constant reading off it. Perhaps there are a slew of potential applications that might make use of this capability but it honestly seems like a pretty niche thing to hang the popularity of a device on. Smartphones let us bring large number of internet connected devices with us at all times (cameras, GPS, audio playback etc). The additional reach provided by the sensors on smartwatches seems very limited in comparison.

Of course you might point out that we aren’t just talking about any smartwatch, we’re talking about a smartwatch made by Apple. And Apple has been very good at figuring out how to make gadgets that only tech nerds could love into easily usable and highly popular devices that have changed the way we live. They didn’t just bring us the iPhone and iPad, but the iPod, Macbooks and even the personal computer. Given all that it seems a little foolish to bet against them. And I would say that this is true…kind of. This going to be a bit gauche of me to say, but I think it’s worth asking whether it was Apple that was responsible for the successes, or whether it was Steve Jobs.

Something that I haven’t really seen talked about much in the tech press is that the Apple Watch is their first completely new product released in the post Steve Jobs era. Of course it’s impossible to really know how important Steve Job was to the success of Apple and the design of it’s products, or to say how much of one man’s personal and intellectual DNA can be kept intact in a company after he departs. But if Jobs was as important as most of us think, then it’s not unreasonable to expect to see the effects of his passing slowly show up in Apples products over time.

This is part of the reason I’m a little cautious when I hear people say that the Apple Watch will jump start the smartwatch industry like the iPhone did with smartphones. For one thing Apple isn’t creating a new product or disrupting an existing industry in the way that it did with either the iPhone or iPad. Smartwatches aren’t an established market, but a number of companies are already making products of their own (some of them aren’t half bad). Smartwatches are the hot topic among tech enthusiasts right now and Apple…Apple is actually just moving along with the direction of the industry. Now of course they may well have moved in this direction no matter what the rest of the industry did, but my main point is that they aren’t ahead of the rest of it’s competitors this time as they were with the iPhone, the iPad and the Macbook Air, to cite a few examples. It’s possible that Apple isn’t quite as able to see into the future the way it used to seem to be able to do.

Also while I haven’t played with it myself of course, some people are saying that the UI of the Apple Watch isn’t quite as simple or easy to learn as that of the iPhone. Of course this might be just a simple matter of taking the time to learn the new device but it has me a little concerned. Jobs with famously obsessive with how Apple devices worked, felt and looked and I can’t help but wonder if the new watch could have used his touch. The design problems posed by a smartwatch…making the functionality of a smartphone work on such a small screen (and perhaps more importantly deciding which bits of functionality to leave out), are pretty difficult ones to deal with. It might be even Apple will need some time to figure all this out.

So here’s the bottom line. I believe that in the long run most the price people will pay for technology products are a function of the utility it provides to the user. The iPhone and other smarphones cost a decent amount (after you include phone contracts) precisely because they provide a lot of utility. On the other hand it’s hard to see how much utility a smartwatch provides which isn’t already provided by a smartphone. It isn’t to say smartwatches are useless, just that they will be used for less. So it’s hard for me to see them catching on in a big way unless they get a lot cheaper than they currently tend to retail for (other than the Pebble watches). And it’s quite possible that Apple (and other manufacturers) may eventually go down this route. We tend to think that Apple only makes high end products, but don’t forget that back in the iPod heyday they did make a number of budget oriented models (the Shuffle and the Nano) to cater to people who didn’t want to buy a full iPod or iPod touch.

As for higher end smartwatches, it’s hard to predict how important a part they will play. They will probably have a market catering to tech enthusiasts (people who buy new phones and computers every year). But outside of that group it will depend on how well they can sell themselves as a luxury item. And that’s something that most tech companies (including Apple) don’t actually have a lot of experience in. Buying a smartphone every few years is fine for most people considering how dependant we are on them, but a smartwatch feels like a new proposition entirely. My sense is that to the average consumer for something to be worth several hundred dollars, it should either provide a lot of utility or it should last a long time. If I’m right about the utility of smartwatches then they will do neither of these things. If that’s the case manufacturers will need both business model and a general product design less like smartphones and more like traditional watches.

Will Apple sell a lot of watches? In the first year probably yes. I mean it is Apple and they have a pull on the popular imagination like no other company (not to mention a legion of highly devoted fans). But the real question is what will people do a year or so from now. Will they buy new smartwatches (Apple or otherwise) every couple of years like they do with smartphones? Will the wider populace decide that a smartwatch is worth the $400 and up manufacturers are asking them to spend? I think that is much less certain.

Of course all this depends on my assumption about the eventual utility of smartwatchs. And of course I could be dead wrong. Perhaps smartwatches will spawn a whole host of new applications and uses that we’ve never thought of before. Maybe fitness tracking is posed to takeoff and become deeply embedded in everyone’s lives. Or perhaps someone will develop an extraordinarily fun and addicting game which requires quick movements (so that you would want your device firmly strapped to you). Technically any of these and more is possible. Being a gadget geek no one will be happier than I would if there truly was another really cool and innovative piece of tech out in the world. If that does indeed become the case I will dutifully eat my share of humble pie before snapping up whatever shiny new smartwatch is hot in the future. But for the time being I remain pretty skeptical.