Everybody’s losing their minds over the new iPhone right now, same as every September, and sure, fine, it’s a good phone. But watching the whole internet lose its collective marbles over a slightly better camera got me thinking about the Apple product that actually changed how I move through the world, and it’s not the phone. It’s the watch. Specifically, the cellular version. And I don’t mean this as a fun hot take to argue about in a comment section — I genuinely think it is the single best product Apple has ever made, full stop, original iPhone included.
I have to go back further than Apple to explain why this one hit me so hard. When I was a kid I read Dick Tracy comics, and the thing that stuck with me more than any villain or plotline was that two-way wrist radio he talked into. A phone, on his wrist. No cord, no handset, nothing to carry, just talk into your own arm like it’s the most normal thing in the world. I remember thinking, even as a little kid, why the hell can’t we actually have that? It felt like the most obvious piece of future technology there was, and it felt like something we should’ve had decades before I was even born. That idea just sat in the back of my head for years, half fantasy, half genuine question, long before I had any reason to think Apple or anyone else would actually build it.
So when the first Apple Watch came out, I was in, immediately, no hesitation. It was slick, it did more than any watch had a right to do, and it felt like a real step toward something. What it wasn’t, yet, was its own thing — it was still tethered to my iPhone over Bluetooth for basically everything that mattered, a beautiful remote control riding on my wrist rather than a device with its own identity. Closer to Dick Tracy than anything before it, but not actually him.
Then, about two years later, Apple announced the cellular version, and I remember my actual reaction word for word, because I said it out loud the second I heard it. It wasn’t confusion and it wasn’t hesitation — it was something a lot closer to vindication. That’s cool. They finally put a phone in it. What actually came out of my mouth was “why the hell has it taken you this long to just put a cell phone in the thing.” Because as far as I was concerned, Apple had basically had the whole premise sitting right there since the first watch shipped — a screen on your wrist, a speaker, a microphone, everything except the one piece, its own connection, that would make it a real, honest-to-god phone instead of a remote control for one. Two years felt like a long time to sit there staring at ninety percent of Dick Tracy’s wrist radio and not just finish the job. So when they finally did it, it didn’t land as a surprise so much as something overdue, something the first watch had been quietly promising the whole time and finally got around to delivering.
And that was the moment it actually landed. This wasn’t a companion device anymore. This was the actual thing. Its own number, its own connection to the network, completely independent of where my phone physically was. I could leave the house with nothing but what’s on my wrist and still be a fully reachable, fully connected person. That’s not an incremental feature update. That’s the wrist radio. That’s the thing I wanted as a kid, finally real, and it’s the thing that finally answered the loud, impatient question I’d asked two years earlier.
Now, every time cellular capability on a watch comes up, somebody trots out the same argument: this is going to cannibalize phone sales, why would Apple build something that competes with its own golden goose. I don’t buy it, and I don’t think the sales numbers over the years have really borne it out either. A cellular Apple Watch doesn’t replace an iPhone — it still needs one to exist in the first place, to get set up, to stay tied to your plan and your Apple ID and your whole ecosystem. If anything it does the opposite of cannibalizing: it’s one more device tying you deeper into Apple’s stack, one more monthly line on your carrier bill, one more reason the whole ecosystem is annoying to leave. People treat it like a threat to the iPhone. I think Apple correctly saw it as a second hook, not a replacement, and I think that’s exactly why it’s stuck around and kept improving instead of getting quietly killed off the way lesser Apple experiments have.
There’s a smaller, vainer reason I love having this on my wrist, and I’ll admit to it: it makes me feel plugged in in a way that gets noticed. People clock the cellular watch, ask about it, seem a little impressed that I’ve got an actual phone number tied to my arm and not just a fancy notification screen. I won’t pretend that doesn’t feel good. But that’s the garnish, not the meal.
There’s a completely different version of this same peace-of-mind argument, and it goes back to being genuinely obsessed with 24 when it was on the air. Jack Bauer wore this MTM Special Ops watch that I thought was the single coolest object I’d ever seen on a television screen, and for years I told myself I’d never actually buy one — not because I couldn’t scrape the money together for it, but because I was legitimately worried somebody would try to cut it off my wrist. That’s the specific fear, not losing it or misplacing it, but somebody deciding a few hundred or a few thousand dollars strapped to my arm was worth hurting me over. Same reason I’ve never gone anywhere near a Rolex — wearing something that valuable in public turns you into a target, and I never wanted to find out the hard way. Now I wear a $500 device that does more than any Special Ops watch or Rolex ever could, and it has never once crossed my mind that somebody’s going to try to take it off me. Part of that is just price, it’s not Rolex money. But part of it is that Apple builds these things to be worthless to a thief the second they’re stolen: pull an Apple Watch off someone’s wrist and it’s locked to their Apple ID, useless as anything but scrap, no resale, no reactivating it as your own. A Rolex holds its value no matter whose wrist it ends up on. Mine doesn’t, and that’s exactly why I get to wear something this capable without carrying around the old fear that used to keep me away from watches like it entirely.
The actual meal, though, is the argument people try to wave off before they’ve thought about it for more than five seconds: “why not just grab your phone out of your pocket?” That assumes everybody’s body works the same way, and it doesn’t. Someone using a wheelchair may not have a pocket that’s reachable in the moment they need it. Someone with limited grip or mobility in their hands might not be able to dig a phone out one-handed from under a jacket or a bag. Someone carrying groceries, or holding a kid, or mid-task with both hands full, doesn’t get a free hand just because a phone is theoretically three inches away. It gets a lot more serious than an inconvenience, too. If someone falls out of a wheelchair, their phone could be across the room, still in a bag on the chair, or just out of arm’s reach on the floor, at exactly the moment they need to call for help the most. A watch stays on the wrist through all of that. And it doesn’t even require dialing — Apple Watch has fall and crash detection built in, so if it senses a hard fall and you don’t respond, it can call emergency services and share your location on its own, whether or not a phone is anywhere nearby. That’s not a party trick. That’s the difference between lying on the ground hoping someone walks by and actually getting help.
That’s what makes the cellular Apple Watch genuinely important instead of just genuinely convenient. It’s not a gadget for people who think phones are too heavy to lift out of a pocket. It’s independence. It’s the difference between needing help to stay connected and not needing help at all — a phone on your wrist that doesn’t require a working pocket, a free hand, or someone else nearby to hand you your device.
So yeah, the new iPhone’s fine. It’ll sell itself, same as it does every year, and there will be a new one twelve months from now that everyone forgets about the year after that. But if you want to talk about the single best product Apple has ever made — not just the shiniest one this quarter, but the one that actually changed what’s possible for people — it’s the one on my wrist that doesn’t need my phone to work, doesn’t make me a target, and doesn’t care whether my hands are full or my legs work. It’s the wrist radio a comic strip promised me when I was a kid, the thing I once loudly told Apple was taking too long to finish, finally delivered and worth every bit of the wait. Better than the original iPhone. Best thing they’ve ever made. Fight me.