I've always owned a mechanical or digital watch of some sort, but when the Apple Watch S4 was released a few years back I figured "Why not?" and gave it a go. I'm a very active person due to my career and fitness regime, and so it was the fitness features of the AW that attracted me the most.
It was an interesting experiment.
I really enjoyed just how comfortable the AW is - it's lightweight, doesn't snag or pinch the skin, and the bands are nice. Integration with other Apple devices was seamless. The customisation options are excellent so you can really make it appear as you want it. All the features I wanted to primarily use, particularly the fitness ones, worked as advertised and better in some cases. And it goes without saying that on a purely technical level the device is a marvel, that the range of features can be miniaturised into such a small product is mind-boggling.
And yet I sold it!
I don't think AW is a poor product in any way, but I do believe that to get the most value from it you need to have clear use cases. I purchased it believing it would assist my workouts and job as a fitness trainer, but what I soon realised was that it didn't value because I had already reached my personal goals. Basic metrics such as the frequency, intensity, time and type of workouts - these are factors that I'm already happy with, and the watch didn't contribute to me getting more from my fitness. Unless you have difficulty maintaining a particular level of fitness or activity, you really don't benefit from knowing how far you walk each day or what your resting HR is.
This is where specific scenarios come in, since I realised that although it wasn't useful to me, there are plenty of athletes and unconditioned people out there that could benefit from this technology to track their progress. Likewise, people who are at risk of uncontrolled heart rates may benefit from the ECG, and the fall detection is clever for those at risk of blacking out or poor balance.
So once I ruled out the fitness features it then came to everything else, and this is where it toppled over for me. The device relays notifications from your iPhone/Mac or other services, yet I found this to become annoying very quickly. I realised that many of the notifications I was receiving, although helpful potentially later in the day or another time, weren't urgent, and so I started to turn them off. One by one. Until eventually I limited it to just pinging text messages and phone calls. And at that point I asked myself, "Why do I have a £400 device strapped to my wrist when the £1,000 device in my pocket is only a couple of seconds away?" Everything that the AW could do, the iPhone could do better in this regard. Even the time it would take to 'scribble' a message on the AW was far longer than had I just got my iPhone out, long-pressed on the notification to send a quick reply, and typed it out.
Obviously there will be little things I miss, like having a big clear stopwatch on my wrist, but at the same time it doesn't have the interest and effortless cool-factor of a traditional mechanical or digital watch. And it's just another device to charge each day, to keep updated, and to eventually upgrade with another model in the future.
Suffice to say, I purchased a G-SHOCK 2100 that is solar powered (with months of power reserve), automatic time, hard-as-nails, and it retails for just £120. Money well spent in my opinion, though when it comes to recommending the AW I would always consider the person's lifestyle carefully before jumping to a Yes.
