WatchOS 7 New sound volume behavior when using crown?

[Trager]

Does the new delay before the crown affects the sound volume drive anyone else batty? It’s really hard to make minor adjustments to volume with it now. I don’t suppose there’s any way to turn this “feature” off...

 

[msbsound]

Noticed this on my runs the past couple days but haven’t dug in to see if it can be disabled. Definitely annoying.

 

[JM]

Yeah, why on earth is there a delay? Who wants a watch that seems to have a slow processor that can't register things quickly? Seriously.

I came from series 0 on watchOS 4, and was bothered by this on the new SE. It also seemed to have a lag on the Taptic feedback when scrolling.

who knows... maybe it's a watchOS 7bug.

 

[midkay]

If you look carefully at the visual behavior you can see that it's an intentional 'feature' but I agree it's kind of trying too hard to be 'helpful' and actually makes fine-grained adjustments more complicated.

The idea is that you have to roll the crown at least about 1/4-1/2 turn to 'engage' the volume control, and as you do, the volume meter slides out from the side of the screen proportional to the amount you roll the crown, so you can visually see how this mechanism works. Once you've rolled the crown enough, the meter will then temporarily become colored green, stay on the screen, and respond to the crown input.

The idea seems to be to prevent any accidental adjustments, which did occur in my experience every so often before, but they happened rarely enough that I didn't really consider it an issue, and the tradeoff of having the volume adjustment be more cumbersome every single time I use it really seems questionable to me.

 

[wilberforce]

If you look carefully at the visual behavior you can see that it's an intentional 'feature' but I agree it's kind of trying too hard to be 'helpful' and actually makes fine-grained adjustments more complicated.

The idea is that you have to roll the crown at least about 1/4-1/2 turn to 'engage' the volume control, and as you do, the volume meter slides out from the side of the screen proportional to the amount you roll the crown, so you can visually see how this mechanism works. Once you've rolled the crown enough, the meter will then temporarily become colored green, stay on the screen, and respond to the crown input.

The idea seems to be to prevent any accidental adjustments, which did occur in my experience every so often before, but they happened rarely enough that I didn't really consider it an issue, and the tradeoff of having the volume adjustment be more cumbersome every single time I use it really seems questionable to me.

Thank you for this explanation! Now I understand how it works, I like it. When I go for a bike ride, my glove would keep nudging the crown and adjusting the volume: now this is avoided.

 

[Trager]

If you look carefully at the visual behavior you can see that it's an intentional 'feature' but I agree it's kind of trying too hard to be 'helpful' and actually makes fine-grained adjustments more complicated.

The idea is that you have to roll the crown at least about 1/4-1/2 turn to 'engage' the volume control, and as you do, the volume meter slides out from the side of the screen proportional to the amount you roll the crown, so you can visually see how this mechanism works. Once you've rolled the crown enough, the meter will then temporarily become colored green, stay on the screen, and respond to the crown input.

The idea seems to be to prevent any accidental adjustments, which did occur in my experience every so often before, but they happened rarely enough that I didn't really consider it an issue, and the tradeoff of having the volume adjustment be more cumbersome every single time I use it really seems questionable to me.

Oh, it’s clearly intentional, but it’s also very annoying for my particular uses. I love having the ability to make minute adjustments to audio levels via my watch — that control is much more granular than the volume buttons on the phone, for example. It also doesn’t quite seem to be deterministic how far you have to turn the crown before the audio changes.

I do appreciate that there’s a slight haptic feedback when the volume adjustment is enabled, but it still adds cognitive load to what was previously a very natural interaction.

 

[bloomfeld]

The idea seems to be to prevent any accidental adjustments, which did occur in my experience every so often before, but they happened rarely enough that I didn't really consider it an issue, and the tradeoff of having the volume adjustment be more cumbersome every single time I use it really seems questionable to me.

Thank you for the explanation. This drove me almost nuts the last days, so that I have considered that behavior as a bug. I agree that this is cumbersome to use and I would favor an option to deactivate this feature. I am going to send this as feedback to Apple.