The Apple Watch and Big iPhones

Like a lot of other nerds, I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the Apple Watch. Over the last year, I’ve been wearing my Pebble watch a great deal and I’ve come to rely upon the ability to get notifications on my wrist. The Apple Watch, however, brings a lot more to the equation due to the fact that it is made by the same company that makes my phone. Put simply, Apple is going to give its watch a lot more access to the iPhone then it gives anybody else’s watch.

One of the points I’m most curious about is how this will affect phone usage. There have already been rumblings about how wearing an Apple Watch means you don’t take your phone out of your pocket nearly as much. That only makes sense. I’m guessing that when the watch first arrives, I’m going to go out of my way not to take my phone out of my pocket.

Nevertheless, at some point the shininess will wear off and we will reach some sort of equilibrium where we understand what tasks make more sense on the watch and what tasks make more sense on the iPhone. The question in my mind, however, is where exactly that line gets drawn and what sort of impact that will have on my choice of future phones.

For example, I carried an iPhone 6 Plus for a week. It was definitely a presence in my pocket and larger than I expected it to be. It was also definitely nicer when looking at the screen with my 47-year-old eyeballs. The deal killer for me was when I stood in an elevator with my briefcase in one hand and couldn’t unlock my phone with one hand to read a text message.

If the Apple Watch takes off and is that useful, the elevator scenario would not happen again. The phone would remain in my pocket and I’d look at my wrist. Put simply, if the Apple Watch is as useful as everybody wants it to be, it may change the tipping point for the bigger iPhone. The next six months are going to be so interesting.