I have stopped wearing my Apple Watch. It just doesn't do what I want any more. It's not worth the effort.
When the Apple Watch first came out, to be blunt, it didn't do much. It was more of a fashion item and a thing for the hard core Apple fans. I held off getting one until features started to match the hype. By the Apple Watch 6 though it was getting there. We enjoyed our Apple Watch 6s. After a few years though they started to get flaky so we updated to the Apple Watch 10. That lasted for a while but increasingly in the last year I have been less and less satisfied with the device. Last week I stopped wearing my watch at all. I took it off, turned it off, and left it on the dresser, and frankly I don't really miss it. The obvious question though is why? Why would a tech geek like me, someone that loved Apple products abandon one of Apple's most hyped devices, the center piece of their wearable efforts?
Simply put, it doesn't work very well anymore. It doesn't do what I want it to. Understand that my Apple Watch is not the problem, it's the ecosystem, what the devices have evolved into. Let's look at the features.
The first one I turned off was Sleep Tracking. It became inaccurate. I'd wake up feeling great and be told I had a poor sleep score. I'd wake feeling like crap and be told I slept well. Worse yet, with the last few updates it became really condescending. "Your sleep score is poor. Maybe if you went to bed earlier you could improve it." No shit Sherlock. But I had a reason to be up later than usual. That is if I did get to bed late. Sometimes I went to sleep at the usual time, get a good nights sleep, and it would still snark at me for staying up late. I don't need that; Off.
Stairs is one I would have turned off if I could. Some days it's accurate. Some days it misses a bunch. My partner almost never gets credit for stairs even though they are up and down at least as much as I am. I usually get 4 to 6, which is about right for us in our house. Yet fairly regularly like at least once a week it will give me credit for none. Same house, same activities but it missed them. Alternatively about once a month it will insist that I went up and down dozens of flights of stairs. I will look at it and it will say that I climbed 15, 36, I think my record was 42 flights of stairs. Not bloody likely.
Fall detection was one of the features I really wanted the Apple Watch for. I'm getting older and it seemed like a good idea to have that extra measure of safety. To give it credit the feature worked well for a long time. But with the last few updates it has gotten so sensitive I had to shut it off. When it is asking me if I fell when I'm climbing a flight of stairs, or slicing carrots, or even picking up a screwdriver it's useless. If I miss the notification it would call Emergency Services and I don't need that worry. So it went off which is a pity because it is specifically one of the reasons I got the device.
Workout tracking has become a joke. Once again it was fine for a long time but with the last year of updates it’s gotten flaky. I walk for 45 minutes every morning on the treadmill. I do a pace of 2.7 mph and a slope of 1.5 degrees. I always end up covered in sweat because it’s a good workout. I do this Monday through Friday like clockwork, because it's how I start my day. But the watch records any random number of exercise minutes between 45 and 4 minutes and a corresponding number of calories. If it cannot keep accurate data of my workout time and the calories burned then it's useless. This actually was the final straw that made me shut the watch off and set it aside. For what it’s worth my partner has noticed their watch is not recording their workouts reliably any more either. It’s not just my unit it’s the updates Apple has made to the system.
It does not even count the times we stand up reliably anymore. I can get up, go upstairs, make breakfast, and it will still not have given me a stand. The same goes for my partner. They have gotten up, gone out to unplug the car, gone upstairs to make and eat breakfast, then gone down and driven to the pool to swim and still have no stands. They will have calories burned, even a couple exercise minutes, maybe even a flight of stairs, maybe, but the watch doesn't think they stood up to do any of that. Conversely I have gotten stands sitting in the couch playing a video game. It's become almost as much of a joke as the exercise minutes.
Over the last couple of years I have had a lot of medical tests chasing heart alerts from my Apple Watch. None of them panned out. There is nothing wrong with my heart. To paraphrase Shakespeare; The fault is not in my heart, but in my Watch. I'm sick of chasing false alarms. Off.
On a related vein one of the reasons I got the Apple Watch 10 was they advertised blood pressure monitoring. But when I got it I found that if you have been diagnosed with high blood pressure, you know the people who actually would benefit from this, it isn't for you. It's a toy for people who don't have to worry about it.
Finally, though not essential, Apple stopped making any new faces some years ago. What they roll out are just variations on the existing themes. Frankly with my Apple Watch 6, faces were something I enjoyed playing with. But the lack of anything meaningfully new in years has left them feeling a bit boring.
Marie Kando said, if something doesn't bring you joy get rid of it. My Apple Watch is not fun anymore. It's not even that useful anymore. It does not record or provide accurate or useful data anymore. It doesn't reliably track the things I want to track anymore. The alerts I get are generally false alarms. It’s important to note that the change has come on with the last few updates and my partner has noticed the same decline on their Apple Watch. It’s a systematic problem. In the final analysis my Apple Watch simply no longer does what I bought it for. It no longer brings me any joy.
So the Apple Watch has gone in a drawer. That experiment is over. It's another Apple product I won't be buying again.
