I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to buy anything from the iPhone event this year. I have been steeling myself for the potential announcements for a year. I was going to upgrade my wife’s iPhone to whatever the basic 14 model would be because we skipped her last year. Our Series 6 Watches are just fine and we have standardized on Beats Fit earbuds.

They started in with the Watch Series 8 and my resolve only got stronger. No dice! Boring! I perked up a little when they got to the Ultra. At least that was something genuinely new to evaluate. But the positioning of the watch as something for extreme activities turned me off. Though only temporary, I’m in a wheelchair rehabbing. This watch wasn’t going to be for me.

Then, they got me. That damned orange button on the left side of the watch snagged my attention and the endless possibilities reeled me in. The moment I realized the preorders were up, I smashed the buy button as fast as I could. I don’t even know what all you can do with that button. I just knew that I had to have it to fill the button-shaped hole that suddenly consumed my life.

Naturally, Apple only showed examples of the button aiding in extreme situations. However, it seems to me that the button is programable. I suspect Apple will limit it at first to a handful of things in which I have no interest. But they might actually allow us to use it to launch shortcuts. If that is the case, the sky’s the limit. My immediate need for the button is to act as a hardware switch for pausing and playing podcasts.

I exclusively use my phone for podcast listening. And I do a lot of it. The watch acts as a remote control for what is playing on the phone. But I don’t want my watch face taken over by Now Playing controls. I need my watch to display information in large print. And I can’t read the time when other apps take over the screen. The Now Playing screen is the worst culprit, making the time displayed on the watch so small that it is useless to me.

That said, I have my watch set to have the media screen take over the watch when media is playing on my phone because I don’t want to dig out my phone to pause and play. That is where the orange button comes in. I believe that I will be able to program that button to act as a hardware play/pause button that controls the media on my phone. I might not be able to do it at launch. But I am pretty sure it will happen eventually. Also, I am just intrigued at all of the possibilities Apple will come up with that we haven’t even considered.

So there it is. I essentially dropped $800 I didn’t really have on a single button that I might not even be able to use for what I intend. How about you? What would you use that damned orange button for? Let me know in the comments.

David Johnson