What Sort of Technology Adopter Are You?
Innovator or laggard? Do you hold back because you have refined tastes or because you are late to see the potential?
There’s a part of me that thinks one day I’ll have to get an Apple Watch. I don’t want one. I don’t need one. I don’t even use a regular watch, so it wouldn’t make any sense to strap several hundred dollars of tech to my wrist and commit myself to upgrading it every year or so. I see friends with smartwatches and have no desire for one. Yet I have this creeping suspicion that one day Apple Watch will somehow inveigle itself into my life and onto my wrist.
“Have to” buy one is perhaps over-stating it. I don’t think Tim Cook will dispatch agents to kidnap my loved ones, sending me photos of body parts over iMessage until I leave an unmarked bag of cash at an Apple Store and strap on an Apple Watch. But I have a feeling the technology will gradually become more ubiquitous until not having one becomes a statement. It’s true that in 2021 no one forces me to have a computer, a smartphone, high-speed internet, a Twitter account, and so on. But to not have those things is to exclude yourself from parts of the world that you might want access to. Services and features will become exclusive. Things won’t work as well without one. Network effects will make it socially…
