I am late to every technology party, so let me talk about being late to this one. The Apple Watch came out in 2015 and I got mine (a used one, from someone local who had upgraded) for $75 a few months ago. The tipping point for me were two specific things.
1. My partner got one and liked it. Neither one of us are particularly good sleepers and he enjoyed seeing what the watch said about how he slept versus his subjective feelings about how he slept. Even understanding that the watch was inexact, he still gleaned information from it and liked it. I also watched him maintain his fitness goals a bit more easily when the watch nagged him than when I did. He stands up more often. He pays attention to his step count more easily. His watch face looks like one of those old diagrams of a circuit board, so many things, so much going on.
2. One of my friends from my Drop-In Time died at the end of 2024. A well-meaning medical person had suggested an Apple Watch as an option for fall-tracking, and making sure she could contact someone if she fell. It didn’t work (long story having to do with poor cell service and it maybe not being set up correctly. I was not the one who set it up.) and she died. Her watch face was Snoopy. I wanted to make sure I understood how wearable devices like this were supposed to work and how to help people determine if they were working correctly. It’s tricky since it’s hard to test, but I wanted to have more knowledge than no knowledge, if I could do it in a simple way.
So I’ve been wearing mine most of the time for a month or two. I got Apple Watch for Dummies out of the library and it was terrible. I know it’s been a long time since the “for dummies” books were the go-to standard, but I didn’t want to watch YouTube videos about this. The book taught me a few things but it seemed mostly to be product hyping for the watch, talking about the features it might have in the future as well as the ones it has now. The guy who wrote the book clearly thought (or acted like) the thing was AMAZING so that may have put me off of it early on.
The Apple Watch is fine. I like a few things it does:
– keeps track of timers and reminders
– lets me track a fitness walk without having to bring my phone, counts steps (I do not use the Apple Fitness app)
– tracks my sleep in a “good enough” way
– notifies me, a person who never turns my ringer on, that I have new messages
– tells me what time it is in the morning without me having to look at my phone or wall clock
Here are the things I wish it did
– let me listen to music from it directly (it has a small speaker it just won’t do this)
– let me listen to podcasts and go back and forth between my phone and my watch (it will not do this reliably)
– go a full 24 hours without a recharge
– put any app I want into its dock
– look appropriately sized for my wrist
– gave me the ability to customize the watch faces more than I can
In short, you know how a phone is not a computer in certain ways? Like there are just things you can’t do, parts of the system you can’t access, and limitations on how it can look and how you can interact with it? The Apple Watch is that same way, only taking the phone as a starting point. I understand the technology, more or less, I’m just surprised it’s so limited. And that those limitations are choices more than engineering limitations, mostly. I also feel like part of the Watch’s purpose is to keep you using it; the Health app tracks stuff over time, so it’s more useful the more you wear it. I also find the WatchOS clunky. The Dummies book that I was reading was several years old but nearly all the OS things have stayed the same. It’s sort of like the Apple TV, it seems like something that was a good idea, but doesn’t have a dedicated team of developers doing anything groundbreaking with it anymore.
It’s been interesting to talk to my partner about it who likes the whole deal a lot more than I do. He enjoys not having to fish his phone out of his pocket to get notifications and he really likes the sleep and exercise app. Except for walking in warm weather, I don’t mind having my phone on me. Remembering to have two devices (esp when I need to charge my watch daily, and I wear it at night) is more effort than just remembering one. I fall asleep some nights imagining what sort of WatchOS I’d need to design to make a watch face which would be small enough fit on my wrist. As it is, I feel like I’m wearing a watch made for someone much bigger than me, like it’s my dad’s watch. Come to think of it, my dad probably would have really liked these things.
