OK, stick with me, this starts off weird.
I’m a big fan of the Pebble watch. It’s been gone for years, but recently announced a comeback. Pebble was a Kickstarter for a cool phone-connected watch that would last a week on a battery charge. It used an e-Ink display to drastically cut down power drain. It was open source, and anyone could write apps or new watch faces for it. It was damn cool.
Through a tortured series of acquisitions, Pebble eventually ended up being owned by Google. In short, that killed it. Until recently when Google announced that the Pebble Operating System (Pebble OS) was going open source. This would allow anyone to build on it and use it in products.
The original owners very quickly announced the rebirth of the Pebble, with new watches coming out “soon.” Today they started taking orders for the new watches.
OK, there’s a lot more there. But that’s enough backstory for the point of what I wanted to be a short post.
Anyway, there’s already new software (has been for a while) running on Android phones that works with old Pebble watches and will continue to be great on the new Pebble watches. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for iPhone.
In reading posts about the Pebble rebirth, I came across a blog post by Eric Migicovsky (father of the Pebble). You should read it, its very well written.
In it Migicovsky explains why there are still questions about how good the Pebble watch will be on the iPhone. Essentially he lays out how Apple restricts anyone from expanding iPhone users beyond the Apple Approved Ecosystem. And especially how only Apple can make a watch for the iPhone that is anywhere near “smart.”
This includes no way for the watch to send texts or iMessages. No way to take actions on notifications (like marking something as done.) Any kind of inter-process communication, which basically means apps talking to each other.
This last one is kind of baked into the iPhone. If you remember, the original iPhone did not allow copy and paste. Let that sink in. They saw no reason to share the simplest data between even their own apps! Of course that was implemented after a huge customer cry of “What the fuck were you thinking?” But it remains their history.
Apple is famously against information sharing except when absolutely necessary. They couch it in “privacy and security.” But it’s really about customers not buying/using anything with their Apple products except Apple products. They even take general concepts, like SMS text messaging. Modify them so they only work on Apple phones and computers. Or it makes people who aren’t on Apple phones or products look like 2nd class citizens. Consider the poor tween who cries when their friends tease them for “having parents too poor to buy them an iPhone.” Yeah, that’s a real thing, and its endorsed by Tim Apple.
Anyway, there’s a lot more here. I recently bought a new desktop Mac heavily promoted as having “Apple Intelligence.” But guess what. Unless I’m using the core Apple apps, it won’t affect any of my work on the platform. And that’s OK. Apple Intelligence is pretty lame right now. I didn’t buy my new computer for “AI.” The Apple apps (Numbers, Pages, Keynote, and Safari) aren’t good enough for the work I do. I just needed a new computer because my old Mac was about to start failing and I wanted to get ahead of the failure. Because users can’t fix or upgrade old Macs. By design. Yeah, another thing.
Before you write me off as a Apple hater, I’m really not. I’m often disappointed about how they feel they have to lie and make stuff up about how great they are. They are pretty great, but they’re not godlike. There are reasonable alternatives. And for the first time in a long time the Windows PCs outnumber the Apple products in our home. I’ve had a Mac on my desk since July of 1984, and it’s my primary machine to this day. I think it’s a great computer, in spite of the anticompetitive shit Apple does to make it a cult machine.
I just wish Apple would drop all the restrictive bullshit and actually become as great as they say they are.
Ric Bretschneider
March 18, 2025
San Jose California