Apple quickly pivoted it to a health tracking device. newer model have even medical grade ECG, blood oxygen level, fall and crash detection, etc. plus the usual activity tracking (steps, calories, workouts)
I think so, yeah. For example if I crash my motorbike it will ask if I’m OK and call emergency services, providing them with my location, name, next of kin, etc if I don’t respond.
So far, I’ve hit the “I’m OK” button the few times that feature has activated, but one day I might not be so lucky.
Mostly though, I like being able to see the accurate time (without needing to adjust it occasionally), the weather forecast, my next calendar schedule, a “traffic is normal” message while getting ready for work in the morning*, and read notifications without taking my phone out of my pocket.
(* if there’s a car accident on my commute, my watch tells me to leave for work early, and which route is best to avoid the worst of the traffic)
The newer watches also have better screens, faster processors, more RAM, etc etc… and also lithium batteries don’t last forever. So I seriously doubt anyone is actually using an eight year old watch unless they’ve had the battery replaced at least a couple times. They’re not really designed to be taken apart so the cost to replace the battery isn’t much cheaper than just upgrading to the new/better model.
I’m never buying a smart watch again. I bought into the Moto360 hype back around this same period. The watch was slow as molasses and basically next to useless. The battery wouldn’t last a full day either. You’d look down to tell the time, and it would be blank. So phone out of the pocket, which is what they are supposed to help prevent.
It was the watch that made me realize that I’d rather just have an actual watch. The battery completely gave out on it sometime in 2018, and it looked like a PITA to fix, so now I have this really attractive gold watch with a nice band that’s completely useless. Won’t be handing it down to the grandkids, that’s for sure. I’ve got a nice real watch now, and they can have that.
There’s always been a weird market for “luxury” tech that’s a gold-plated version of what everyone else has. I remember gold-plated pre-smartphone phones that went for ridiculous amounts of money; of course it becomes obsolete, it’s targeting those with money but no foresight.
It had been from day one, just in case no-one noticed.
The very idea of a "watch" that has a bunch of gimmics while completely fail the main job of providing the time over a long time without any hassle shows how absurd this product was from the very beginning.
A good automatic, mechanical watch is way superior on that behalf. As a bonus, it looks better. And you don't have to press a button to actually see the time.
… You do realize Apple Watches have had always-on screens for half a decade now? You don’t have to do anything to see the time.
And yeah, if all you use it for is to see the time, then it’s obviously not worth it. But can you listen to music through a mechanical watch? Can you use a mechanical watch to respond to text messages? Can a mechanical watch show you the map while you’re hiking?
Why even have a smartphone? You just need a landline phone. After all, it’s just pick up and dial, with a smartphone you have to unlock it to call.
Or maybe phones can be more than just phones these days? Just like watches can be more than just watches.
Yes the batteries are small, but other brands last much longer than Apple watches. And really, setting your watch down on the wireless charger at night is no harder than plugging your phone in or taking your regular watch off and putting it on your nightstand
Yes the batteries are small, but other brands last much longer than Apple watches
No they don’t. Apple Watches have very large batteries and very efficient processors.
Other smart watches only get longer battery life if you avoid power hungry features… and you can do that with an Apple Watch. Apple’s largest watch will last a full 30 days if you don’t use power hungry features like wifi, heart rate monitoring, music playback, Siri, GPS, etc etc. The smaller Apple watches will last almost as long in the same mode.
Most smart watches that advertise long battery life have all (or at least most) of those features, and they don’t last long at all if you take advantage of them. The Garmin FR965 (their largest watch) advertises “up to 25 days” battery life but that’s with everything disabled (and it’s also less than the 30 days you get with an Apple Watch). If you read the spec sheet for the Garmin FR965 it advertises “Up to 8.5 hours” if you make extensive use of all of the available smartwatch features. And that’s the biggest/heaviest Garmin. The popular Garmins have smaller batteries - like half the size of the battery in that Garmin.
That’s my bad then. For some reason I was getting my info mixed up. Anyways, yeah 30 days is a long time but companies always bullshit like that where they say “up to”. My galaxy watch 3 is pretty good on battery life, like a day and a half of me just using it regularly for time and heart rate etc. The biggest problem I have is that if I want to sleep track with it I need to remember to put it on the charger when I sit down at my desk and most of the time I forget so it dies on me.
Apple Watches aren’t the only option, and watches don’t just go "obsolete" like they’ve gone out of date. Just because they don’t get more support doesn’t mean they’re unusable. This article is literally about how an almost decade old product still had official support until now, and it’s going to still be a usable product for years to come if you’re willing to put up with the slowness inherent to the first gen (seriously, 2nd or 3rd series and onwards watches could easily last over a decade or more)
Also, this criticism applies to smartphones too… but it doesn’t mean (most) people abandon their smartphones and use a Nokia 3310 for their multiple week batterylife over one that needs to charge every/every other night. The tradeoff of charging is offset ten-fold by the slew of useful features.
The watch I had before needed the time adjusted every night if I wanted it to be accurate to the second which I did. And adjusting was a painful process. You can’t adjust the seconds - it resets the secondhand to zero and then you need to stare at a reliable timepiece (like maybe an Apple Watch), taking the regular watch out of time set mode at exactly zero seconds. If you miss it by a second… you need to wait an entire minute to try again.
I don’t like sleeping with my watch on anyway, so placing it on a charger isn’t a problem. And the battery lasts long enough it doesn’t matter if I forget ocasinally.
There are very affordable g-shocks with multi band, using radio signals to accurately set the time every night with an atomic clock as the source. I mean if accuracy is an issue.
The solar models also charge using sunlight and fluorescent lights but will still last about 1-2 years in darkness. Regular wear will always keep it charged.
Not to say an Apple Watch isn’t right for you. Just stating that non-smart watch options exist for those who just want to tell time, date, weekday, accurately with added stuff like alarms and stopwatch etc.
I never really got this argument, to be honest. I put mine on the charger when I take a shower in the morning. If I did a long workout that day, shortly before bed, too. Other than that, I wear mine day and night. It really doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. I wouldn’t wear a mechanical (or quartz) watch in the shower either.
I can see you’re a watch enthusiast. But really, people don’t buy smart watches to see the time. They buy them to more easily keep track of their fitness progress, (heart rate, bp, blood oxygen, etc.), and it’s much easier to respond to a message without having to take your attention away from something else. We shouldn’t be attacking the idea of a smartwatch because it’s pretty cool, we should be attacking the companies tracking us, stealing our data, and making us pay absurd amounts of money for something that goes obsolete in a few years.
If you have a fitness tracker - no problems with that. Needs a recharge after two or three weeks, which is not perfect, but still better than those "smart" watches that you have to feed daily.
Ok, I’ll be sure to use my automatic mechanical watch to check my decent speed and heart rate on my ski trip… Oh wait…
Personally I have a Garmin Fenix for the 3 week battery life but let’s not pretend that a mechanical watch and a smartwatch fill even close to the same market segment… It’s like telling someone who dropped 3k on a mountain bike to buy a car instead as it’s faster on the highway: ok, but not comparable and not relevant
If anyone thought an electronic device would become a family heirloom they are really clueless.
I think the first good wearable computer ever made has great potential as something people might like to collect. I have the first ever (proper/good) laptop for example. It doesn’t work anymore, but I still like having it (and I’d love to restore it some day - just because Apple won’t fix it doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed… it just means Apple isn’t maintaining a large stockpile of spare parts anymore).
In 20 years time, I bet those watches are worth a lot of money in good condition. An original iPhone recently sold at auction for $200,000.
Good riddance. I had a first gen watch, and it was awful. Trying to navigate apps would take minutes. And forget about trying to use Siri with it. Even gen 2 was night and day in terms of performance, but I think gen 3 was when it really became a viable product.
I still miss my Pebble though. Really, if Apple would let people make faces for the damned thing and create a rich face ecosystem, that would remedy like 90% of my issues with the watch. And just putting the time on a pic isn’t an answer. I miss things like the old LCARS face I had on my Pebble that incorporated all the other data into it (time, date, battery, now playing, weather, etc.). They need to let us do that with custom faces.
Your comment sent me digging. I had no idea that they could still function. I thought they were lost to time (lol), but apparently Google gave an update to the official app so the Rebble project could keep supporting all the functionality of the watch. Looks like it’s Android only, though tbf Pebble always did have significantly more functionality on Android than iOS. But if it would work on iOS, I’d dig out my Pebble right now.
Presumably because it uses LFP battery cells? If that’s the case, then the lower rated range is not as important since those cells tolerate many charge cycles to 100%.
One typically only charges to 80% with other Li battery chemistries so one effectively loses that top 20% of range.
I’d argue you’re not really losing it if you never use it all in the first place. People put too much thought into range when all they’re doing is short trips most of the time.
An electric motor placed in the differentials is more environmentally friendly than producing more cars. The first rule of recycling is to REDUCE. You have to reduce first, then reuse, then recycle. Tesla jumped on electric vehicles to exploit the technology and not help the environment.
Yes they did, but not every car can be retrofit, and it is not a simple process. If you drive a car until the wheels fall off, trying to do that would probably be inefficient and prohibitively expensive. Plus that motor has to come from somewhere, so do the batteries that power it. You can’t just throw a motor in and call it good.
My Tesla has been in the shop since November (!!!) because Tesla isn’t making enough repair parts. I love my Tesla, but nobody should be going anywhere near them until they get their supply chain shit together.
That is really terrible. They have always had a bad reputation in the repair department, but that is ridiculous. Seems like they have been getting worse, not better. Hopefully you get your car back soon. Hope they at least provided a loaner?
I don't think it's that bad. But it's a shame how unfriendly EVs are for the environment, the whole process is borderline worse than using fossil fuels when you consider emissions as well as potential fire hazards and poor disposability
It is true that there should be more done about using cobalt and to a lesser extent lithium, but even with those issues it is better in the long run. There are companies that are focusing on recycling those minerals and new battery chemistry is moving away from cobalt.
As far as fires go, yes battery fires can be very hard to contain. That being said, EVs catch fire far less often than ICE cars.
Ah, interesting. I did not know this! But I had thought that the concern with the EV car fires was mostly because the cars can set fire unexpectedly, they are hard to contain, and carry more hazardous fumes than a traditional vehicle, not that they catch fire more often.
There have been a couple recalls with LG batteries that had the potential, but AFAIK the number of times it happened is very low, and again more likely to happen with ICE cars. They tend to err on the side of extreme caution with EV batteries.
Lithium fires are for sure harder to contain, and I won’t deny that not all Fire Departments are equipped. There is special equipment needed, but once you have that it becomes much less of an issue. As far as fumes, I don’t know which is worse. There are a lot of nasty things in both EVs and ICE cars. I’ll have to look into it.
I’m sorry, I hate Elon and Tesla (and with good reason) but saying that an EV is rolling e-waste is going too far.
My model 3 has been bulletproof for the last five years. It’s a 2017 model, one of the earliest, so take that for what you will. The earliest models like mine were apparently some of the better ones until 2021+ model years. I wouldn’t consider buying one now due to Elon’s tomfuckery and the unresolved racism issues within Tesla, but to claim that they’re rolling trash isnt correct.
Plus, the fact is that virtually all cars (ICE models as well!) are rolling out of factories with dozens of integrated computers and touchscreens. It’s very hard here in the US to get something cheap that doesn’t have any electronics - basically imposible. And, if you do the compromise on cheaper and fewer electronics, the reality is that the poor grade of those cheap electronics will actually lead to a shorter lifespan and more overall repairs.
I’m not suggesting for that reason to go buy an EV - certainly not a new Tesla. A used one might be fine. But more broadly, electronics in cars (not just EVs) are really a huge problem. Unless they’re designed with repairability and durability in mind, all new cars have this issue, and you can’t single out Tesla for this.
I’m glad you’ve had a good experience with your Model 3. Genuinely. I hope it serves you very well and remains reliable for years to come! Nobody is judging you for adopting an EV prior to knowing how much of a fool Elon is.
My issue isn’t with the ethics there. It’s with Tesla’s notorious build quality and reliability issues. And with them making things cheaper and cheaper, this can’t bode well.
I feel like the important part is that apple again is allowed to keep its old devices locked up after taking them our of support. This needs to become illegal.
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