Smart hardware’s all the same: don’t say I didn’t warn you about the extra costs

Who knew that consumer products needed consumables?

Photo © 2024 Erik Mclean | https://unsplash.com/fr/@introspectivedsgn

My fitness watch is getting bad for my health.

Not content with nagging me every day to get up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head and generally move around a bit – move around quite a lot, in fact – it wants me to sign up for its extra-cost coaching option.

This involves, as far as I can gather, paying a monthly premium so that a team of remote fitness trainers, including a man called ‘Diamond’ and a woman called ‘Poofy’, can nag me every day to move around a lot.

Given that nagging me to do precisely this is what the smart watch does already – that’s what it’s for, alongside subsidiary functions such as showing the time – I remain unconvinced how paying more will offer any extra benefit.

Benefit to me, that is. Obviously it’s an enormous benefit to the watch manufacturer if I send them a monthly fee to make the watch do what it already does. But as a customer, the logic eludes me. I mean, who pays a premium to ensure loss?

I read that the new Pixel Watch features “automatic sleep detection”.

Now, call me ungrateful, but I can detect when I fall asleep already, and I don’t need a watch to do this for me. The tell-tale signs are not difficult to register. It usually begins with drowsiness, for example. Then, once I fall asleep, well, I am pretty damn sure I am sleeping at that point. There, detected – all by myself.

Maybe in the future the Pixel Watch will be able to detect automatically every time I get punched in the face. I mean, how else would I know?