¶ Last Minute Watch Thoughts

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I've posted very little — if anything — about the Apple Watch. I'm pretty excited for it as I can see some areas it would be useful for me. Admittedly, I hadn't really considered the Watch much until two things happened in the past few months.

  1. My parents bought me a Seiko 5 Automatic watch for Christmas (thanks Mom & Dad!).
  2. I lost my Fitbit One.

I hadn't really worn a watch since around 2004 when I started using a laptop as my main computer. At the time, the watch strap on the watch I wore dug into my wrist as my wrist rested on the laptop while typing. I was in college at the time, and was typing pretty much most of the day every day.

The strap on the Seiko 5 is fabric, and I don't have this problem. It's a simple watch, and I've loved wearing it. I could go on more, but I'll save that for a future article.

Losing my Fitbit has been the biggest impact. Yes, I could go buy another Fitbit. But for kicks and giggles I started using the M8 motion coprocessor in my iPhone 6 to track steps. All this gets recorded into Apple's Health app, which fascinates me. However I am mainly using Pedometer++ to visualize the data. I also still have the Fitbit app tying into the M8 with its MobileTrack function, and I also tied in the Nike+ Fuel app to it to complement my Nike+ Running app.

The experiment with the iPhone 6 for step tracking has been great. And adding the Apple Watch to that as an additional set of sensors for that ecosystem is very enticing.

But I also had a couple thoughts this morning of What If… that would make the Watch even more compelling.

Security

What if the Apple Watch could be used a token of sorts to unlock your Mac when you are near it and lock it when you walk away. I like to think this would work much like how the Watch will work with Apple Pay.

For Apple Pay, you must have the Watch in contact with your skin, and authenticate it with your iPhone. Break the skin contact, and a re-auth will be required.

What if you also had your Watch paired to your Mac, and have to log in with your password once on the Mac to authenticate, and then the Watch serves as a proximity token as long as skin contact is maintained.

It's just a little thought, but I can see that being yet another compelling selling point for the Apple Watch.