Apple Watch Impressions - beautiful redundancy

A week ago a package arrived for me. It was an Apple Watch Series 9 in silver, with a blue sport loop watch band. I’ve been wearing it almost constantly since initially setting it up, even taking it to sleep with me a few times, and while I surely lack the insight on this device that an experienced user might have, I feel confident in firing off a couple of impressions and thoughts right now. Lets begin.

The Apple Watch is a curious product. For one, it’s the only Apple product with a screen that doesn’t really work on its own, you need an iPhone to set it up and use it day to day. Some models feature cellular connectivity, to be able to communicate via the internet without your phone physically near it, but it’s still not a device that you can use without also owning an iPhone. This immediately sets it apart from the rest of Apples ecosystem. The Watch is always a “second step” of sorts, you’re committing a little bit more to Apples way of doing things.

All of this in and of itself isn’t that strange. Other smartwatches and similar accessories like fitness trackers and smart rings work the same way. But it does strike me as interesting, upon closer inspection of the Watchs features and unique abilities.

The Watch is supposed to be an extension of your iPhone first and foremost. While it can perform some functions related to other Apple devices around you, it primarily serves as a little preview window and remote for things happening on your phone. One of the most universal functions that smart watches offer, besides displaying the time and weather, is notification mirroring. This feature is so self-explanatory and obviously useful that I won’t go into it further here. I always keep my phone on silent, with exceptions only made for calls from my contacts, and disallow notifications for about half of the apps I have installed. Getting pings from social media is terrible for my mental health it turns out, and so is getting a vibration in my pocket or on my wrist for every e-mail and chat message that arrives. I want to control when I see what, and the Watch respects that choice perfectly well. It mirrors the “focus mode” set on my iPhone, which is either Do Not Disturb or the sleep mode, and then simply displays a little red dot on the watch face, that lets me know that something has arrived in the form of a notification, and I can check it out later. The dot can be turned off as well, which I appreciate.

The second best feature of the Watch for me is media control. Whenever I start playing music or a podcast or a youtube video on my phone, the Watch automatically opens a mini-app called “Now Playing”, which allows me to play/pause, skip and change the volume of the thing I’m listening to, all without touching my phone or even being near it. This is great. While I work, I keep my phone on my desk, and go to the kitchen with my Watch on my wrist and my Airpods in my ears, and remain in control of the thing thats playing. Now I could of course do everything that Now Playing offers just with my Airpods too, but the digital crown on the side of the Watch offers much finer volume control, while the double tap gesture introduced with the Series 9 allows me to play and pause without even touching the display. Is this a necessary addition to my life? Absolutely not. But I like it. Since the Watch connects to all the same wifi networks and Airpods that it’s paired iPhone does, I can also listen to music or podcasts downstairs or in the garden, while my phone is plugged into the charger upstairs. Pretty neat.

Fitness and Health tracking might really be the main functionality of the Apple Watch for a large chunk of the people who buy it, and Apple really likes to advertise it as well. The Watch is stuffed full of sensors which can track workouts, sleep, heart function, and general activity throughout the day. It might do more than that too, but those are the four things that I have used it for so far. The health aspects were also what finally convinced me to buy a Watch in the first place. I’m not the most active or health-focussed person in the world, but I do work out at home every other day or so, I try to get a healthy amount of sleep (and completely fail to function without it), and want to remain active despite my work-from-home job. Despite this being the most interesting part of the Watch for me, it’s also the one that I can currently say the least about. I am by no means a health expert and I wouldn’t dare to boast with any conclusions about the value of it’s sensors and software after a mere week of usage. All I can and want to say right now that I like the simple to understand Activity rings, and think that wearing the Watch to sleep is far less annoying than I initially thought. I’ve previously worn a Casio F-91W to bed a bunch of times, usually since I forgot to take it off, and while the Apple Watch is way larger than the Casio, the feeling of “theres something on my wrist” isn’t too different for me.

I haven’t been an iPhone user for that long of a time. I’ve owned and played with a few iOS devices for years now, those usually being older iPhone models that relatives of mine switched away from or that I bought used for very little money. I’ve also had an iPad for a little over four, and a MacBook for three years now. Using an iPhone as my main phone though, as opposed to an Android device, is pretty new to me. No conversation about Apple can get around “the ecosystem” nowadays. I even mentioned it a few paragraphs ago already. The ecosystem, and the design choice that come with it, is really the defining quality of Apple products for me. Using an iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch and Airpods together is a great experience, by and large. I encountered some uncharacteristic bugs with the Watch in particular, but the overall impression is one of polish and cohesion. That’s what I like. But its also what makes me question the value of the Apple Watch, for myself but also in general.

All of the aformentioned devices bring some unique value to the ecosystem. The iPhone does things that the iPad can’t, which does things that the MacBook can’t and the Airpods support all of them nicely. But the Apple Watch really only has one feature, or set of features, that it can add to the rest of the devices. My Watch can show me the time, weather, notifications, media that is playing, directions to my destination, calendar events, reminders, make calls, use Apple Pay, wake me up, record voice memos, display a calculator and so on and so on. But there’s one massive elephant in the room here. My iPhone can do all those things too, and a lot of them even better. The only real benefit I have from having them on my Watch is just that - they’re easily viewable on my wrist, instead of in my pocket or on my desk. What makes it unique is the health and fitness tracking. But its really only unique for that in Apples lineup, not in comparison to the market as a whole. There exist a bunch of other devices that do those same things! And if they’re display-less, they can be much cheaper too, while allowing you to wear a regular watch alongside them. What is the value of the Apple Watch then? Simple. It offers all of these little convenience features, putting interaction with your Apple devices even closer to your body and fingertips, while also performing regular watch and fitness tracker duties. That is all it does. And while that doesn’t make it a particularly interesting or exciting product, it’s definitely good at what it wants to do.