Smart Watches are DUMB

The Jetsons predicted that by 2062 humans would have flat screen TVs Robo vacuums flying cars and smart watches well welcome to the Future Baby half a century early now the Jetson Smartwatch could only do video chats so we're actually doing better than predicted but these wrist computers don't fulfill the futuristic promises that we might have hoped for [Music] now my own personal take here I bought an Apple Watch series 7 back in March because I have a heart condition and for a long time I felt like a smart watch with a heart rate monitor would be a solid purchase for somebody in my unique position while you might notice that I am not currently wearing one and that's because I sold it after two months of owning it the reasons for me personally getting off of this Smartwatch bandwagon will be discussed later but let's just set the scene for why you should also be getting off the bandwagon believe it or not smart watches have been around since the 1970s and those ones were hilarious we're just gonna skip forward to about 2015 which is when Apple dropped the Apple watch marking the beginning of the Smartwatch era as we know it today this fancy Gizmo was perfectly suited to the ideal Apple customer it was slick expensive and not really necessary now when these things launched it was a big deal it felt like the iPhone launched a new category a new frontier for the tech world that would change the way that we communicate as a species but it was predictably a letdown that baby will do everything but tell you what time it is it doesn't tell time no basically the biggest perk of this thing was that you could get notifications without needing to pull the phone out of your pocket which yes I know is a is a very stressful and strenuous part of your everyday I'm putting in a pocket where you want me to put it anywhere not in your pocket the Apple watch quickly became the best-selling watch on the market outpacing tycoons like Rolex and Tag Heuer despite its ultimately questionable reviews and functionality smart watches are now one of the most popular wearable products worldwide and are expected to generate 45 billion dollars USD this year now modern Smart Watch technology has come far enough that there can be an argument made for the functionality of these devices you no longer need to plug them in to use the screen and they're a lot sleeker than the wrist keyboards of the past compared to the iPhone the Apple watch does have some improved features supposedly this is better for activity and fitness tracking which I can kind of confirm and it goes more places like underwater sometimes it has some useful features for health related situations like people who are diabetics or people who have heart conditions and finally it can call 9-1-1 for you in an emergency which is pretty cool now I don't know if there is anyone who truly just has an Apple Watch on their wrist but a lot of people are really into the idea of having access to basic Communications like texting or calling or GPS without the distraction of the Doom scroll that can happen when you're looking at your phone but that's not really how these watches are being used today for the most part watches still need to be near the companion iPhone to work the Apple watch Ultra is the most suited to all-day use without needing an iPhone there are lots of videos of people trying this out for like an entire day with relatively mixed reviews for some it works pretty well for others there were just a lot of issues with connectivity GPS battery life and ultimately still needed a bigger device to get things done on and this is the first real problem of the Smartwatch in a world of iPads iPhones and MacBooks the Smartwatch is fairly Limited in its uses but a lot of people are still buying them so why one quarter of smart watch users say that their main reason for buying a smart watch was for the health and fitness benefits basically me now I loved closing my rings every day you know monitoring all my fitness for about three weeks and then I pretty quickly lost my enthusiasm for the whole gamification thing and just stopped using it and the thing is that's just my opinion but it's a lot of other people's experiences too because the research agrees apparently only about half of smart watch users actually use the health tracking technology available on the device one third of people using the fitness trackers stop within six months and over half of the users abandoned them all together people who use fitbits and other fitness trackers are actually less successful in meeting their health goals or maintaining motivation after the tracker is gone and finally the metrics aren't even that reliable and see this is the theme with the smart watch promises in general there's so many amazing things that it can technically do but none of them do them well enough to be a game changer I bought my Series 7 specifically because of its ECG feature which is really accurate and a pretty phenomenal technology that Apple has developed basically use the pulse in your finger and in your wrist to measure your heart rate at a particular moment while this feature has been proven to be effective at measuring and capturing irregular heart rhythms in other patients it never worked for me basically you need to find a place really stable where you can put your arm on the table really still and hold it for 30 seconds now in that 30 seconds I was never able to get a conclusive reading because you know I was like running or something or jumping around and and by the time I like found a place to chill out put my arm and hold it for 30 seconds it just either the moment had passed or or the reading just didn't come through clearly enough but here's the thing for the millions of people with heart conditions across the U.S and myself included it was a health related reason to justify buying an expensive watch we're talking four digits sometimes here but apple is the king of manufacturing problems and then selling us the solutions do you remember when they removed that headphone jack at the same time that the released air pods for the first time smart watches are no different here no one needs a smart watch no one cared before caring about it is a need I invented to sell this kind of stuff but it seems like everyone in their dog has one nowadays Apple sneakily invented a whole new product class that they could have people replace in every Euro two with planned obsolescence it's truly a great business model terrible for the environment and everyone else but a great business model for them now to give you my very biased perspective on this basically the best case scenario for you buying a smart watch is you waste a bunch of money on a device that you bear really use but what's the worst case scenario you might ask well it's a lot more Insidious because the thing is these are literally trackers they are no doubt gathering information about you and your life where you go when you sleep how much you exercise and more make no mistake this data collection is not neutral and there are fears that other health apps like menstrual cycle tracking could be used to criminalize people for getting abortion since Roe v Wade was overturned Nobody Knows the extent to which these companies are harvesting our personal data or what they're doing with it never mind the risk of hacking Etc because this technology is changing so fast it's basically impossible to know all of the ways that it's impacting us we're going to learn down the road that you know people who have these fitness trackers monitoring their everyday lives have watery poops like that could just be it like maybe we don't know this now but like all these people having watery poops or having them because they got this wristwatch monitoring their their blood flow or something that's probably not a great example we'll Workshop that one regardless of the impacts the tech is definitely reshaping our brains literally changing our neural Pathways and while we don't know what the outcome is going to be the effects that we're seeing are already pretty black mirrory [Music] here's my main concern with all this if we're Outsourcing our self-awareness and motivation to these smart watches we're basically setting ourselves up to be controlled by them take for an example Phantom notifications yeah I can't be the only one that sometimes feels like my phone just buzzed in my pocket when it didn't well the same thing is happening on people's wrists which on its own makes sense and doesn't seem too scary until you think about it in a pavlovian way where we are basically being conditioned to respond to a small vibration telling us something [Music] sure [Music] what are you doing a bad all of a sudden in our Smart Homes video we talked about the amount of control that you give up when you adopt a smart home system and that video is also very depressing if you want to go watch it after this one inoperable locks hacked security systems lights that won't turn on imagine that same thing when you Outsource your self-awareness and motivation to a little thing on your wrist eventually you're going to start relying on this to be motivated to do anything because it's already happening some Smartwatch users have said that they have started to rely on the watch to tell them things like whether or not they slept well or were they energized enough for a workout instead of just like you know checking in for a second and seeing how you feel others have said that if they forget their watch at home there's no point in going to the gym that day I've literally done that myself I have turned around on a walk gone home just to get the watch so that I could record those steps and not miss out some psychologists have noted how smartwatch is with their ability to track things like sleep heart rate and time spent on various activities can help us understand our inner motivations and needs which does seem valid we are Outsourcing our self-awareness to this device and relying on it to tell us what we like and what we don't like at the same time technology use is known to wear down the pleasure Center in your brain making it harder and harder for you to feel pleasure in the first place it's like the energizing feeling that you get from going on a run or jumping into the ocean versus the energizing feel that you get when you chug an entire cup of coffee it doesn't feel that far off to imagine a future where Siri can notice when you're feeling sad and make a suggestion to cheer you up and maybe sure that suggestion is to listen to your favorite song or go on a run or maybe it's something else like buying something from a corporation that runs your algorithm and yes this is really sad and dark and and creepy but we're not even at the creepiest part yet Martin Cooper the father of the cell phone and former head of Motorola believes that cell phones are literally going to become a part of our bodies way back when his original Vision was a cell phone that would be an extension of a person and wouldn't be with that person at all times and let's just do a quick fact check here yes point for Martin because I'm addicted to my phone but recently he gave another prediction he said I kid you not the cell phone is going to become a part of you parts of the cell phone will be in embedded under your skin yummy but he doesn't even stop there you won't have to charge a cell phone because your body is the perfect charger I mean come on are we in the horror movie right now see humans are teetering on the parallel universe line between having the world ruined and relying on Tech as our savior or having ruined the whole world and seen Tech as a part of that problem one of the weirdest Parts though is that smart Tech Brands itself as both of these things at once it's more Tech that will give you a life of less Tech like there is a lot of people who buy a smart watch because they don't want to look at their phones as much and I can't be the only person that thinks that that is kind of a crazy justification right for some of us sure absolutely the Smartwatch can be a very functional tool but for the vast majority it's either unnecessary not actually good enough at doing its job or a creepy tracking monitor thing that's transmitting your daily movements to a massive corporation like most Apple products it's something we buy because we want to be more productive want to be healthier or cooler whatever but just because Tech has got us into all these messes it doesn't mean that Tech is the thing that's going to get us out of them as we get closer to this smarter Tech world we are seeing a rise in the opposite of dumb Tech take the light phone their whole thing is that they designed this product so that you use it less it doesn't have social media a web browser or apps it only phones and texts and yes there is a headphone jack Mighty is a modern MP3 player that can actually sync with your Spotify and apple music so that you can listen to stuff without an internet connection or the threat threat of any sort of curated playlist that Spotify has decided to throw at you that day and free write is a digital keyboard that lets you type into a word processor but without internet access like if a typewriter and a laptop had a baby this way you have the benefits of word processing technology but without the distractions of the internet will this be enough to offset the radically pre-seen technological bend that we seem to be on maybe not but it's good to know that at least some of us want other options and you might be able to get them if you're looking for that if you're interested in other Tech free or Tech light solutions to these kinds of situations or weird products in the world that we should talk about we have a Reddit page where we talk about other things that don't make it on this channel so go and check us out over there and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more videos every single week [Music] smart watches

Channel: Future Proof

Views: 275,211

Keywords: smart watch, smart watches, apple watch, apple watch series 9, new apple watch, samsung watch, google pixel watch, pixel watch, galaxy watch, heart rate monitor, fitness tracker, fitbit, apple, google, samsung, tech, tech products, latest tech, consumerism, sustainability, review, educational, explainer, future proof

Id: 5oHDKJ6e0h4

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023