I am on my third Apple Watch.
I have wanted to like Apple’s approach to wearables, and through two different tries — a Day 1 Series 1 and a Series 3 — I found the experience to be continually clunky, ugly, and constantly in search of a problem that one of its solutions could fix. I wasn’t working out particularly much at the time, and if I’m honest, I believe the problem was that Apple for several years managed to sell a device that they had not quite worked out the utility of.
Wearables are a unique product because they seem like they’d be useful on paper, but in practice fail to provide anything “new” to your life, and thus eventually get discarded. I use an Oura ring to track my sleep and my heart rate (most of the time, though it doesn’t work so well with Hydrow), and the biggest reason I use it is because it’s really easy to forget you’re wearing a ring on your finger. Adding a watch, or an armband, or some sort of other kind of device to your person makes you intimately aware of it, which means that you both have to justify its use and remember to use and charge it every day.
As a result, I’d argue that only Apple could have brought the Apple Watch to market, because it needed at least six years of “people are going to buy this because it’s Apple” to find a contiguous reason to exist, along with watch app developers working out what it is one can do with your wrist that doesn’t suck.
And, most importantly, it seems that they’ve finally realized what the Apple Watch is — it is a…
