I just bought a Pax era last week... my second one. It seems like many on this forum are confused about what it is...
It's a cartridge-based cannabis vaporizer that uses some pretty impressive tech to heat up the terpenes and cannabinoids to a temperature where they are active enough to be vaporized as air passes over them, but not hot enough to burn. In short, it's a lot less (zero to be exact) tar and has no harsh byproducts of burning cannabis the traditional way.
Although this device looks a lot like the Juul, and is designed and manufactured by the same company that originally developed Juul, it isn't a cigarette or nicotine-based vape. It's for cannabis and cannabis only.
The app enables some really cool features that, in my opinion, make the Pax era a premium device above alternatives, including temperature control, monitoring usage, information on the chemical makeup of the cartridge you're using, a lockout feature to prevent *cough* Children from using it... and even a few games. Only Silicon Valley could've made a device with this much simplicity and under-the-hood functionality. You definitely don't HAVE to use the app with it... you can just put a cartridge in and start to inhale, but it's not the same experience. Akin to using an Apple Watch without pairing it to an iPhone.
And it's very frustrating that Apple, a company based in California, where cannabis is legal for recreational use, has decided to take this stance. If it were really about keeping underage kids from using vape devices, Apple would and should implement an age-based verification system for Apple ID's using DL data from the DMV, the same way the Pax website uses DL data to verify the age of their customers.