I’ve been an Apple Watch Owner for an entire year. I’ve never worn a single thing that long aside from my eye-glasses that I generally replace every 3 years whether they need it or not. My keys, wallet, phone are out of my pockets while driving or sitting at my desk and when I get home, my iPhone gets docked beside my iMac and I don’t touch it again until I set an alarm for it before bed. I’d prefer to set the alarm on my Apple Watch instead but it’s necessary that I charge it at night. That’s the only limiting factor to not wearing my Apple Watch 24/7.
…and I bet Apple wants me wearing it 24/7. The amount of motion and health (biometrics) data they can collect from me by wearing the watch constantly would be vast. They’d calculate sleeping patterns, heart-rate, location and how often I get up to use the bathroom or let the dog out. If Apple could build solar charging or motion charging (similar to how hybrids charge while the car comes to a rolling stop), this watch would be worn full-time. Further, if Apple could make the watch work fully over WiFi w/o the iPhone in my pocket and if apps actually worked, I’d never need my iPhone except for typing out long messages which I rarely do since I’m always 20 feet from a computer.
I’m getting ahead of myself though. Let’s talk about Apple Watch, one year in.
It’s important that I preface that I’m not your typical reviewer. The first thing is, I unconditionally love Apple’s Products. I have for many years. Since my Mac LC III and hand-me down PowerBook, I would call quarterly investors meetings in 1999 to hear Steve Jobs answer questions and even though I was only 13, I loved Apple. That feeling has not changed although I am a bit more mellow about my love for Apple. I still camp in front of Apple Stores for yearly iPhone launches despite the act being completely unnecessary. The second thing I should mention is I’m not your typical reviewer in that I actually have a real job, real hobbies and I do more than sit on my computer all day tweeting and blogging. The majority of Apple-Bloggers who proclaimed they stopped wearing the Apple Watch are guys who sit at a desk all day with an iMac, iPad, iPhone and don’t go to physical meetings or go out for lunch or buy groceries on their way home from the office or sit in meetings where staring at your phone is not cool but glancing at the watches fully accepted. These are not people who drive 20,000 miles a year and using the watch to keep up to date w/ things while not being distracted is a godsend. I think I’m the perfect use case for the Apple Watch outside of its health tracking features because honestly, since buying Apple Watch, I haven’t set foot on a treadmill or walking-path.
——-
Yesterday, I put the Apple Watch on at 6AM. I took it off at 11PM. It was at 25% Battery. This is the norm. I’ve never seen the watch in the teens except maybe one case where I didn’t take it off to charge when I laid down to sleep. The battery life for AM to PM wear is great. AM to next AM, nah. By the time 8AM the next morning rolls around, the watch will have about 5% battery left and soon shut down. I bring my charger with me and plug the watch in on my 26 mile commute to work and it’s at 50% by the time I get to the office and will last until at least dinner-time. You can sleep with the watch if you turn on Airplane mode as I did for a while with the Sleep++ app. I’d use it all day normally, go in airplane mode for 1 hour while laying down to read, put it on in airplane mode and fire up Sleep++ then wake up, charge for an hour and take it out of airplane mode and it’d be at around 80% charged for my day at work. I got tired of the activity and now charge it at night but it is possible to wear it full time if you work at it. Tracking my sleep patterns just wasn’t that important for how much work I had to put into it.
——-
I have gone swimming in lakes, braved rain storms, showered with and washed dishes with Apple Watch. I have never removed the watch due to the elements. I wash my car with it, it’s always on me and I’ve never had any issue. For almost all purposes, I consider this watch to be waterproof. I won’t go diving with it but it can brave the daily elements.
I’m also not very careful with the watch. I bang it into a door, wall, desk, drawer every single day. It hangs on my motorcycle gloves and siri activates almost every morning. I’m incredibly abusive to the watch and bands. While there are surface scratches on the Space Black finish, the watch has held up incredibly well.
The Milanese Loop is uncomfortable and it’s why I haven’t upgraded to the Space Black version yet. While it would look beautiful on my watch, I find the Milanese loop starts comfortable and when I bend my wrist, it comes loose, to make it fit snug, I have to go ultra tight and then the bones in my wrist have these loop imprints on them an hour after removing the watch. It’s light which is nice but I wouldn’t recommend it especially at $149
I have a Black and Red sport band. These are great. High-quality, great if you’re going to have an active weekend. When i go on a trip, I pack one of these with me. They are light, flexible, breathable (in that they don’t snug your wrist too much) and the feel is soft without pulling out your hairs.
The included Stainless Steel link bracelet. I love it. It’s my 90% band. It doesn’t yank out hair, it’s heavy and feels really expensive. The clasp mechanism is genius, it’s just gorgeous in how each link is curved and easily adjustable without visiting a jeweler. I love the link bracelet a LOT. As I show in photos though, you’ll see how the black finish is wearing off on the edges of the links. I wish there was a way to stop this from happening without babying the watch which I promised myself I’d never do.
There are other bands I’d like to own but at this point, I’m fully covered. The black link bracelet is the “hey guys, I have the expensive one” bracelet, the sport is comfortable and useful and the milanese, despite its fitment and comfort issues is very light weight while still being steel so it has a “out for drinks” use for me which means I use it once a month.
——-
For daily wear and as a new product, two things are really interesting. Despite the heavy weight of the steel watch and steel band, I don’t notice it anymore. It sits on my wrist basically undetected. I wear it on my left hand, control my mouse with the right and while I am left handed, I touch a pen perhaps once a month at most and that’s just to sign my checks at restaurants. So with that, it never intrudes on anything. Maybe the only time I take it off is working on my car’s engine and it’s not to keep the Apple Watch looking good, it’s to make it easier to get into those hard to reach places with a screw driver where the Apple Watch’s height may get in the way.
Close acquaintances / co-workers will perhaps once remark on the watch and ask me what I think. After the initial launch, no-one even notices it except women. But I’ve read that women notice watches where men do not. I find women staring at it but I think that’s any watch. I don’t think that has anything to do with it being an Apple Watch and more that it’s solid black jewelry that stands out on my arm. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like wearing the black or red sport bands because the make the watch look like any commodity Wal*Mart watch or cheap FitBit knock off. Rubber red bands just don’t appeal to me unless I’m out camping and function is better than form.
I’ve said this before but as a new product category, this is the first time I’ve experienced not being noticed with Apple Watch and I’m actually very much okay with it because outside of the features I outline in this piece, the watch is only valuable with certain activities andI don’t think the money I paid for this watch has been justified outside of the core features that even the $300 model can do. People still talk to me in Cafes and ask about my Retina MacBook Pro or iPad Air 2. I get emails from people asking me about the Core i7 iMac over Core i5 and is the BTO option “worth it”? but the Apple Watch hasn’t had that issue once the initial hype wore down.
I spent $1099 on the Space Black Apple Watch and aside from the materials and color, it’s identical in every way to a watch that costs $299. The additional $800 gets me a color and steel. While I love my watch an I’m one of the elite who chose to get the top-end of a first gen product (top-end compared to solid gold), I wouldn’t recommend this model to others unless they, like me, like rare-ness. I’m the kind of guy that would buy the carbon ceramic breaks and aero kit on my Porsche and essentially double the car’s price-tag. Most people get the next level up from base and call it a day. For people like me, the Space Black has been awesome.
Overall, the one benefit I can explain without feeling like a jerk is that Space Black Stainless Steel uses a process where black carbon is bonded to the steel to make the watch more scratch proof. While mine has some surface scratches, compared to a standard shiny, mirror-finished stainless steel Apple Watch, the finish has held up surprisingly well. The Sapphire screen is supposedly more scratch proof compared to the Ion-X glass in the Sport model but it is more shatter-likely than the glass version of the screen and I can attest that there are very few scratches on the screen except in certain light.
Every watch will do the same tasks with the same storage and battery life. Spend what you want but realize you’re paying for materials after $299. I do stand by the fact that there is value specifically in the Space Black Stainless Steel over any other model. Is that value $1099? That’s only up to the consumer.
——-
Then again, most of this rabble rabble is moot because if a new Apple Watch comes out, we start over again but I think it’s all worth stating.
——-
1800 words in and we’re finally talking about the software.It took a while but I did have a lot to say about ownership of the watch in general. Thanks for your patience.
The Apple Watch is really good at these things:
- Time Keeping
- Notifications
- Health (Filling up those rings)
- Calendar (made WAY better by time-travel on the main watch face)
- ApplePay
- Glancing quickly at Weather / Date
- Getting Maps Directions without looking at my phone (a feature that was made moot once I bought a car in August of 2015 that had Apple CarPlay)
The Apple Watch is really bad at nearly everything else and one area it’s just awful at (and likely no fault of Apple’s) is the 3rd party applications. I made this quick video to show exactly what I mean.
For the core features I listed, the Apple Watch is great and these features is all I use it for. Other than setting a timer, I never click the digital crown and select an application. I NEVER do this.
Siri, I don’t use it either. When I’m at home, it’s faster to talk over to my iMac and type something out or do a search or even type in a URL in Safari and then open it on my iPad via iCloud tabs (Have I mentioned how much I hate software keyboards?). While on the go, I never have LTE anyway so Siri doesn’t work for me. So, even though I haven’t started using Siri on my other devices, I haven’t for sure started using it on Apple Watch.
As for storing photos or music on the Apple Watch, I just got my first BlueTooth headphones and they’re in my Motorcycle Helmet so I use my iPhone mounted on my handlebars to play music & podcasts and I control the music with a handle-bar remote since controlling an iPhone or Watch w/ gloves is impossible. If Apple added Bluetooth to the iPod Classic, I’d be in heaven. Play / Pause with physical buttons ?!?!?!? sign me up.
Overall, the Apple watch is great at the automatic things updated on the main screen and it’s great at notifying me things when my iPhone is less than 100 feet away. It’s not very good at anything else and that’s really just Apps. I think though that the next watch, phone and iOS/WatchOS update will fix most of these issues. I hope so because
——-
I don’t plan on buying Apple Watch 2. I might buy 3 but not 2. The reason is this was an $1100 watch. it’s a quantifiable percentage of my annual salary and once you add up an iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch every year and a MacBook / iMac every 2 years (on an annual rotation) you’re looking as an actual percentage of my salary that is pretty measurable like 2 weeks in Europe measurable and these days I enjoy traveling a lot more than technology purchases followed by a weekend of setting up the new device.
So, I really hope with iPhone 7, iOS 10, Watch OS 2.5/3 that the apps finally start working like really working and maybe the Watch is dead by 10PM instead of 6AM the next day but it works with any app over WiFi instead of the iPhone being required. It might get me to use Siri more. I hope this August the Watch starts working the way it should have from the start. If Software can’t fix it, I’m not going to upgrade just for the S2 chip. Maybe the S3 but I’ve already spend my 5 years of watch budgets on this first watch. It does enough that I wear it every day and love wearing it but not enough that I think I can justify spending another grand for everything it does today…just faster.
I say this about all wearables though because if you look at what Microsoft is doing, Apple is still winning this game:
