Plenty of digital ink’s already been spilled about the Apple Watch. Most of the reviews did a terrible job at actually reviewing the product. Many reviewers and casual observers alike have complained aggressively, but for the wrong reasons, about how it’s priced.

Two weeks ago was Part One and last week was Part Two of three thoughts on the product’s present value proposition and its pricing. Those parts were relatively dismal. Here’s Part Three where we talk about something really exciting: the future.

Part Three: The Apple Watch is not a watch at all

Apple is a pretty smart company. It’s possible that what I’m about to describe is what their vision’s been all along.

In Part 1, we talked about the most important use case of a wristwatch, particularly using a wristwatch in lieu of a pocket watch: To tell the time, not to a fraction of a second, but in a fraction of a second.

I’m fascinated by thinking about other instances where the apparently minuscule traditional value proposition of the watch — do “x” in a fraction of a second — leads to a demonstrable improvement in experience.

Well, what else can we pull out of our pockets? Usually, we’ve got phones, keys, and wallets.

On the phone front: Apple harps on moving your messages/notifications/inbox from your pocket to your wrist. I’m thoroughly convinced this is rubbish. Messaging is something that benefits too much from having screen real estate to read and write. It’s not a quick, mindless, glance-and-get-back-to-what-you-were-doing activity. We’ve discussed the importance of this phenomenon at length already.

There’s also a big push for apps on the Watch — Uber and Google Maps for example — but again, my thesis is that if you’re doing something that takes more than a half a second, you might as well take out your phone.

This “no bullshit” user guide suggests using Siri instead of the menus because the menus are “fiddly” and Siri is faster. Then — right freaking there — he says “there’s a bit of lag. It can take a second” and it’s bewildering to me how we’re not all in agreement that just taking your phone out at this point is easier.

Side Note: In fact, I’d be amused to see tests run which pit Phone and Watch versions of apps against each other in races. I’d bet that nine times out of ten, you get the task done and get back to work just as quickly — if not more quickly — if you use your phone. Your Uber isn’t going to get to you any faster because you’re using your Watch. I’d bet you wind up reading and responding to your messages more slowly because of the Watch’s screen size. Checking the time is going to be markedly faster, though again, it still takes a fraction of a second too long.

Surprisingly, the phone replacement branch is the part that Apple seems to boast about the most in its current marketing push, and it’s the part which I think is by far the least productive.

So if not a phone replacement, what else?

On the keys front: This is potentially incredibly neat.

Here’s a bunch of questions:

• Why do we even still have keys? Why do we carry around dumb pieces of metal — often a half-dozen dumb pieces of metal — which all look exactly alike? Isn’t it annoying when you accidentally try opening the door using the wrong key, because it looks exactly like the right key?
• Why do we trust our security to a dumb piece of metal which the locksmith down the street can duplicate in like 15 minutes? Why are we stuck in a system where if you lose your dumb piece of metal, you need to hire a guy and it costs an afternoon and a few hundred bucks for him to rip apart your door to replace the locking stuff?
• Isn’t it annoying when you get home and you have to fish through your pockets to get your keys while balancing two huge bags of groceries? Before that, wasn’t it annoying when you got to your car in the parking lot and had to do the same thing to open the trunk?

Using your keys and opening stuff is exactly the kind of process we’re looking for, where the seemingly insignificant improvement in process time leads to a measurable increase in satisfaction, and where you can convert a process that takes even a modicum of mental energy into one that’s completely effortless. Opening stuff by holding my wrist near a sensor would be awesome.

(Yeah, but Josh, doesn’t this raise security issues?) I don’t think so. A stolen Watch/Key might have different password protocols if the cellphone it’s usually paired with isn’t present. A building with Watch/Key doors could simply install an extra magnetic charger at the front where people with dead Watches could charge for 5 seconds to get the requisite 20 seconds of battery life needed to unlock the door.

On the wallet front: This is cool. Really cool. The Watch can replace my wallet.

Apple Pay is something that already exists today. This is a system by which you can pay for stuff by holding your iPhone up to a reader and pressing down on the thumb reader for a minute. And it’s getting some traction. But digitizing the wallet is only half the idea — the whole idea, again, is turning a process which takes a second into one that takes a fraction.

The manual process for buying stuff in 2015 is almost archaic. At my grocery store using a credit card:

1. I wait in line for 20 minutes
2. Lady scans all my food items and bags them
3. I take out my wallet
4. I take out my credit card
5. I swipe my credit card
6. (Inevitable: The lady scolds me because I swiped too soon)
7. (The lady says “okay now swipe”)
8. I have to pick between Debit or Credit
9. The receipt prints
10. A second receipt prints
11. I have to physically sign the second receipt, which she puts god-knows-where
12. I leave
13. Later, I throw out my copy of the receipt

With Apple Pay on iPhone, I sub the words “credit card” for “iPhone” and almost everything is the same.

If I have an Apple Watch, the grocery store lady simply scans my wrist the same way she scans my chosen box of frozen vegetables. The process looks like this:

1. Line is much shorter
2. Lady scans all my food items and bags them
3. I scan my Watch (I can do this while the lady is bagging. And my preferred card is already chosen, or I can select it.)
4. I confirm on my wrist
5. I leave

So: Try to think about all the times you have to pay for something in your day-to-day life. Groceries, restaurants, bars, subway ticket, Starbucks, Bloomingdales, you get it. Now imagine that every single time you pay for anything, the process is twice as fast. And it’s twice as fast for everyone else — which means every single line you ever wait on is exponentially shorter.

In fact: There’s already a live and compelling case study for exactly this sort of thing: Electronic Toll Collection (called E-Zpass here in the northeast US). This study illustrates that toll processing goes from about 425 cars per hour when on manual collection or coin collection, up to 1,200-1,800 cars per hour with electronic toll collection. 2.8-4.2x process speed.

In fact: There’s an even better case study. As it turns out, the exact ecosystem I’m describing — with automatic payments, fast lines, room keys, everything — already exists. It’s at Disneyworld.

Here’s an impossibly long explanation from Wired. If you don’t want to read that, here’s 90 seconds from YouTube:

 

What if every single time you had to pay for something, you could do it 2.8-4.2x faster? What if you permanently lived in DisneyWorld? That’s a universe that Apple Watch can create. If this idea existed, if there were fast lanes at the grocery store, coffee shop, everywhere for transactions paying with Apple Watch, people would flip. Tech journalists would maybe even write something genuinely positive about the device.

I would flip.

In fact, watch this flip:

Score: 2 out of 10

No longer.

Score: 7 out of 10

Just kidding. Still fuming that TheVerge doesn’t have the balls to say anything negative, ever, about any Apple product.

Future Score: 9 out of 10

It’s hard to give a high score to a product that doesn’t totally work today and needs pretty comprehensive ecosystems built out in order to fully realize its potential. But Apple is unarguably one of the only companies in the world who could effect that kind of change.

I’m a little afraid of this future. I wonder if $350-$550 is really a fair trade for a bunch of pleasant design accoutrements and some efficiencies in minutia — it sounds like a ripoff. Though I guess this is the same value proposition that the Nest thermostat has, and that seems to have done quite nicely for itself.

I have no plans of buying an Apple Watch today. I’m happy to let the fanboys toil for a few years of sniffing their own farts blinding themselves on 4pt font text messages while I wait for Keys and Wallet functionality to fully materialize. But come 2019 or so… maybe hell’s freezing over, or maybe I finally come around to the Apple side of the tech world.