Tom Evans' two-and-a-half-minute video, titled "Free Apple Watch," opens with a joke that doubles as an instruction: this is the world's lowest-cost watch, it is actually free, and it does not tell the time. What it offers instead is a short seated practice built around a single apple. The viewer softens the gaze, widens attention to the room, takes three deliberate breaths with a longer exhale, and then contemplates the fruit's colors, its engineering, and its seeds. The video claims that doing this at the start of each day may create more time. This piece works through the practice step by step, explains what each instruction asks of attention, and considers why a humble apple makes a serviceable meditation object.
Nothing, if measuring means counting minutes. That is the point. The video's opening is a deadpan bit of marketing parody: a premium product category, a price tag of zero, and a feature list that begins with what the device fails to do. "This Apple watch doesn't even tell the time," Evans says at the top, before pivoting to the claim that matters. Watching the apple "for a couple of minutes at the start of each day" may leave you with more time, not less.
The joke works because the everyday watch is a machine for reminding you that time is running out. A watch counts it down in tidy increments. Evans' object does the opposite. It asks you to stop counting. The comedy is the reframing: the most ordinary, unclaimed object in the kitchen becomes a timepiece in the sense that matters, a way of marking the start of a day on your own terms.
Whatever you make of the claim about time, the practice is concrete enough to try in your kitchen tomorrow morning, and that is what makes the video worth two and a half minutes.
The first instruction is simple to state and harder to do well. "Just stare at the center of this apple and become aware of the white screen around it," Evans says at about 0:22. He is describing a plain visual anchor: the apple sits at the center of a field, presumably a plain background, and you hold your eyes on it. Then comes the adjustment that defines the practice: "let your eyes defocus at the center." At about 0:32 he repeats it, and the difference between staring and defocusing is the whole exercise.
Staring is effort. The eyes lock, the jaw sets, and the mind starts narrating: shiny, red, bruise on the side. Defocusing is the opposite. You keep the apple in view while letting its edges go soft, as though you were looking through it rather than at it. The object stays present without demanding analysis.
This is the first place a reader can feel what the video is actually teaching. Attention can be wide or narrow, and most of our day is spent in a narrow, forward-leaning beam. A soft gaze is one of the quickest ways to shift out of that beam without leaving the room.
Having softened the gaze on the fruit, Evans asks you to expand the frame: "now widen your attention so the apple is at the center of your gaze but become aware of the room around you." He names the surfaces, the walls on either side, the ceiling, the floor, at roughly 0:38 to 0:52. The apple stays at the center, but it is no longer the only thing you are holding.
This is a small but deliberate move from focus to awareness. Focus selects. Awareness receives. By keeping the apple at the center and letting the room register at the edges, the practice gives the mind two things to rest in at once. The object becomes an anchor rather than a fixation, and the surrounding space becomes part of the meditation rather than background to it.
For a reader trying this on a noisy morning, the instruction is a relief. You do not have to empty the room. You only have to notice that it is there.
Evans then shifts from sight to breath. "Bring your focus to your breath and just breathe in and out deeply three times," he says at about 0:55. The instruction is specific: three deep breaths to begin, then a rule for the exhale. "When you exhale make the out breath three or four times as long as the in breath," he continues at about 1:01.
The ratio is the practical heart of the video. A long exhale is an easy thing to try and an easy thing to feel. It asks the body to let go of the breath slowly rather than release it, and it gives the attention something steady to follow. Evans does not elaborate on physiology in the video, and this piece will not invent claims he did not make. What matters for the practitioner is the experience of the instruction: the inhale is short, the exhale is long, and the attention travels with the air all the way out.
Combined with the soft gaze, the breath rule gives the practice its structure. Eyes soft, room held at the edges, breath long on the way out. Three rounds of that is the whole opening.
Once settled, the video moves into contemplation of the apple itself, and this is where the spiritual register becomes most explicit. "As you observe the apple, be minded that colors, be they red, yellow or green, are mere reflections of the true color within," Evans says at about 1:25. It is a line that asks you to treat the visible surface as a reflection rather than an essence. The red is not the apple's truth. It is what light does when it meets the skin.
This is the kind of reframing contemplative traditions have long used with ordinary objects: look at the surface, then ask what is behind it. The question is not answered in the video, and Evans does not push it further. He leaves the observer holding the apple, with a question in place of a conclusion.
From color, the video turns to construction, and the tone shifts from abstraction to appreciation. "Notice how perfectly it is engineered," Evans says at about 1:41. "Its skin is strong enough to protect its tasty insides but thin enough that we can bite through it." Then he widens the list of uses: the apple "can be eaten raw, made into apple crumble, or even distilled into cider. It is a marvel of creation."
This is the most playful passage in the video and also the most useful for a practitioner. Noticing that a skin can be both protective and penetrable is a way of training attention toward the functional intelligence of ordinary things. It turns the mind from judgment ("this is just fruit") to wonder ("look how this is made"). The list of uses, raw, baked, fermented, has the same effect. It shows the object as a set of possibilities rather than a single fixed item.
The video closes on its most surreal line. "At its very center are some pips which can be used to make free clones of itself," Evans says at about 2:02. "Now that is one apple worth watching each and every day," he concludes at about 2:09.
The pips are the video's final joke and, read another way, its quiet thesis. The apple, watched with attention, contains the means to produce more of itself. Seeds are a symbol of continuation, and the closing line folds that into the daily ritual: the practice is worth repeating because its value is generative. The claim about time returns in a new form. What is replicated is not minutes on a clock but a repeatable way of arriving in the day.
Read this way, the joke is not a gimmick. It is the video's way of saying that a two-minute practice, repeated, can have effects larger than its length.
The instructions give you a usable template. Sit with an apple or any simple object at the start of the day. Stare at the center, then let the eyes soften. Widen attention to take in the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Take three deep breaths and let each exhale run three or four times as long as the inhale. Then observe the object: its color as reflection, its construction as design, its possibilities as food, drink, and seed.
- Choose an apple or another plain object that sits at a comfortable distance.
- Soften the gaze rather than staring, and keep the object in view as you do.
- Widen attention to the room, holding the object at the center without losing the edges.
- Breathe deeply three times, lengthening each exhale.
- Contemplate the object for the remainder of the session, noticing surface, structure, and seeds.
Evans frames the whole thing as a daily act, not a one-off. Two minutes at the start of each day is the recommended dose. The question of whether it creates time is one each practitioner answers by trying it for a week and noticing what the morning feels like afterward.
If the video left you curious, the next step is simply to repeat it. Use the same apple, or the same bowl of fruit, for several mornings. Notice where your eyes want to lock and practice softening them. Notice whether the room feels larger when you widen attention. Notice whether the long exhale changes the pace of the first minutes of your day.
Evans points viewers to his site for more meditations of this kind. This piece has deliberately stayed with the one video, because its power is in how small and specific it is. A free apple, a soft gaze, three breaths, and a day that begins a little slower than it otherwise would.
