Preface: I originally pre-ordered the watch as a new tech gadget for myself, fully aware that I am buying a watch foremost and anything else on top is gravy. I already had experience with the watch SDK and saw the limitations clear as day, so expectations were low.
My hope is that they were going to release another SDK for everyone to develop and play with before WWDC 2015. Doesn't seem to be the case at all.
I developed a couple of apps that were a spinoff of another iPad and iPhone application I already had. Everything seemed wonderful in the simulator, but as we all know: the instruments tool is sketchy at best when you're running it against the simulator as you're using your Mac CPU/RAM/etc and not the actual hardware. My app loaded in about 1 second via simulator, and 13 seconds in real life on a friends Apple Watch. Some tweaking improved it to 6 seconds but still unacceptable.
Fast forward to preordering on April 10th. I stayed up late untill Midnight to put an order in so that I could get my new gadget on launch day to test and play with. I hate staying up late unless I'm doing my own personal coding and I usually like to have a one track mind to finish and push to source control ASAP so I can go to bed.
Anyways, April 10th Midnight comes and the
website is down. Well that is wonderful! I know some people used the app and so forth but how do you think the app works? It's calling a web service. Alas, the site is down for one reason or another. Then we start to approach 12:04 when it finally comes up. I proceed to click on the Space Grey Aluminum Black Band and it has a shipment date of
May 13 - May 27. Ugh, what? Launch date is April 24th. At this point I'm fairly irritated that I stayed up late and the watch isn't available as advertised. Irritated is used loosely, I should say, "raged"
So after sighing very loud and waking up my girlfriend I look at the other options and move over to the SS version. For a gen 1 device and a terrible SDK, $700? Yeah no. I talked myself out of it and went back to the SG BSB, still May 13-May 27. Ugh...Went ahead and input all of my billing details(had to update) and submitted the order.
Got the confirmation email at 12:16. No worries, went to bed figuring they gave long lead times because they were unsure of their demand and maybe it was just an error.
Fast forward to launch day and it seems like they shipped 13 watches total. Hardly anyone got theirs on launch day unless they played some game with the iphone/watch app.
Okay, I can understand hours, but we are talking about seconds and minutes. If they could not satisfy everyone who ordered within the first 30 minutes for a launch order date(April 24), what were they thinking? I saw the rumor about the haptic engine but they should of come out and made that statement to all of the people who pre ordered the device. Instead,
THEY KEPT QUIET.
That right there is a terrible customer experience.
So now we are a month into the pre order day and people are still wondering when their watch will ship that they ordered at
12:07. Really? 7 minutes into the pre order, and realistically 3 minutes because the store was DOWN for the first 4. Really? Sigh.
As an Apple fan and someone that really likes new gadgets, I had to just go ahead and admit that this is pathetic and I need to move on so that I can move away from this subforum and
stop worrying about when my watch will arrive. It's a terrible customer experience, something that Apple prides itself in. This has hands down been the worst apple purchasing experience I have ever had. You could always say, "Why cancel? Why not just wait until you get it". That's easy to say to my
girlfriend who can care less, but I'm a gadget and nerd at heart, I can't just stay away from the forums and not track when my watch is due to arrive!
And before someone says, "You knew when you were pre-ordering the ship date was May 13-27, so why are you complaining". To that, I can only respond with,
I'm sorry but this time frame is unacceptable for anyone who pre-ordered within minutes of a MIDNIGHT launch 2 WEEKS before the ship date. Especially for a product that was announced in September.
Imagine you waited in line for
3 hours at the movie theater with about 100 people ahead of you for what was advertised as a 3,000 seat theater before you even GOT in line. As soon as it hit midnight, they walked up and down the line and said that only the
first 10 people could watch the movie right now and the rest of us had to wait until the next day. What? I'm already here, okay let me have a ticket and maybe they'll find more seats because we were all told it was a 3,000 person theater so there must be some mistake.
Fast forward to 5 hours later, only 10 people are watching the movie and they are letting in 1 person every hour.
And the people who already saw the movie are wondering why the rest of the people that are waiting in line are sour?
Apples biggest failure is
ZERO communication
. Auto-generated emails saying they're still working on your order is not communication I would expect from a multi billion dollar corporation.
Cheers to all!
I'll be back when the SDK is improved and there is more supply. Please expand the API and allow for native apps!!
