Time for a Change

The Apple Watch Pre-Unboxing Chapter

Two days ago, my iPhone dinged me awake with a Periscope notification. I tapped into the livestream to see three tech-writer dudes at The Guardian in London, gathered around a long white box.

"It's on," I thought.

That was the first of the unboxing videos that appeared all over the nets on Friday, April 24th, the day Apple Watch began arriving at the homes and offices of customers in the U.S., U.K, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, and Japan.

We early adopters appear to have preordered a million Apple Watches in the minutes and hours after midnight Cupertino time on April 10. The first unboxing videos surfaced two weeks later from Australia. New ones no doubt appeared in an eastward progression of time zones, the way New Years Eve celebrations follow the arrival of a new year. Or in this case, a New Era.

I know, I know.

The Dance of the Early Adopters-should we call it The Cupertino?-is a predictable bore to civilians. This is going to change everything! Game changer, new paradigm, historic, revolutionary, and-this is the one that matters most-really cool.

I saw The Cupertino performed on June 29, 2007, when I was the first customer to buy an iPhone at the Cambridge, Mass., Apple store.

As I and the other sleep-deprived fanboys strode into the store, Apple staffers on both sides of the path to the Genius Bar cheered, clapped, and gave thumbs up. One Genius took my photo from behind the bar, and the kid next to him did The Cupertino, literally jumping up and down as the first iPhone customer approached.

The Guardian guys two days ago were not for real jumping up and down, but they might as well have been. They oohed and ahed over the whiteness of the box, the "designed in Cupertino, California" message, the length of the charging cable, and the way the three-pronged U.K. power plug folded its prongs into itself.

"Now we won't injure ourselves stepping on it in the middle of the night!" one of the reporter geeks exulted. He was the standup comedian of the group, doing play-by-play satire of their Early Adopter mania even as he savored every moment of it.

My friends Garrett Riley in California and Brett McNeil in Washington state received their Apple Watches on Friday, too. Garrett texted me that he felt as if he were wearing an ankle bracelet, tethered to his home most of the day, so he would not miss the UPS truck. Garrett's unboxing Periscope took place in the kitchen, filmed by his early-adopter-in-training son, Zach, who just turned 11.

Meanwhile, back at the online Apple Store's "check order status" page, all I saw was "Preparing for Shipment." I hit refresh on my browser every few minutes, to no avail. Finally, just before 4 p.m. Denver time, my status switched to "Shipped: Delivers Apr 27, 2015 by Standard Shipping."

After ending his Periscope, Garrett texted me photos of The Watch on his left wrist. One shot showed the time, weather in Santa Clarita (61 degrees, cloudy) and the AAPL stock price ($130.20.) Another presented a baseball score (LAD and SD tied at 0), and a third showed my favorite of the Apple Watch faces, a curve tracing the sun's transit.

He also texted me an animated Emoji of a large red heart circled above by little hearts rotating counterclockwise. If I had been in Indiana ordering pizza at certain establishments, I might have kept that one to myself, to borrow a line from last night's White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

I know that when I get my watch I will want to try the Taptic feature enabling one Watch wearer to transmit his or her heartbeat to another's wrist. Since my wife Darlene won't have one, whom am I going to touch in this new way? Garrett and Brett, of course, but no doubt with a texted caveat: "Don't worry guys, this is only a test..."

Amidst the jumping up and down Friday, the pro pundits were trying to discern the Apple Watch's significance. What I love about a technology moment like this is that no one has a clue what's ahead, even in the near term. So anyone interested can opine about What This Means.

The most convincing evaluation I've seen since Friday came from Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote. In a CNBC interview he said, "The great thing about the Watch is it's the screen that you always see." Evernote already has an app available for the Watch, so Libin and team have been doing more than just speculating.

"Apps for Apple Watch are just extensions of the current iPhone apps," he continued, "except for things that are easier to do on your wrist. So anything that takes a couple of seconds, you reach for your watch. Anything that takes a few minutes or longer, you take your phone out of your pocket."

Libin expects that Apple Watch is going to bring the wearable-tech category mainstream, taking it from niche to very high impact during the rest of 2015.

"I think the estimates on it are conservative on how much they're going to sell," he said. "I'm really, really bullish on it."

Me too.

Tomorrow, April 27, 2015, by 3 p.m. Denver time, I will be Persicoping my own Apple Watch unboxing. In honor of the delight that tech innovations have brought me in the past decade, I will do The Cupertino in our dining room here at the condo.

The next chapter of my story will be typed with a new screen on my left wrist, watchable in a glance.

For me, it's not on yet. But it's close!