Jack Tame: Drawing the line with Apple

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

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11d ago 4:09

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I make no bones about it – I'm a bit of an Apple yuppy.

I was hooked at a critical time. Travelling across the US as a one-man tv-news-making band, I often found myself in seat 32B on a cut-price red-eye flight, totally dependent on a laptop with sufficient grunt to edit HD video for hours at a time, and sufficient durability so that when it got knocked about in the overhead locker, the casing would remain in one piece.

And the way these companies work is that the moment you rely on them for one thing, they get their claws out and squeeze you ever closer. I went from being a MacBook user, to an iPhone user, to an iPad user, to an AirPod user, to an iCloud subscriber, too. I’m more or less trapped within the system now. Locked into paying Apple every month until I leave this mortal world.

But finally, I think I’m drawing the line.

Apple has just released its latest Apple Watch and finally caught up to much of the smart device competition by giving users a daily sleep score.

The idea is that you wear your watch to bed. It measures your heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, temperature, and your movement. It records what time you go down, the number of disturbances you have, your various sleep cycles, and how much time you ultimately spend between the sheets.

And then, 1-100, it gives you a score.

Of course, you can be smart scored on all manner of things in life, these days. You can get a smart toothbrush that’ll connect to an app on your phone and give you personalised feedback on your brushing technique. Breezed over a lower molar too quickly? That’ll affect your score.

You can get a smart razor that’ll do the same thing. Pushed a bit hard on a tricky chin dimple? Stiff cheese. That’ll affect your score.

You can buy a smart water bottle that’ll score your hydration. You can be scored on your light exposure and your posture. Apparently if you’re really curious, there’s even a market in devices that’ll score individual sexual wellbeing. Just maybe don’t Google them at work.

But to me, at least, there’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the sleep score concept. If I’m having a bad night’s sleep, few things are guaranteed to make it worse than knowing I’m being assessed. I’d get anxious. I’d stress out, toss and turn, flip my pillow back and forth. And for what? Just to read a number in the morning that tells me what I already know.

I don’t need a smart watch or a special ring to know I’ve had a bad night’s sleep. I know because I feel bad. So I should’ve gone to bed earlier or shouldn’t have had that late afternoon coffee? I should’ve turned off those other screens and devices earlier? Thank you, but instead of looking up a score I’ll look in the mirror instead.

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