From “The Golden Generation,” a New Yorker article about Chinese citizens who live in Vancouver:
Last year, the son of China’s richest man posted pictures online of his dog wearing two gold-plated Apple Watches, one on each front paw.
Who else has found a use for the Apple Watch?
I find it very useful. Its great for discreet notifications (including when my phone is not on me) and as a result I can keep my phone entirely silent 24/7. This of course requires you to carefully curate what notifications you want to see. Similarly I have even taken a call once or twice on the watch when my phone was elsewhere and I wasn’t near another Mac or iOS device that could take the call. I also use it for fitness tracking and it’s amazing how little features like starting a timer with Siri becomes extremely handy.
The haptic engine died on mine and I took it in yesterday and it made me realized how much I missed it. On a related note, I was surprised that the Apple Store didn’t have replacement watches on site for warranty repairs and had to send my watch off. Whenever I had an iPhone issue I either walked out with a replacement phone or it was a quick while you wait repair.
Is it worth $700-1,000 for a Gen 1 product? No, but I got my sport model for $300 on sale from Best Buy over the holidays and I think it was totally worth that amount.
it’s a watch. if you find watches useful, then the added features can make it more useful.
i mostly like that i can glance at it instead of pulling out my phone, especially in social situations which has become a big pet peeve. i also use the health monitoring stuff quite a bit.
is it worth it? i don’t know. i hadn’t worn a watch since i was twelve. i forget it a lot. i’ve liked it and have gotten a lot of use out of it. is it eight-hundred-dollars worth it? i’m not convinced it was for me, but apparently the watch community is a weird world that i don’t understand and they pay gargantuan amounts of money for specific measures of quality. a few years ago, a person was telling me why $3,000 was a bargain for some fancy “regular” watch he’d bought, so maybe $800 *is* worth it depending on your perspective.
they do need to improve the battery life.
the biggest downside has been dealing with the new wave of brave souls in real life who see me wearing the watch and take it upon themselves to lecture me without invitation that not only am i an idiotic apple sheep for my consumer decisions, but whatever thing they happen to have at the moment is better.
it’s a watch.
Can Apple use it to increase the price of their stock? Just make a low estimate each quarter about sales targets for the watch, and when they are exceeded, stock price rises?
They’re still everywhere in SOMA, but with each economic stimulus package, SOMA drifts into its own isolated Apple universe, able to sustain itself with no outside income.
As a disclaimer, I’m an Apple enthusiast. I think the Apple Watch can be useful in ways, although, as it is, it suffers from technological drawbacks of a first generation product.
It doesn’t have many sensors, so motion and heart rate tracking aren’t the most exciting features for me, but people into fitness seem to appreciate it. I’ll not comment on that.
As someone mentioned already, the notifications are delivered in a very friendly and discrete way, with a gentle tap. I really appreciate that, and the watch does give you the chance to go over them quickly. But let’s also leave this aside, since many might thing notifications are overwhelming and yet another way to introduce more stress to one’s life.
The features I really enjoy are maps, siri, wallet & apple pay. All of them are extremely convenient and the apple pay experience is quite “magical”. Yes, they’re all available on your phone, but they really gain another dimension with the “right there, right now” availability that the watch allows.
That being said, none of the more complex functionalities end up really being “right there, right now”, since the device is too slow. Quite possibly due to the bluetooth communications, since you end up doing the same thing on the phone far faster. Until this is solved, the watch is a toy, a gadget. But I see many similarities to the original iPhone (the camera was crap, no video, no MMS, no wireless syncing of calendars and contacts, no 3G, no simultaneous voice and data, no copy-paste, etc. etc.).
If and when these problems (and some others) are solved, I believe the watch will be a fine device with a good future. Does it hold as much potential as the iPhone/smartphone? Of course not, but what does?
My opinion is that even at $300/$400 it’s not worth it if you’re not an enthusiast and wouldn’t actually enjoy spending the money on a gadget. But I do see potential.