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?
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?
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