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The original Apple Watch lineup is officially obsolete
(narwhal.city)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Technology
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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. Like needing to be recharged every night, and being obsolete after a handful of years.
Apple Watches aren’t the only option, and watches don’t just go "obsolete" like they’ve gone out of date.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.
My Apple Watch needs to be charged ever night.
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.
That's an apple problem, not a smartwatch problem in general
Any smartwatch that has the utility of an Apple Watch will also have the battery issues of an Apple Watch.
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
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.
Those other brands will not have feature parity with the Apple Watch. I agree that charging the watch every light is not an issue.
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.
If you have an apple watch do you leave home without your smartphone?
I often go phoneless when I go hiking or jogging, yes.
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.
I don't personally know anybody who got an apple watch to tell the time.
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
Now that is a totally different beast than an Apple watch that has to be recharged daily.