The moment you put on one of Levi’s products, it’s masterfully designed to elicit a powerful sensation. A new pair of Levi’s jeans or one of its Commuter series denim jackets excels at that moment, reminding you of its 150-plus years of cloth craftwork experience and the familiar, but never tired, feeling of an article of clothing that just feels right.

The same can be said of the first time you put on the Project Jacquard jacket, made in partnership by Levi’s and Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, or ATAP for short. Unfortunately, that’s about where the whole experience stops feeling right and starts feeling like you just bought a $350 jacket interwoven with technology you’ll only rarely use.

Project Jacquard, the ATAP initiative to weave touch-sensitive fabric into everyday clothing, was announced back in May 2015 to lots of puzzled looks, but a fair deal of genuine fascination. The Jacquard technology, named after a 19th century punch card-controlled loom, is indeed impressive. Google’s ATAP group managed to weave capacitive threads with a copper core into cloth itself, without needing to make substantial changes to the textile manufacturing process.

This allows a portion of the clothing — in the case of this jacket, the left cuff — to take touch inputs from your hand and translate them into input controls for your smartphone, with the help of a Bluetooth-powered dongle stored in the cuff. Those controls include music playback and some simple navigation pings within Google Maps, among other minor tricks. (It appears that both Google and Levi’s decided not to sell cheap touch-powered cufflink add-on for Levi’s existing $145 Commuter jacket.) Levi’s is the first partner for now — a powerful proof-of-concept given the stress-testing required of denim — with more to come down the line. The jacket is available now.

In my time with a retail version of the jacket over the past two weeks, which involved a trip to Southern California and more than a week’s worth of daily bike commuting in San Francisco, I can say that it is an absolutely fantastic article of clothing. It is comfortable, stylish, breathes well at higher temperatures, and is pretty much tailor-made for bike commuting in San Francisco, which happens to be where Levi Strauss & Co. was founded back in 1853. (For warmer temperatures, I would not recommend biking with a jean jacket on.)

It is everything that Levi’s Commuter line of jackets has offered, in terms of fit and function, while being the best-looking, subtlest piece of wearable technology on the market. You can, in fact, wash it, so long as you remove the Bluetooth cuff attachment, though Google and Levi’s suggest you avoid ironing the sleeve, having the jacket dry cleaned, or washing it excessively.

Project Jacquard is not a super useful piece of technology

The central issue: the Jacquard jacket is just not a super useful piece of technology.

The primary use case of Jacquard is getting music playback control and Google Maps pings, for both your ETA and the step in your list of directions on a preplanned route. You can also use the jacket to answer calls or respond only to pings from certain contacts. It can also jot down in the mobile app the name of the what song you’re listening to. These are all functions you can ascribe to a distinct number of touchscreen-like motions, including a double tap, a brush inward on your sleeve, and a brush outward.

It’s not that Jacquard doesn’t work well. In fact, the jacket does exactly what it’s designed to do. I only occasionally ran into connection hiccups that involved having to check my Bluetooth settings and make sure the cufflink was being recognized by the Jacquard mobile app when I would put the jacket on again on my way out the door. But working just fine is still not enough to justify the price one will pay for it, and, in a greater sense, the Jacquard jacket’s reason for existing.

As technology critic Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic of the corporate and cultural allure of the Internet of Things, “The computational aspects of ordinary things have become goals unto themselves, rather than just a means to an end. As it spreads from desktops and back-offices to pockets, cameras, cars, and door locks, the affection people have with computers transfers onto other, even more ordinary objects.” The same can be said of smart clothing like Jacquard, which promises to be hopefully as good as your regular clothing, but with new, computer-like features you didn’t know you needed or wanted — and probably don’t need or want.

Smart clothing promises computer-like features you probably don’t want or need

When I first tried on the Jacquard jacket, back at the SXSW festival in Austin earlier this year, I said that it restored my faith in wearables by balancing how the item looks and feels with how well its technology can stay out of the way while still remaining active in the background. I stand by that statement. I can see people, those who love new gadgets and maybe bike to work somewhat regularly, buying this jacket and loving it mostly because it’s a great jacket that just happens to do some neat tricks.

Yet, similar to the Apple Watch and other wearables, it’s hard to know exactly how much utility these devices actually provide for you personally until you integrate them into your daily life. It’s not that the Jacquard jacket doesn’t do that well. It’s simply that — again, like smartwatches — there’s often another, more common tool that does it better.

In the moment, it’s a lot easier just to use the playback controls of your earbuds, especially while riding a bike. Using the Jacquard sleeve does have a natural feel to it, and every time I performed a function it felt fun in a way new technology rarely is. But using it is not all that intuitive, and it requires breaking learned habits I’ve accumulated over years of using technology. I had to force myself to use the sleeve when my headphones were just as capable, or when taking my phone out of my pocket while walking was more preferable.

There is also the matter of marketing the jacket as something for bike commuters who will have headphones plugged in, something that is prohibited in California (though it is almost never enforced), and tends to differ state by state depending on whether cyclists are treated like automobile drivers. Regardless, I’m not sure there are too many cyclists keen on biking all of the time with headphones in, or needing a pricey jacket that would make that easier to do.

In all honesty, it doesn’t feel like there is a whole lot this jacket could do that would make it more appealing. But perhaps Jacquard’s relative mundanity is just the state of technology at the moment, and the reason wearables haven’t heralded the next wave of mobile computing like we once thought.

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage on Wednesday during the company’s Pixel 2 hardware event, he repeated familiar talking points about the shift from a mobile to an artificial intelligence-dominated world. Pichai has often talked about how the rise of what technologists call “ambient” computing — where sensors, cameras, and microchips turn everything into a computer powered by the cloud — will unleash the power of AI insights onto every real-world object around us.

That vision may be the ultimate endgame for wearable tech, the smart home, and the Internet of Things at large. But right now, we’re mostly getting handicapped versions of smartphone functions. Until the real AI smarts are there — delivering the features we didn’t know we needed that actually feel essential — these devices can’t and won’t be more than fun toys.

For Project Jacquard, the same is true. At the very least, it’s a really nice jacket, and Levi’s, which likely loves the marketing benefits of having a top-of-the-line piece of smart clothing, that certainly seems like enough. For Google ATAP, on the other hand, this feels like step one. The next goal, a much harder one, will be making a piece of smart clothing with software as powerful as the Jacquard jacket is attractive.