I’ve Been Avoiding The Apple Watch Like The Plague

The lone wolf within the “sheeple” community. The outlier, the square peg in the round hole, the polar bear in the middle of the Sahara, the blob of blue cheese in a sea of mozzarella. That was me. Until today. I fought against the tide for over six years, weathered many battles against relatives, friends, colleagues wearing any and all versions of what secretly in my head I still call the iWatch. Today, I gave up that fight. The sheeples got me. Am wearing an Apple Watch Series 7 in Midnight colour.

It’s no secret that I am a little bit biased towards Apple. But the Apple Watch for me was always a very-very hard sell. Don’t get me wrong, all the features were there. Genuinely. If anything, for me the Apple Watch is an overkill. The one feature it was always lacking, and objectively speaking kind of still does, is decent battery life. You have to understand, I have an extensive experience with smart-watches. Been an early adopter since the Samsung Gear Live and the Pebble, quickly followed by a few more Pebbles, a FitBit and finally a Garmin.

All, except the Samsung Gear Live, had one thing in common: ridiculously good battery-life. The Pebbles would usually last me between 5–10 days on a single charge, the FitBit about 5–7 days, while the Garmin a whopping 10–14 days! It’s no surprise so that when Apple came out with their smart-watch, and I heard it was capable of running for a total of a laughable 18 hours, I instantly went “get that garbage away from me”.

Can you blame me? Since the iPhone XS I had a two day battery-life, on the 13 Pro, I get three days! A situation where I charge my watch more often than my phone, wasn’t one I was too keen to get into. A watch, be that smart, dumb, wind-up, electronic, nixie-tubed, atomic or radio-controlled, will still be at the end of the day — a watch. It’s primary function is to keep the time. All day, every day, 365 days a year. Everything else is a nice to have, and owning a watch that could potentially fail to deliver on that one main function in the space of a single day, for me was just not acceptable. Still isn’t.

So why change now?

My Garmin started to show its age after four years. Still managed to get six days of battery-life out of it, but it felt like left behind technology, and very slow in comparison to every other bit of tech I own. Integration-wise also not great. While worked OK with all my iPhones (6S, XS, 13 Pro) that I had throughout its 4 years of service, it really started to feel more and more alien to the Apple ecosystem.

That alone however would have not convinced me to give it a try. I am much too pragmatic to consider that alone a good enough reason. What really triggered a change of heart is actually something more general that Apple has been doing for the last year or so — building more energy-efficient devices. Based on the hunch that just like the iPhone 13 models and the new MacBook Air and Pro models, the Apple Watch might have benefitted from some of that Apple-wide effort, I did some research, and found that my educated guesses were not unfounded. Searching through YouTube, I found a video where all the Apple Watches’ battery life is put to the test and compared against each other. Check it out, worth a watch — pun intended.

In an attempt to not spoil the ending, I’ll just say that the series 7 ran with an active screen a continuous 14 hours. Whether it’s the winner or not, you’ll find out from the video. What this test confirmed is also what a number of articles state online, that the Series 7 is in fact capable of running for two days, even with an hour’s worth of gym time every day — something that I won’t be doing, or at least not planning to, and no that does not make me lazy. I reached my standing goal of 6 minutes today, thank you very much!

Initial impressions

Remember, I’m new to the Apple Watch, but not new to smart-watches. Packaging is by far the best. It doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, but for a split second you do feel like somehow it’s in its own league. I was slightly worried about the weight, as being a metal (aluminium is a metal too!) watch with a touch-screen, covered by a crystal panel made me assume it was heavier than my Garmin at 42 grams. Turns out the Apple Watch is actually 3.2 grams lighter. It also feels like a better fit, and yes, it is the 45mm version. With my wrist size of 17cm, it’s a perfect match.

The midnight colour is essentially a very-very dark blue or grey, depends who you ask, but for all intents and purposes, I just consider it black, and that was by choice. I needed a neutral colour that went well with any clothes. Should also allow me for a flexible set of bands in the future. As a fresh convert, I can see why people spend so much cash on extra bands. Being super easy to swap, gives one a never before experienced flexibility of adapting the watch to the situation and attire. This is something that I could not easily do with any of my previous smart-watches, or regular watches for that matter, and I owned many since the age of around 9. I still feel super bad about trading my first ever watch my dad got me for a bag of Lego parts. Kids and their priorities, eh?

Setup is very Applesque. Very similar to an iPad or iPhone setup, except probably less steps, and somehow seems to take a bit longer. I think it took about 20 minutes for the syncing process to finish. No biggie, just noticeable.

The whole “raise your wrist and talk to Siri” I feel is unbaked somehow. Six out of 10 times it just doesn’t do anything, but perhaps that’s because I am surrounded by a HomePod Mini, the iPhone, the iPad and the MacBook Pro, all of which have Siri enabled. Maybe this Siri polygamy I’ve got going on isn’t the best idea.

My use-case

As stated previously, most smart-watches are an overkill for me, but there are a few functions I will be using. Some daily, some occasionally.

• getting notifications — is probably the single most important one for me
• heart-rate monitoring — the doc says it’s a tad high, so watching the ol’ ticker, I feel is important
• sleep-tracking — believe it or not, every time I have an off week, looking at the stats, it tends to turn out, I was sleeping on average a lot less than recommended
• paying for stuff — less hassle than taking out the phone, opening the wallet case, unlocking (because we live in a masked world), pressing buttons, putting in the unlock code again (because we live in a masked world).

Some verdicts a couple days later

My Series 7 watch came with a 58% charged battery. That was likely a tad higher before setup and syncing, but 55% of those 58, took me from 11AM that day to 3PM the next day, with sleep-tracking active as I wore it throughout the night. Within that timeframe I played around a bit with Siri, sent a couple of texts, viewed all my notifications, acted on the workout ring requests like standing up and stuff, went Nespresso and doughnut shopping, paid on both occasions with the Apple Watch, rearranged the app icons, installed a few more apps, a watch-face and controlled some of my lights through Apple Home.

Speaking of watch-faces, they’re brilliant. There are a ton of options, all highly customisable. I don’t foresee myself switching between them much, but it’s great to see the variety. I myself went for the Infograph Modular one. It allows access to all the most important features for me, and keeps me up to date on the rain — it’s Ireland after all, rain status is always handy to know!

Having had the chance to test one of the core features I was looking for, paying for things with Apple Pay, I must say, I am incredibly impressed, and I feel like I should have moved to the Apple Watch before the pandemic. Apple Pay with a phone in a world where you must wear a mask in a shop while you’re paying is cumbersome. In fact it’s actually worse than having to whip the credit card out and punch the pin code in.

Charging is indeed, as Apple advertises, super-quick. In fact quicker than the official numbers. Plugged into a 20W Apple charger, I was at 80% in just 38 minutes. A full charge seems to take an hour with maybe 2–3% more to go, but one should avoid charging to 100% all the time anyway. While this does mean that I will have to adopt different charging habits compared to all my previous smart-watches — sans the Samsung Gear Live — I feel confident that a combination of quick charges and full charges throughout the week will keep me always with plenty of juice to spare.

The haptic feedback for notifications is out of this world. On the Garmin, and frankly, all the others, you could feel it being a small motor vibrating its wee heart out. Not on the Apple Watch. At first it’s almost weird, as it feels exactly like someone tapping my wrist.

It’s odd to say this about technology, but the haptic feedback on the Apple Watch feels human.

The sounds also feel very soft and non-intrusive. The massive surprise was the alarm in the morning, which sounded from the watch rather than the iPhone and I must say, it makes sense, and it felt like I was woken up a tad more gently than otherwise.

When it comes to heart-rate and sleep monitoring, so far all I can say is that the data it gathers, is very similar to the Garmin’s. I suppose, the more positive aspect is that the Apple Watch would notify me should something funny go on with my ticker, while the Garmin would have not had the capability to do that. From this perspective, the Apple Watch is a more pro-active solution, compared to the logging-only approach my previous smart-watch and many others have out there.

One unexpected benefit of the watch is being able to unlock my MacBook Pro with the watch. All I had to do to enable this was:

• go to Security & Privacy on the Mac
• have the iPhone unlocked
• wear the watch while close to the Mac
• check the “Use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac” tickbox

A super handy feature!

While I find it hard to admit, I think I am a convert, and I can see why the Apple Watch is the most popular smart-watch out there. While for most folks, the Series 7 is an almost negligible upgrade, and perhaps entirely underwhelming, for me, coming from an entirely different category of smart-wear, it’s a massive and welcome step up. I’ll admit, half of its features are lost on me, so technically an overkill in terms of capabilities, but overall a very comfortable and very practical watch, that fits perfectly into the Apple eco-system, my life-style and workflow.

While I have you here…

Just in case you’d like to read some more of my thoughts on Apple or technology in general, here’s a few you might find useful or intriguing:

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Attila Vago — Software engineer, editor, writer, and occasional music critic. Pragmatic doer, Lego fan, Mac user, cool nerd. JS and Flutter enthusiast. Accessibility advocate.