Re:Fitbit is reportedly buying Pebble for around $40M
by vidarh on Thursday December 01, 2016 @01:39AM
(#13077655)
The Pebble is a bit like a calculator watch in the early 80's: terribly exciting to those of us who like 7-8 year old me thought the idea of having something hi-tech on my wrist was awesomely cool, and a big, flashing sign saying "geek" (and not in fashionable hipster-playing-geek kind of way, but in the "badly dressed and socially awkward" kind of way) to people who are fashion conscious.
It's almost even worse than that: I don't care much about fashion, and I'm a big geek, but I still kinda judge the few of my friends and colleagues I see wearing smart watches. Watches have transitioned so strongly from "utility" to "fashion" with the rise of smart watches that anything that doesn't clearly look like it's intended to be a fashion accessory first or "ironic" and retro (like a cheap, low end, dumb digital watch) very easily ends up looking out of place and try-hard.
It's like my mind goes "No! you're not that important!" whenever I see someone receive a notification on one - it feels like it's a sign of obsession of self-importance that just steps over the line into caricature.
The difficult, of course, is that cellphones felt like that too - when I got my first cell phone in the mid 90's, it made me feel like now we were "properly doing business", while at the same time certain people definitively were judging.
So it's hard to tell if this is just because it's new, and whether - if it changes - it will change because companies bring out models that satisfies the fashion conscious, or if it will become more acceptable to wear a watch that looks utilitarian again.
Re:Fitbit is reportedly buying Pebble for around $40M
by vidarh on Friday December 02, 2016 @09:53AM
(#13088950)
I'm perfectly fine with being called a jerk by someone who by judging me on the basis of a single comment demonstrates they're not worth paying attention to.
It's almost even worse than that: I don't care much about fashion, and I'm a big geek, but I still kinda judge the few of my friends and colleagues I see wearing smart watches. Watches have transitioned so strongly from "utility" to "fashion" with the rise of smart watches that anything that doesn't clearly look like it's intended to be a fashion accessory first or "ironic" and retro (like a cheap, low end, dumb digital watch) very easily ends up looking out of place and try-hard.
It's like my mind goes "No! you're not that important!" whenever I see someone receive a notification on one - it feels like it's a sign of obsession of self-importance that just steps over the line into caricature.
The difficult, of course, is that cellphones felt like that too - when I got my first cell phone in the mid 90's, it made me feel like now we were "properly doing business", while at the same time certain people definitively were judging.
So it's hard to tell if this is just because it's new, and whether - if it changes - it will change because companies bring out models that satisfies the fashion conscious, or if it will become more acceptable to wear a watch that looks utilitarian again.