The question should really be: why is *anyone* buying an Apple watch? The first wrist watches to have computerized and connectivity features have been around since the late 90s. The missing link was an intermediary device such as a smart phone, which only recently reached ubiquity after 2007. By my count, Apple is at the very least two to three years late to the game since the Kickstarter-funded smart watch, the Pebble, came to market in 2013. Along with it came a slew of other devices for health monitoring, activity tracking, and a slew of other functionality.

Traditionally, first adopters of any tech will always suffer beta software glitches, comfort issues, and sometimes unplanned obsolescence, but purveyors of all things Apple don’t really worry about those headaches. The first few iPhones were minuscule, clunky, slow, hard to type using the on-screen keyboard, and lacked general connectivity features that many of its competitors offered, namely Bluetooth and NFC. In my opinion, Apple finally got the iPhone right with version six, five years after the original. People have their own reasons for purchasing products, but mostly the products that succeed are well hyped and maybe actually work at the intended purpose. That is the success that is Apple. The Apple watch does not succeed at being an excellent device, nor does it particularly do well at acting as an intermediary, relating messages and notifications. Why then are millions of people flocking to buy one, further filling Apple’s bottom line with dollar signs? Who would spend premium on an untested, entrant to the wearables market?

Those are very good questions that I do not have the answers to give. What I can tell you is that there are several other players in the game with products that have already come to market. I mentioned Pebble—they have been actually making these watches for a few years. The first generation of smartwatches they produced, I was an early adopter A couple of years later they funded a new campaign on kickstarter, breaking even more records for funds raised in a short time period on the crowd-funding website. This is just one. There are others like Motorola’s 360, Samsung Galaxy Gear, and many more, but none of these just work like my Apple stuff.

There we have it! Many people don’t care whether it’s better or not, but they care how it works with everything else. If you’ve bought into the whole Apple ecosystem, you want your itunes working with your ipod or iphone or ipad or imac. The fear is real, but I’m here to tell you that other things work fine there too. I own a macbook, a pebble watch, a Nexus (Android) phone, a roku, and a slew of other devices. They all work with each other just fine regardless of not being Apple products save for the macbook.