It’s the one-year anniversary of the Apple Watch’s introduction and you know that scene in The Lord of the Rings where there’s an avalanche of skulls? Well, it’s the same thing only with thought pieces.
How do you stand out from the crowd? Well, one way is to crank it up to 11 like Gizmodo’s Casey Chan.
“My God-Awful Year With the Apple Watch.” (No link but a tip o’ the antlers to David Chartier and David Barnard.)
Are you there, God? It’s me, Apple Watch owner.
I bought the Apple Watch a year ago. I stopped wearing it two months ago…
So… not really a year, then.
That’s because it doesn’t really do anything that anyone needs…
Define “needs.” Are we talking “wants” kind of needs or insulin kind of needs? If you want to get super-pedantic about it, some of the health stuff might reach insulin-needs levels. But, for most people, no, no one “needs” an Apple Watch. Bread and air and water are really enough to keep people alive, at least for a while.
(Gizmodo said of bread: “A Verifiable Waste of Starch Molecules.”)
But there could be plenty of reasons why someone might want an Apple Watch.
Here are some things I learned over the past year (minus two months) of strapping the [Chan’s expletive deleted] screen vibrator to my wrist.
Nothing can just be not as good as it could or should be. It has to be the worst thing ever, a veritable Hitler of user interactions. Even Chan doesn’t completely believe what he’s writing.
…there’s actually nothing worthwhile to do with the Apple Watch that you can’t do just as easily with an iPhone. Okay fine, that’s not all the way true…
Is “all the way true” like “all the way pregnant”?
You know, there are other ways to write things than just loading up the hyperbole cannon and firing indiscriminately. Just throwing that out there.
Most Watch apps just end up being a shell of the iPhone app.
Most iPhone apps are shells of desktop apps. That doesn’t seem to put people off the category.
Chan says he likes Apple Pay well enough, but complains:
…the biometric sensors on the underside of the Watch that’s supposed to remember me once I’ve punched in my code, regularly loses contact with my wrist, making the security system think that I’ve taken the Watch off. Which means, I have to punch in my passcode multiple times a day to use it. It totally kills it.
The Macalope has a third-party leather band for his Watch which, depending on the weather, is often loose enough that he needs to shake his shank to move it back off the base of his hoof when it slides down. So, it’s not a death grip by any means. And do you know how many times he’s had to re-enter his passcode? Zero. That is to say, never, not even once, none. If you’re wearing your watch so loose that it can’t keep any skin contact at all, then you’ve created a no-win scenario for secure payments for any smartwatch.
“The Apple Watch is not a magical device that knows my will without having to rely on definable actions!”
Yeah, no, it doesn’t do that. The Emperor has no clothes. Or, in this case, magical robes.
We all have different tolerances and preferences, but the Macalope personally relies on Apple Pay on the Watch so much he can’t even remember how to invoke it on the iPhone.
Charging the Watch every night is not the worst thing in the world (charging by magnetic stand is great, btw), until you wake up somewhere without an Apple Watch charger, and the watch is dead for the entire next day.
Next up at Gizmodo: My God-Awful Year With a Smartphone.
So I’ve taken the Apple Watch off and don’t know when I’ll put it back on. The Watch isn’t at all worth it, but I’m not sure it’s even possible to make a smartwatch that I, or any reasonable non-tech nerd, would need.
So, it’s the entire category you’re opposed to. Well, it’s been a long, emotional rollercoaster of a journey to personal discovery that probably should have happened before you were given one particular brand of smartwatch to comment on, but at least we made this important breakthrough.
In the second-to-last paragraph.
It’s certainly fine to have complaints about the Watch (the Macalope does). It’s fine to decide you don’t want to use it. It’s even OK to suggest people not buy one. It’s not a must-have for most people. But when you’re flailing your arms like an airdancer at a used car lot about how it’s the worst thing ever, it makes the Macalope think it’s more about getting attention than critiquing the device.