Nine reasons only a tool would buy the Apple Watch.

While Apple has had its share of failures, the Newton comes to mind, but the Apple Watch is the first time I’ve seen an Apple product reviled as lame pander to “Trustifarian” rich kids.

Since the original MacIntosh, Apple has always sold its products on its chic elegance and its tightly controlled (and intuitive) interface, but it has always had a subtext of Apple producing “The Computer for the rest of us.”

This is not “The Computer for the rest of us”.

What has attracted the most attention is the $17,000 (£13,500) solid gold version, and it casts the entire watch product line as a bloated Veblin good.^*

People like status objects, but they do not like to be made fools of, and this product screams, “More money than brains.”

^*Named after economist Thorstein Veblin, who in his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class, coined the term “Conspicuous consumption”, and detailed how some items, like a solid gold Apple Watch, serve no purpose beyond status markers.