John Gruber on the recent grumblings of the Apple Watch being a magnet for thieves because it doesn’t require a passcode to be reset:

This is no less secure than every single other wristwatch ever made. Certainly, in the future, there could be an option to require the passcode no matter what, but I’m not persuaded that should be the default.

I agree with John. People forget their passcodes, especially with a device that seldomly asks for it. Apple could require you to reset the Watch from your iPhone, but what if it’s lost, stolen, or broken? There’s no easy solution. Maybe Apple will come up with one in the future but I don’t think it’s even necessary.

Everyone seems to have this false sense that any device that could include anti-theft features should. I think that’s dead wrong. Expecting Apple to develop that kind of mechanism in a 1.0 product is foolish — I can imagine they’d rather spend that time on features that are used day to day rather than features that most owners will never use. But more than that, what if theives find some way to circumvent it? Couldn’t that leave Apple open to lawsuits from users who had their Watch stolen?

I also enjoyed David Mark’s take on the issue:

There are not enough Apple Watches in the wild yet to be a large enough market. The desirability might be there for early adopters, but it’s still too early in the adoption cycle for desirability to be high enough to trigger a large enough black market to entice this sort of thievery.

In all of the reporting I read on this issue I couldn’t find one example of real-world Apple Watch theft taking place. It seems some of these writers have put the cart before the horse in an effort to generate page views.