Smart watches are not useful if you are idle or nearly idle and the rate of notifications is low. But if you are busy or the rate of notifications is high then that changes dramatically.
What are some examples? Doing any physical work is a perfect example. Maybe you're cooking, or plugging together and configuring a rack full of networking or AV equipment, or soldering, or building a house, or basically doing any of the million things people do every day where an interruption long enough to check a smart phone is a serious disruption to the flow of work.
And what happens when you're not just receiving 1 notification per hour or even every 10 minutes but perhaps 10 notifications in 1 minute? Not all day, but all it takes is 10 notifications per minute to happen once or twice a day to make having a smart watch worthwhile.
It may not be the sort of thing that is ever useful to you, but that's fine, don't buy one. But they are plenty useful for a lot of people.
Well if you get that many notifications, I'd just start ignoring them / turning them off. Too much noise, too much distraction. Plus, it's probably not important / something one needs to respond immediately to.
It's not noise though. For me a smartwatch would replace a radio. With a radio you can easily pass a handful of messages back and forth every minute with low overhead, but with a smartphone that many messages becomes a burden. With a smart watch it's not a burden.
What are some examples? Doing any physical work is a perfect example. Maybe you're cooking, or plugging together and configuring a rack full of networking or AV equipment, or soldering, or building a house, or basically doing any of the million things people do every day where an interruption long enough to check a smart phone is a serious disruption to the flow of work.
And what happens when you're not just receiving 1 notification per hour or even every 10 minutes but perhaps 10 notifications in 1 minute? Not all day, but all it takes is 10 notifications per minute to happen once or twice a day to make having a smart watch worthwhile.
It may not be the sort of thing that is ever useful to you, but that's fine, don't buy one. But they are plenty useful for a lot of people.