Apple Watch Elevator Pitch: Forget the Sublime. Focus on the Mundane

Apple taketh, and Apple giveth back.

One of the great ironies of technology is that an advancement can exacerbate a problem and still be a Great Leap Forward. Computers were supposed to usher in the paperless office. That didn't work out. Technology itself was meant to create a worker's paradise. George Jetson worked fewer hours in a full-time job than would qualify him for employer-mandated Obamacare. He had a robot servant. He never seemed to take a single step, from hyper loops to his personal rocket car to a moving walkway that took him straight to office where his job seemed to be comprised entirely of putting his feet up on the desk.

That doesn't sound the least bit familiar to me ...

The most impactful invention of the last decade is the smart phone. It changed daily life. It solved problems we didn't know we had, extended our productivity in time and space, became our one constant companion. People who barely need a mobile phone own a smartphone. So do people who've realized they don't need a "home" phone.

Like any deeply passionate love affair, this romance takes up a lot of our time.

Sometimes tech doesn't solve the original problem, but fails interestingly. That's why we still need paper, and nobody is really complaining. But sometimes, like the smartphone, it introduces new problems, and opportunities.

With Apple Watch, the company that brought you the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad is now, for at least the second time, putting its massive resources behind an idea that can fairly be described as entirely unnecessary.

And, while I wouldn't exactly call it a missed opportunity, Apple's live event was a little weird. As it announced pricing (Apple Watch starts at $350) and availability (it goes on sale April 25), Apple's presentation to a tech press which knows better portrayed the device as sort of an iPhone replacement — getting calls, responding to texts — that still requires an iPhone.

I'm all for hardware and software disappearing, but this seems a bit premature (if not a bit exaggerated). I heard a single reference to the Watch's iPhone dependency, and that was Tim Cook's pronouncement that "Apple Watch has been designed to work with the iPhone." Which, as they say, is to say the least.

There was a single reference to battery life: A "typical" 18 hours. Which means that, if you'd like to have it monitor your sleep and wake you up, you'll have to find time during the day — every day — to charge it up. And, yeah, it's not going to last 18 hours.

There are three general use cases for a smart watch: notification, interaction, immersion. In my view Apple emphasized the latter, when it's the former two that will be necessary to make case that a smart watch is actually useful — that it solves an obvious problem.

But unlike the iPad, which didn't solve any obvious problems on its way to re-creating demand in a dormant product and selling considerably more more than 200 million units, Apple Watch can leverage an established reason to exist, even if it requires a bit more than an elevator pitch, and even if Apple buried the lede.

Here it is: Apple Watch gives you back time Apple's iPhone steals from you constantly.

I've used a smartwatch for years now, but I found my original Pebble immediately useful in a very meta way, allowing me to avoid unnecessary distraction as I wrote my Reuters review about it.

The Faustian bargain we've made with smartphones is that they keep us informed all the time. To do that, they must keep informing us, all the time.

For business professionals, at least, this is no small matter. Nobody wants to have to deal with useless information, but our choices in this advanced era remain curiously binary: Let me in on just about everything, or leave me alone. The tug to brandish your smartphone just to see if that incoming message or alert is important right now is agonizing for someone who receives dozens or hundreds of notifications a day.

This isn't just about repeatedly pulling your phone out of your pocket — which may sound trivial but does get old fast. It's about having to make the slightest effort possible for something that that, most of the time, is a waste of time. It's about minimizing distraction. It's about managing one's time as if one owns it, not the person vying to get it.

Think of this as the smartphone's version of the simple but monumental advancement that was Caller ID: Within a generation the balance of power shifted. We took control. We realized that our phones existed for us to use as and when we saw fit, not so that we were at everyone else's beck and call.

But even a hard-core user like me knows that wrangling notifications is a necessary feature, but not a sufficient one. I haven't expanded my Pebble use much beyond notifications, which it does extraordinarily well (though mapping and turn-by-turn navigation are unexpectedly compelling).

Anyone can tackle the notifications problem sufficiently. Apple's competitors already have for Android phones. This fix, necessitated by tech innovation, opens the door to a market, but not to a mass market. Sales of these devices have been anemic, by Apple standards.

That is why Apple is making a fashion appeal, and offering Watches at price points which emphasize it as a stylish accessory. Come for the cool, stay for the features. If you're in the market for a solid timepiece in the $300 - $500 range — and already have an iPhone — you might be tempted to at least check it out. Apple is converting valuable real estate in its retail stores to enable just that, so you can get a walk through.

Even the important style hook, and health monitoring, is not enough. Closing the deal will require making Watch invaluable on customer terms, not geek. It was when the tech challenged and indifferent began buying iPads instead of laptop computers they never would have purchased that tablets jumped the chasm.

Apple may not have provided an Aha! moment today, but history shows they didn't need to — just be interesting enough. The next few hours will be key as tech writers decide whether Apple will win because it's doing something insanely great, because it has the marketing muscle to make a good idea it didn't come up with better than anyone else, or whether it has instead has come up with another Apple TV — a product it won't quit but that makes nobody's heart rate soar.

On that, the jury is decidedly out, Apple's initial positioning notwithstanding. The iPhone was a curious device for a very long time. Peculiar keyboard with no spellcheck. Very few apps. Blackberry had already solved mobile email. The web did not work on tiny screens. You could only have eight web pages open at one time, and had to manually close one to make space. You couldn't cut-and-paste, for heaven's sake.

First generation iPhone sales were 6.1 million in the five quarters ending Dec. 31, 2009. In the single quarter ending Dec. 31, 2014 alone, Apple sold 74.5 million iPhone 6's.

What happens in the months and years after this initial blitz will matter, not what the pre-orders or opening weekend tea leaves might indicate. Apple positions itself for a sprint, but is always prepared for a marathon.

Apple may not have made the "take back your life" case as strongly as I had hoped. But if they can give back some of the time they have stolen, it's hard to put a price on that.

Earlier: LIVE BLOG: What Apple is Announcing Right Now