Like its predecessors from the Church Clock to the Pocket Watch & finally to the Wrist Watch, will the Apple Watch, as it is officially being called,  fundamentally revolutionise the textures & rhythms of life? Furthermore will it initiate the march to a totally connected always-on world?

The very idea of a wearable computer has existed in the human imagination since at least the birth of the James Bond movies. Fifty years ago it was a science fiction gadget which nobody least of all the scientists took seriously. Finally Apple has placed it at the pinnacle of its new revolution – a wearable computer. 

Is it as revolutionary as it claims to be or is it merely yet another device which the techno-fistas will mandate that has to be purchased or is the current design of a “tethered” device a halfway point in the evolution to a truly independent wearable computer cum watch cum iPod cum iPad.

In spite of Apple’s hype and Tim Cook’s future as Apple’s CEO dependent on this iteration of technology being the latest industry defining standard, can even Apple’s cachet overcome reality and gravity.

Perhaps being an iconoclast – don’t call be a technophobe – my view on the watch per se in its role as a tradition timepiece has not been the breakthrough that the market anticipated.

Occasionally I have questioned the necessity for carrying both a cell phone and a watch. Why not simply use the Cellphone to view the time? Is it merely social convention that one can only use a watch to ascertain the time? Is the ease of utilising the watch instead of the cell phone so important that one cannot use the cell phone instead?

If the truth be told or admitted, I wear a watch solely as part of an overweening tradition and for no other reason. Pure logic would have dictated that I discarded it many years ago. Perhaps ditching a watch is analogous to not wearing a tie to work after doing so for 30 years or like a Muslim woman casting aside her hijab.

What Apple has succeeded in doing in quietening some concerns about a superfluous watch by again making it de rigeur to wear one albeit for another motive: to smash yet another industry model.

Before the invention of the clock, how was time measured? Instead of discrete precise measurable units, it was based upon the diurnal rhythms. The first version of clocks was installed as large institutional instruments adorning churches and state buildings. The use of the peal of its bells would advise those in the vicinity of passage of the half hour. Instead of the angle of the sun, it was now the tolling of the bells which would indicate the end of a day’s toil in the fields or more importantly from a church’s perspective, the time to attend church.

The first personal version was so large that it had to be carried in one’s pocket much like a latter day Cellphone. It was a treasured piece of high tech equipment; in fact the only piece of technology that one would own in one’s life.

The next revolution was the wearable wrist watch. Finally it too discarded its mechanical moving parts some 30 years ago and become electronic.

I view the iWatch as merely an interim phase and not the final product. This harsh verdict is predicated solely upon the fact that in reality it is not an independent unit as it serves as an extension of one’s Apple cell phone. Does the fact that one is viewing one’s watch rather than a Cellphone have any additional utility for the user? Hardly but of course that will not be the only functionality that it will offer. Instead of viewing the weather forecast on one’s Cellphone, one will now have the ability to view it on one’s watch.

Whoopee doooooooooo!

A major breakthrough! A Eureka moment!

I fear not.

Technology snobs might disagree but until such time as the iWatch can fulfil functions independently of some other device that one is carrying, it serves no useful purpose other than to advertise one’s superiority technologically and money-wise.

Before we cast these early adopters as vain and narcissistic, I will concede that it is only by the fact of their embracing such technology that the eventual successor to the current wrist watch will emerge.

When it finally emanates from the laboratories and workshops of the world, it will certainly constitute a change as revolutionary as the emergence of the clock. It will indubitably change the fabric and pace of our lives irreparably.

Only then will the texture and rhythms of our lives truly be revolutionised.