The New York Times recently ran a piece about how Apple’s watch can do so many amazing things (“…track the distance you run, measure the noise you hear on the street, record your heartbeat…”) but is expensive and has to be replaced periodically because of planned obsolescence. Entitled, “Apple’s Watch Is Smarter, but My Casio Keeps Getting the Job Done,” the article extols the virtues of Casio’s F-91W watch – a cheap, resilient, accurate watch whose battery, according to Casio, doesn’t have to be replaced more that once every seven years. “In this era of rampant planned obsolescence, the Casio watch remains a remarkable outlier: a once-advanced device that has been available for a quarter-century and still does exactly what it was designed to do.”
The New York Times
I see articles like this on a fairly regular basis. There’s a small and, I think, growing backlash against what the Apple watch represents: constant connectivity, more distraction, extravagance, planned obsolescence. This is the niche I’m going for with the Okobo – specifically, in the world of sport and training.