Yesterday Tim Cook showed off all the things you can do with an Apple Watch. You can transmit your heartbeat and open your garage door; you can summon an Uber and peruse Instagram. Basically, you can do a lot of the things you can do on your phone, but on your wrist. That seems nice but doesn’t really answer the question of why you’d spend a few hundred dollars (or more) for a device that does the same things as the device in your pocket. Apple’s challenge was to present a compelling use case for the watch, and it mostly failed to. "It still feels like an awful lot of interesting ideas without a unifying theme,"Nilay wrote after testing the watch.

The thing is, the watch does have a use case, it's just one that’s hard for Apple to talk about. Last week Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch wrote that the best thing about the watch, according to the Apple employees who’ve been demoing it, was that it let them basically stop using their phone. Instead of fishing their phones out of their pockets every couple minutes, they could check incoming notifications on the watch and choose to ignore or respond to them. Panzarino imagined a future where the watch helps us be less distracted and more presen