Petri: Apple, a watch should just be a watch

No, Apple. This time you have gone too far.

You may have made an Apple Watch, but for once, I must say: I do not want what you have to offer. I will not bite the apple, serpent! You may have designed some fancy new product with all kinds of capabilities. Fine. The Apple Watch can do all kinds of things that a traditional watch cannot. Monitor your heart rate (this seems like something out of "Gattaca"). Tell a touch from a tap (I can barely tell a touch from a tap myself). Track your every movement (if I wanted my every movement to be tracked, I would just violate my parole). Show you text messages. (Not wanting to receive any text messages just now was why I left the house with my watch and not my phone in the first place!) All of these features are very nice, if that is the kind of thing you like.

But can it do the things that a traditional watch can? Be slightly, slightly off the correct time in a way that makes you late to everything? Stop mysteriously one day when you have a lot of things to get to so you don't notice until you realize it's been 2:40 for the past several hours? Fall into water and stop working? (That I bet it can.)

Either have a digital display, which apparently proclaims to business associates that you "don't know how to tell time" (a valuable skill in case you ever get transported to 1830 for some reason), or a round face with series of Roman numerals on it, the last holdouts from an empire that has been extinct for more than a thousand years, probably long enough that we should be able to admit freely that XII is a dumb way of writing "12"? Give you something to look at to tell the meaning of "clockwise" or "counterclockwise," otherwise baffling and meaningless terms with little relevance to modern life? Clash horribly with your outfit? Require a tiny battery that is sold only in the Far Distant Suburbs and has to be installed by an elderly jeweler who works only during the precise hours you have to be in the office? Tell you what time it is while giving you no other information?

This last thing is somewhat more valuable than I think we realize. We live in a great age of More Information Than You Require, where if you are not careful, any query can send you down an Internet rabbit hole from which you emerge, dazed, six hours later, having read all there is to read about the 2003 movie "Peter Pan" for reasons you are unable to recall. Just getting one piece of information from any tool is increasingly rare - and, correspondingly, precious.

Besides, as a committed Late Person, I think the rise of smartphones is bad enough. This watch trend needs to be nipped in the bud. If everyone has Apple Watches, we will all know what time it is. And that would be terrible.

Yes, smartphones generally are sweeping across the land, and probably, on net, this is more good than not. But for late people like me, the Apple Watch strips us bare of our defenses.

There goes the excuse that "my watch was fast" or "my watch was slow." You will no longer be able to trick yourself into believing that you are late for things when you are in fact on time because you have cleverly set your watch seven minutes fast - a ruse that never actually works because you instantly start to compensate for it in all your movements but that feels better than doing nothing.

Watches are already pretty much supplanted by phones. You used to mark epochs by the watch you wore - your Hello Kitty watch, your Baby-G, your Timex Ironman that was invulnerable in up to six feet of water, or something like that, with a velcro closure. You could pass down watches in your family.

Now you mark epochs by your phones. That flip phone from middle or high school. That other, slimmer flip phone. The Razr. The iPhone. The Galaxy. And now - the watch again.

Look, do we really need this? Besides, if you want to know what time it is, there's always your phone.

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Alexandra Petri writes the ComPost blog at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost.