I bought an Apple Watch Series 7, cellular, 45mm, in April 2022 for $881.
I’ve decided to sell it. Here’s why.
My expectations for the Apple Watch
I had a simple goal for buying the Watch: I wanted to be able to leave the house without my iPhone.
Like smartphones generally, iPhones have grown in size over time. The first iPhone had a 3.5″ screen, and today’s smallest iPhone 15 has a 6.1″ screen. They’ve gotten thinner but not by much.
So with today’s models there’s a 6.1″ rectangle (or larger) in your pocket or hanging around your neck. It’s become part of today’s personal landscape and everyone’s used to it, but it bothers me. I’d like to not carry it all the time. I guess my feelings are aesthetic, because I’m physically able to carry it and it does fit in my pants/shorts/jeans/jacket pocket. But it’s a bulge. Is that an iPhone in your pocket?
The Watch is an engineering and design marvel but it can’t match what’s possible with 6.1″ of screen real estate and more body mass. Having said that, there is enough screen and computing power to enable not having to carry my iPhone if I bought a cellular model and didn’t mind not having a camera. If, that is, the Watch’s apps were sufficiently sophisticated.
I knew the Watch was tied to the iPhone for configuration and updates, but that would be OK if I didn’t need to fuss with them often. I read some grumbling reviews of Watch apps. (Apple’s “Walkie-Talkie” app in particular was universally deemed a piece of shit.) But apps improve over time, right?…
I took the plunge and bought it.
The good aspects
After wearing the Watch for two years, some aspects are very good or great.
- The hardware is rock solid
- The battery still holds a decent charge. It lasts for about 36 hours the way I use it.
- It’s comfortable.
- Some apps work very well. Like Wallet & Apple Pay, myQ, 1Password, OmniFocus, and Fantastical. The Weather, Messages, and Nearby Bus Routes widgets work well.
- The cellular hand-off. The Watch needs a few minutes to realize the iPhone isn’t on the network, and it then connects to the cellular carrier. Seamless!
- The wrist-based alarm clock is very effective.
- Flipping my wrist to ask Siri to set a timer or reminder is convenient.
- The activity monitoring design is good, and does a good job of sensing when I’ve started walking outdoors.
The bad aspects
After wearing the Watch for two years, some aspects annoy me.
Some apps flat-out don’t work
The “Walkie-Talkie” app never worked.
The City of Seattle uses PayByPhone for on-the-street parking payments. The PayByPhone app works fine on the iPhone but has never worked in any capacity (starting a new parking, checking the time remaining on an existing parking) on the Watch.
Some apps are lobotomized
Exhibit A: Apple’s Mail app. You can reply to an email, send an email, or delete an email. That’s it. You can’t forward, file an email to a folder, move email between folders, or search. Apple has chosen to not provide more than the bare minimum functionality.
Another example is the mySolarEdge app. You can display a chart of today’s total solar production or an instantaneous power reading. You can’t bring up any other graphs nor display other time periods.
Another annoyance is that Siri can’t find my parked car. Even if I’m carrying my iPhone in my pocket. It can find my parked car if I ask Siri on my iPhone but not from my Watch. FAIL!
There’s one reason for all this disappointment: Apple and the app owners don’t see a market need to operate any differently. I’m in the minority for wanting full-featured apps and I’m fine with that.
Watch notifications can be distracting
Sometimes I want to see all of them and other times I don’t. There’s no easy way to tell the Watch to “pipe down” for the next N hours. There’s a hard way, which is changing the notification preferences a la carte on my iPhone and then syncing the Watch.
The Watch is tethered to the iPhone for configuration changes
This is true for many Watch configuration settings, and all per-app configuration settings.
Apps that need authentication require you to first open up the associated iPhone app in order to authenticate/authorize the Watch app. This would be OK if it happened only once. But sometimes an app I’ve run many times says without warning, Sorry, you need to go through the iPhone authentication process again! Why? I don’t know! Maybe it’s due to some iPhone updates. Or some Watch updates. Or from a long-duration authentication timeout. Or the phase of the moon. Regardless, if you don’t have your iPhone when this happens, you are SOL until you can get to it.
I hoped the Watch would adjust to me over time
That’s a big nope…
If I didn’t stand up as often as the fitness monitor wanted, I hoped it would start to remind me half as often. Or if I usually didn’t respond to notification XYZ, it would ask if I still wanted that notification. This happens with iPhone background refresh. I had visions of a personal device that was personal…
Apple made no explicit promise of this but I wrongly hoped it would be a thing at some point. Spoiler: It hasn’t. The watch still reminds me to stand every hour. All day, every day.
This may be an Own Goal.
The don’t-care aspects
Some things I just don’t care about. They’re good features but I don’t use or rely on them.
Fall-detection, fitness goals, and customizable faces are in this category. (Yes I played with my Watch faces at first. I’ve settled on five, I don’t fiddle with them, and I use the Utility or Infograph faces most of the time. I’d be content if it had only Infograph.)
Summary
There are definitely great things things about the Apple Watch. For me, the not-good things and disappointments outweigh them.
I checked some online sites for selling Apple Watches. I decided to do the easiest and simplest thing and use Apple’s trade-in policy. I’ll get a $140 Apple gift card for it.
Seek Nuance 