Forget About Robot Overlords. Batteries Will Be the Death of Us

It's the dark side of the computer age: We've ceded control not to our robot overlords, but to batteries.

Usually it's a fair trade. We take care of our toys every now and then, and they take care of us 24/7. Feeding our little beasts is a necessary obsession. That's why the best seat at the airport is the floor next to a power outlet.

Range anxiety isn't only limited to EVs. As Winter storm Juno approaches my home in the Northeast of the U.S., that anxiety is acute: Power outages are a certainty. The only thing we don't know is who will lose that lottery and whether the fates will deny the unfortunate among us access to AC power for longer than our smartphones can hold a charge.

We bend to the demands of smartphones because the payoff is enormous. The category debuted in a world where mobile phones with replaceable batteries that lasted for days without a charge was commonplace. They completely disrupted our expectations by inventing a category in spite of vastly inferior power consumption.

So far wearables do not look like smartphones redux. When the Apple Watch debuts, probably next month, we'll have some strong evidence if the masses are willing, once again, to overlook lousy battery life for something insanely great.

I'm inclined to think not, at least not right away. Unless Apple Watch has "good enough" power consumption in round one, the smartwatch category might struggle along or even implode before it takes the world by storm — as I think it can and should.

Here's the problem: Wearables improve upon nothing. Google Glass stereotyped and demonized users instead of making them people we all wanted to be just like. Millennials don't need wristwatches to tell time — smartphones have become a modern-day pocket watch.

Apple is a latecomer to the smart watch game, but it is running into the same headwinds that have stymied earlier movers. Tech press liked the Samsung Gear, but mocked its battery life. In style and substance, Motorola's Moto 360 — powered by Google Android Wear OS — also seems a fair comparison. The big minus? It, too, is not likely to run a full day on one charge. (A commenter says he comfortably gets two days of use out of his Moto 360, and that early software versions got much less life).

Apple has tried to inoculate the faithful that they will have to charge once a day — presumably at night (exactly when I like to use my smartwatch as a bedside clock replacement, and silent morning alarm). There was an unfortunate spin to CEO Tim Cook's revelation: "We think people are going to use it so much you will end up charging it daily."

That might have been optimistic (and a clever way of blaming usefulness for a fatal flaw). 9to5Mac is reporting that if you use Apple Watch just as a watch — displaying the time — it won't last the morning: "We’re told that the Watch should be able to display its clock face for approximately three hours, including watch ticking animations, if nothing else is done with the device."

So, using the Watch as a watch is considered heavy application use. 9to5Mac continues: "Our sources say that Apple is targeting 2.5 hours of 'heavy' application use, such as processor-intensive gameplay, or 3.5 hours of standard app use."

Considered separately, the active use app, clock, and fitness numbers sound very low, but the reality is that people will passively wear the Apple Watch for most of the day, actively interacting with it only for short periods of time. That’s why the Watch will be able to last the average user roughly a day on a single charge. We’re told that Apple has been shooting for roughly 19 hours of mixed usage each day, but that the company may not hit that number in the first generation version.

This consumer profile sounds like wishful thinking — a very tough sell.

Felix Salmon was among the first to opine about the power problem. As he wrote on the day Apple Watch was announced:

… there’s no indication that this thing will last even 24 hours. A watch’s battery should last for months; even watches which don’t have batteries will last for a couple of days, if you have to wind them manually, or indefinitely, if they’re automatic and all you have to do is wear them.

Apple is shooting high, which is better than shooting low. It's potentially a huge platform — The Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims believes "Apple Watch will be a launching pad for the next wave of billion-dollar consumer-tech startups."

But unless we are relieved of range anxiety, we'll be cautious about use, no matter how cool and life-altering the applications. Power is a necessary condition. It's tough to finesse that point.

I've made no secret of my enthusiasm for the Pebble smartwatch, a wearable whose chief attribute is relaying notifications so you don't have to keep reaching for your phone to see that you don't have to deal with the latest message you got. It operates for days while displaying the time constantly. It's also one of the few that work with both iPhones and Android devices.

So, all that is possible. But the tradeoff for Pebble is a lower resolution, e-paper screen — the same technology used in e-readers, whose batteries last weeks at a time.

That's a trade-off I am willing to make. I need to be convinced that I need yet another portable computer — with the worst battery life of the lot — instead of an smartphone annex on my wrist.

Does this category interest you at all? Do you wear a watch that you'd consider replacing with something "smarter?" Would you be among the first to buy an Apple Watch?