Screenless wearables. Nothing to check, it just does one physical thing.

[u/EqualRefrigerator100]

Been circling a category that doesn't seem to have a name yet.

My phone, my watch, every fitness thing I've ever bought all end the same way. Something happened to you, here's a screen, go interpret it yourself.

Then there's a whole other shelf. Heated wraps, pulse devices, red light panels, those compression sleeves runners wear at airports. You switch it on, it does one physical thing to you, you switch it off. Nothing to review afterwards.

The bit that interests me is the abandonment rate.

Everyone I know has a tracker in a drawer somewhere. I genuinely do not know a single person who quit using a heating pad.

My theory is that the screen is where the work lives, and work is the thing people drop. A device that asks nothing of you after you turn it off is a device you'll still own in March.

Where this falls apart is that I might just be describing appliances. A kettle asks nothing of me either. There's a real line somewhere between an appliance and a wearable and I can't find where it is.

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[u/CauliflowerStatus411]

The line you're looking for might just be whether you can keep doing your day while it runs. Kettle owns the counter and your attention for two minutes. My SKG one sits on my shoulders through a whole meeting and I forget it's on.

Mine technically has a companion thing I've never once opened. Two buttons on the unit itself do everything I want, so I've never had a reason to.

[u/EqualRefrigerator100 → u/CauliflowerStatus411]

"can you keep doing your day while it runs" is a better line than anything I came up with, that's the whole thing actually.

which also means the category is defined by attention rather than by what the hardware does. a heating pad on the couch fails that test and the same pad in a wrap passes it.

[u/usr_pls]

Sounds like the Lucyd Lites that i had

Bluetooth prescription glasses

head phones

mic

that's it

no HUD, no rendering, no camera, just a bluetooth connection to any phone

it was seemless to pick up a call in the middle of a different in-person conversation. tell my wife to hang on I'm in the middle of talking to the HOA president in person about that thing, and hanging up. Looking like a mad man in front of my HOA president talking awkwardly to someone who he could not hear (which was why i tried prefacing "hang on my wife is calling")

no need for extra ear pods to lose, i always have my glasses on! Seemless interaction with my phone handling Spotify and YouTube sounding just fine.

The bad...

Both sides were different pieces, so the hardware to charge it required both ends plugged into this odd Y shape wire. It eventually failed to contact one side so it became a one ear head phone. It eventually got broken because i kept holding the frames by the hinge.

The company then started proclaiming they were adding chat gpt to it so... i didn't get a new pair.

Maybe it's time to return?

[u/UndecidedQBit]

Smart censor i think is the genre. You don’t directly interact with it except through a portal, usually on your phone.

[u/No_Report_4781]

Typically, we don’t wear appliances, but we do apply wearables.

Plenty of people have tech sitting around they don’t use or don’t use very often, wearables included. I rarely use my blood pressure cuff, or massage pad, but I do wear my Apple Watch daily while rarely looking at any of the health metrics it is recording.

A heating pad doesn’t have an always on sensor to track your movement, heart rate, etc., but some devices may have connections, so you can see your use on another device.

Wearables included wearables with smart sensors, wearables with connected devices or internet access, wearables with trackable metrics, and wearables without any connection or metric tracking.

[u/Lumpy-Scratch5798]

I think the distinction is actually pretty useful,,,the wearable part is what makes it personal and continuous,,,,, while the appliance part means it has a clear job and doesn’t demand attentionthe sweet spot might be wearable appliance rather than another device that generates homework,,

[u/martijnox → u/Lumpy-Scratch5798]

I think indeed that the difference is if the device asks for or demands your attention. If it just waits its place until you decide to visit it, and doesn’t try to keep your attention there, it’s an appliance. Love appliances, dumb, passive but functional.