Dear Tim,
I paid $579 for a SG Sport watch. That’s Australian Dollars. You can buy most android phones with that money here.
I’ve been an avid Apple creative for over a decade. I have pretty much every Apple product so far, so I wanted to give the Watch a try, to see how much of Jobs attention to detail and focus has remained at Apple.
Here’s the pros and the cons as I perceived them in my one week of using the watch:
Pro:
Software Cons:
Now, I could hang on to the watch, knowing that these software annoyances will be addressed in wOS 2.0, if it weren’t for the blatant lacking of the internal hardware.
Hardware cons:
Absolutely not nice:
Conclusion
A very sleek and nice looking device with some nice core features. But that's it. The $579 price tag for the entry model of a notification center device and a bit of health awareness requiring a $1,000 way too big pocket computer, is almost like a test to see just how far you can go with Apple loyalty.
Well, Tim, you've found that limit now. You don't have a nose for the future, like Steve had, so you better have a pretty large and diverse beta tryout group before you bring v2.0 to the market.
Cut the price in half. Get it to work at least one week on one charge. Allow mix-n-match between the cases and the bands. Let me know when that's possible and I might get another one.
But the biggest mistake Apple made here was hyping it beyond proportions. Making these watches appear as super tools, while really only being an accessory to the iPhone. You should have waited a year, and sell it in bundles with the purchase of a new phone.
I feel this is the first product where the return rate will be as important as the sales figures.
Mine is going back on Monday.
Thanks for reading this, Tim.
--
Buyers advice
Buy the sports. Try it out for a week like I did, and see how you go. If the above cons bother you too, return it. Hard as it is to phantom right now, Apple does have a tendency to release 2.0 hardware in less than a year after launching 1.0. Also the fact that WatchOS 2 is just around the corner with native apps (which the current battery or the S1 will barely cope with), gives me confidence Watch 2.0 is coming very soon.
Apples recurring mantra "we wanted to get product x in to as many hands as possible", also leads me to think that: they will release a new watch, or at the very least drop the price of this one, when the next iPhone is announced in September.
I paid $579 for a SG Sport watch. That’s Australian Dollars. You can buy most android phones with that money here.
I’ve been an avid Apple creative for over a decade. I have pretty much every Apple product so far, so I wanted to give the Watch a try, to see how much of Jobs attention to detail and focus has remained at Apple.
Here’s the pros and the cons as I perceived them in my one week of using the watch:
Pro:
- Looks ok
- Not too heavy
- Not as bulky as the marketing material portrays
- Notifications is easy
- Telling time is easy
- Watch faces and complications are nice (I have two simple faces: one without any complications for weekends, another for the week-business time), although complications could be much more customisable.
- Double click the crown for app switching
- Remote: nice to control music in the house
- Handoff: to iPhone, iPad and Mac. Look at a map on your wrist, think “oh, ****, this is small” and open it on your laptop.
- Activity: keeps you aware of your movement and is properly executed
Software Cons:
- Overall: Very beta software wise: the fact Apple have some things you need to change on the phone, some on the watch and some you can on both. The home screen is a diagonal mess, one finger can easily cover three app icons.
- Home: There is no solid way to go to the watch. sometimes you have to double press the crown, sometimes 1 time. Sometimes you press it too many times, and of all people, SIRI comes and asks you how it can help you. The double click app switcher should have been on the Friends button. The friends button should have been a third button on the other side in the middle.
- Driving: outright dangerous the way the default taps on wrist to navigate are set up. The watch should detect the driving motions of your hand, and go in DND whenever it detects you're on the road.
- Heart rate monitor: only records 2 out of 3 days. Sometimes not even during workouts. Also HealthKit isn't intelligent enough to see that a 30bpm spike or drop between otherwise consistent readings should be ignored or deleted.
- Long loading times. Not just third party apps. But the Calendar takes its time. It also seems like the friends faces are having to be loaded off the iPhone each time you open the Friends screen. Not only that, but once an app starts loading and takes ages – Fantastical comes to mind – you have to wait for the load to finish before you can do anything else.
- Customisation: I want to filter which notifications I can see and what data is displayed on the Watch. I have more calendars displaying on the Phone, but I don’t want them on the Watch. I just want my schedule on the watch, not the birthdays or shared calendars I’m subscribed to on the phone.
- Phone: no ringtones we can choose from.
- Workout: Very inaccurate fitness gimmick (start a Workout, choose Other, and then lay in the sofa typing on your laptop for 30 minutes and you have half of your Exercise goals)
- Calendar: I can only see the current month… Really?
- Reminders: no way to see a list, marking reminder notifications as completed doesn't get all the way through to the cloud.
- Alarms: surprisingly does not sync with iPhone. No custom alarm tones can be set. Strange.
Now, I could hang on to the watch, knowing that these software annoyances will be addressed in wOS 2.0, if it weren’t for the blatant lacking of the internal hardware.
Hardware cons:
- Speaker: needs improvement. Can’t be used to play music? Alarm in the morning will not wake you up.
- S1: that first wrist computer is just that. The first one, not fast, not energy efficient and certainly not what you'd expect from an A8 chip companion.
- Scratchy: Speaking of laptops: The pin in the watchband scratches the body of my Macbook Pro’s aluminium case when typing! Apple products attacking each other. Yes, there is a market for Apple Watch Strap cases. Or I could just get a leather loop that doesn’t have pin for AUD 229, say the price of a refurbished iPad mini.
- Haptic engine: not strong enough. When walking with hands in pocket, the slapping of the sleeves of a coat on the watch generate phantom haptics.
- Battery: barely has enough to get through a day if you use it for more than timekeeping too often. Since the battery is now at its best, it's safe to say it will only get worse.
- Wifi: No way of telling when it is on, let alone basic technical information such as IP address, subnet or gateway. This has to be the first Apple device with wifi capability that doesn’t even allow us to see it.
- Bluetooth: This might be an iPhone 6 issue: but when the iPhone is connected to the watch and a bluetooth headset simultaneously, the wifi seems to drop more often than not on the iPhone 6.
- Force Touch: hardware wise needs proper calibration, feels rushed to market (the whole thing really), software: not really put in very intuitive places.
- Digital Crown - still pretty analogue. It rotates. Dust can get in it. It's mechanical and thus the weakest part of the watch. Make it truly digital, like you did with the trackpads recently, Tim.
- Ion X: the X stands for scratch. Simple limestone from my fireplace managed to tear a horizontal line over my watch on day 2. Safire available at unreasonable premium.
Absolutely not nice:
- The price, Apple seems to just trying to get paid for 3 years of extensive R&D, and a very expensive marketing campaign.
- Doesn’t even come with a manual, or at least a quick getting started folder. This is Apple’s most challenging new product. iPod were a natural flow and improvement over MP3 players. iPhones were a natural evolution of the Blackberries. iPads were just larger iPhones. The watch is inventing a lot of new stuff and has a steep learning curve if you want to use it for more than just a watch.
- Radio radiation: I'm not sure having streaming Bluetooth antennas pressed into your wrist is adding to my health.
- Marketing mails: Days after purchasing the watch, Apple keeps sending email to point out things you can do with it. Including Apple Pay (nope not here)
Conclusion
A very sleek and nice looking device with some nice core features. But that's it. The $579 price tag for the entry model of a notification center device and a bit of health awareness requiring a $1,000 way too big pocket computer, is almost like a test to see just how far you can go with Apple loyalty.
Well, Tim, you've found that limit now. You don't have a nose for the future, like Steve had, so you better have a pretty large and diverse beta tryout group before you bring v2.0 to the market.
Cut the price in half. Get it to work at least one week on one charge. Allow mix-n-match between the cases and the bands. Let me know when that's possible and I might get another one.
But the biggest mistake Apple made here was hyping it beyond proportions. Making these watches appear as super tools, while really only being an accessory to the iPhone. You should have waited a year, and sell it in bundles with the purchase of a new phone.
I feel this is the first product where the return rate will be as important as the sales figures.
Mine is going back on Monday.
Thanks for reading this, Tim.
--
Buyers advice
Buy the sports. Try it out for a week like I did, and see how you go. If the above cons bother you too, return it. Hard as it is to phantom right now, Apple does have a tendency to release 2.0 hardware in less than a year after launching 1.0. Also the fact that WatchOS 2 is just around the corner with native apps (which the current battery or the S1 will barely cope with), gives me confidence Watch 2.0 is coming very soon.
Apples recurring mantra "we wanted to get product x in to as many hands as possible", also leads me to think that: they will release a new watch, or at the very least drop the price of this one, when the next iPhone is announced in September.
