Apple is weeks away (according to rumor) from releasing a new consumer technology product that has the potential to revolutionize our relationship to technology. Sure, there’s been smartwatches before, but none have had Apple’s level of detail, polish, and integration on the hardware and software levels. If anyone can get a smartwatch right, and unlock the potential of a computer on the wrist, it’s probably Apple. We can’t say until it’s for sale and wrapped around our wrists. There’s plenty we don’t know about Apple Watch, and how we’ll be using it, and all those unknowns are fueling speculation around the Internet.

Well, maybe in some places. What I keep seeing in my circles is speculation about how much Apple’s going to charge for the gold, Edition models, theories about how many Edition models are being manufactured, and curiosity about how they’ll be sold.

Seriously, people. We’re about to get our hands on a piece of gear that could, if done right, change the way we interact with every piece of digital technology in our lives. Apple Watch can become the most personal piece of technology we have seen, changing the way we relate to everything digital… and we’re arguing about the price of the gold in the case, and whether the most expensive model will cost $3,000, $5,000, or $20,000. Spare me. It’s clear that Apple is targeting across the price spectrum for their smartwatch, and it’s a smart strategy. There are people who drop multiple thousands on mechanical watches without blinking, and making Apple Watch appeal to them is a reasonable way try and secure some clout among the fashion conscious. How much will it cost? “A lot” will suffice.

The more important price we know is $349, the price for the entry-level Apple Watch. I agree with the current theory that the $349 price will be for the Sports variant, and it’s only $100 more than the base model Moto 360, generally considered the best Android Wear watch out there. As prices go, it’s one that puts the Apple Watch within reach of many people with an interest in technology. It’s affordable, but not cheap, which is fast becoming Apple’s entry-level price point. I’m reminded of the discussion, pre-iPad about pricing, with some suggesting it would start at $999. Instead, Apple priced it at $499, shocking everybody, and instantly making the iPad seem more affordable. If we have to talk about the price of this product, this is where we should be having the discussion.

Instead, focusing on the high-end of the price scale for Apple Watch feels like navel-gazing of the highest order.

There’s real conversations we can have about the role of wearables, like John Pavlus’s recent piece in MIT Technology Review:

The unique promise of wearable technology lies in its intimate proximity to our bodies, which makes Apple’s inward-facing “taptic engine” particularly interesting. This lets the device deliver pulses of vibration, or haptic feedback, to the wearer’s wrist, and it is unavailable to third-party developers for now. If Apple removes that barrier, the watch’s true power as a new kind of personal communicator will be unleashed…

This is powerful, compelling, and exciting stuff! It’s why, wearables skeptic that I am, have undertaken an experiment of wearing a smartwatch for a month. I want to know the potential of what this new form of computing can do, and the potential of what we can do with it. The gold Apple Watch Edition isn’t going to differ functionally from its less expensive, steel and aluminum brethren. On the outside it’s shinier, and fancier, but inside, the hardware is the same, and so are the bits that make up the software. So why all the attention being lavished on the mysterious price point for the gold model?

As I think about this problem, I come back to a thought I had recently: “That which is not quantifiable is not valued.” People, especially technology people, love numbers. I remember comparing the specs on computers with my friends back in the day, grumbling with envy at the guy with the 500Mhz Pentium III while I still got by with my 266Mhz Pentium II. In 2015, the specs no longer matter that much, outside of heavy lifting truck stuff, like video editing and 3D rendering (for games and design alike). When the innards of our laptops and tablets don’t differ that much between brands, we have to find something else to quantify, gloat about, and argue over.

So, we choose to fight and die on the hill of our chosen brand’s market value. Apple had the biggest quarter ever, and is now worth more than almost all other companies in the world. Apple sold more iPhones last quarter, at a higher average selling price than ever before. If Apple sells a bunch of multi-thousand dollar gold watches, that’s a huge pile of profit, and yet another thing to cheer for, and another arrow in our quiver that we can launch at the Android fans with their flat-tire screened Moto 360s.

John Gruber has described two types of baseball fans: numbers people, and story people. Numbers people care obsessively about the statistics, while story people focus on the player, their interactions, and the arc of a team’s season. For baseball, Gruber styles himself a story person. In technology, there’s the same thing. Some of us care about the numbers: clock speed, RAM, cache, transfer speeds. Some of care about how we can use the darn thing: about apps, interfaces, and our relationship with our gizmos. It’s clear that I’ve moved into that latter camp, and the numbers people aren’t telling a story I care about.

When we care about what someone else is drinking, we are attaching some small part of our inner peace to that person and their actions. Because we can’t control that person or what they drink, we risk feeling discontent when they don’t act in the way we’ve expected them to.

We allow ourselves to be affected by other people like this all the time. It’s a perfectly natural, human thing. Of course we should care about what our loved ones think. But when it comes to minutia—like what someone’s drinking—I can’t see any worthwhile reason to care.

Ask yourself, “How does this person’s decision affect me?”

— “What Do You Care?” — Quarter-Life Enlightenment

Linking to an old, but evergreen, post by a friend.

The speed someone listens to a podcast at doesn’t affect you. The smartphone platform of the person across from you at the coffee shop doesn’t affect you. Someone ordering soup at a restaurant doesn’t affect you.

When you’re about to write a polemic about something, ask yourself that important question: “How does this person’s decision affect me?”

Chances are it doesn’t.

A dear friend of mine is an public school art teacher with decades of experience on the job. She’s been bemoaning the push in public education towards what she describes as “left-brain” thinking—a focus on hard knowledge, facts, and skills over creative, “right-brain” thinking, the sort she excels at and teaches. [1] While much can be said about the miseries of the public education system in the United States, standardized testing, and its effects on students, that’s far out of my realm of knowledge. I think of my friend’s complaints in the terms of a technology essayist, and she’s on to something.

There’s a huge, aggressive, push to teach people to learn programming. It’s enough so that, even President Obama insists “Everybody’s got to learn how to code”. Never mind that that there’s jobs in technology that don’t require writing a single line of code. Programming is one of those skills that’s viewed as extremely “left-brain”: logical, linear, and direct. It often is. It’s also, often, something that requires huge amounts of creative thinking, problem solving, and “right-brain” style thinking. The best programmers are often ones who have wild, creative ideas and try to build them with the tools at hand—or making their own, new tools.

I’m not trying to write a polemic against learning to code. It’s a polemic that learning to code is not enough. Programming is a great way to empower people to create new, innovative things, stuff more innovative than writing the latest front-end to another miserable sharing economy service, built on around a pre-existing framework. Without education that teaches children both how to write code, and how to think creatively, they’re only getting half of the tools they need to make awesome things. Coding is a tool. The way you use it is what matters, and only with creative, “right-brain” thinking can you find new ways to apply it.

Far beyond just programming, being able to think creatively is essential to solving the problems that face humanity. The ability to create new ideas and implement them, is what has the greatest chance to save our species from itself. It’s hard to quantify the success of creative thinking, and harder to teach. The best tools we have to teach creativity and problem solving are things like art, music, and creative writing. [2] It’s a form of education that is hard, if not impossible to quantify, and that’s what makes it so easy to ignore, and to cut from our education budgets. Doing so is dangerous, and sells our futures short.

I’m a week or so into my Great Smartwatch Experiment of 2015. The initial novelty’s worn off, and I’m getting used to having a vibrating alert machine on my wrist. There’s moments in using a Pebble where I’m really glad to have it. Among them, the gentle reminders when something comes due in Due.app, being able to see the upcoming due items from OmniFocus in my calendar at a glance, and triaging messages when I’m out and about in the cold weather. [1] It’s made me rethink strategies around notifications, and made my phone a quieter, calmer thing to keep in my pocket.

And yet, this thing is annoying as hell. I’ve had moments where it’s vibrating and twitching so much that I want to throw it across the room. Part of these are OS-level issues. There’s no way to not get a notification on my Pebble if I’m actively using the phone, so when a message from my girlfriend comes in while I’m scrolling Twitter on the subway, I’ll see it on my screen, and feel it on my wrist two seconds later. iOS 8 also hasn’t exposed APIs for interactive notifications to Pebble, so when an alarm rings in Due, I’ve got to find my phone to mark the item done, or postpone it. I hope that iOS 8.2, will expose these features to watches other than Apple Watch, but that hope is toothpick slim.

Stephen Hackett noticed the same thing in his Pebble experiement, suggesting that “he Pebble may have to shift to being more Android-centric, where it can compete better against more integrated devices.” Pebble’s CEO promises a new interface, and new hardware soon, making this an interesting time to try one of these things out. I like the idea of the Pebble as a “hub,” and not a computing device all to itself…

…Not for the least of reasons because the Pebble app ecosystem is miserable. I’m not going to lie. Most of the apps on the Pebble, at least the ones that work with iOS, feel half-, if not quarter-baked. There are ones that work super well, but these are often the most basic apps: timers, remotes, and the like. The Evernote app is a little finicky, but it works well enough. I just don’t have much need to look at Evernote notes on my wrist. There seems to be precious little curation and testing for Pebble apps, which may be why they want to get out of the app game.

But the biggest issue, so far, remains the inability to do much on my phone with the Pebble but dismiss notifications. If I could interact more with the Pebble, and not dig my phone out of my pocket—or swipe at it in its dock on my desk—I’d be much less annoyed with it. Yet, there’s some huge conveniences with the Pebble, and I’m not entirely sure I want to give it up for the annoyances. It’s walking a tight line between convenient and annoying, and right now the balance is at the point where I can’t decide which way to go.

The drive on my Time Capsule is failing. This makes sense—the darn thing is seven years old, and hard drives don’t last forever. I’ve got cloud backup for all my important stuff, so I’m not worried. I just didn’t want to have to buy a new one right now.

I’m having issues with my MacBook Pro (15″ non-retina, 2013 model) and Yosemite, where apps will suddenly hang on launch. I’ve rebooted a few times, fixed permissions, and I think everything is behaving now, but it feels tenuous. Nothing is more fun than trying to get work done, only to have to reboot into recovery mode to run Disk Utility.

I think the touchscreen on my iPad 3 is starting to act up. When trying to use it, I’m seeing strange, seemingly random swipes and taps on ocassion. When I sat down to write last night, I managed to go 20 minutes without anything weird happening. Intermittent issues are the most annoying ones.

My EarPods are crackling and the volume feels weaker. I think the connection at the jack is breaking. This happens about every year or so with a pair, and somehow, I’ve accumulated enough pairs from various sources, that I even keep a backup in my daily bag with my iPhone cables.

So many of the tools we rely on every day are more fragile than we think. Hard drives fail, batteries swell, connections break under stress, software updates have bugs that only manifest under edge cases. When things go wrong, it’s a huge, and sometimes expensive, pain in the butt, and we’re always surprised when it happens. Now matter how much we reduce the points of failure in our technological lives, we’ll never reach a zero failure rate.

When the inevitable happens, try to keep this in mind. I hope it will reduce the frustration we feel when our systems fail.