Apple Watch — first full day
Note: This is going to be personal, about my health needs. If you’re looking for the usual fluffy marketing porn, you might want to look elsewhere. If you’re considering getting an Apple Watch because you need to make real change in your health and think it might help, read on.
tl;dr Overall, I’m quite pleased with it after one day, but there are a couple of serious caveats.
I am 56 years old, overweight, and rarely exercise. Despite managing to avoid COVID (so far), the pandemic has not been kind to me physically — or more correctly, I haven’t taken advantage of the changes in my schedule to be more kind to myself. It really caught up with me at Christmastime. Traveling to see family, it was the first time I’ve worn dress-up clothes in two years. I had to go buy a new shirt to fit, and failed to check the fit of my dress pants, which of course didn’t fit, so I had to go to a family dinner in jeans — jeans that were themselves barely fitting. When we finally got back on monday, I weighed in… at 243 pounds. OUCH. That’s 20 pounds over my already bad pre-pandemic weight. And my poor arthritic right knee was miserable for the whole trip.
I felt better tools could help me with the sustained routines required to change my physical health for the better. So I checked out the Apple Watch. Apple’s current marketing focuses heavily on using Apple Watch with their Fitness+ platform. This looks like what I want… a structured way to get a home exercise routine, without going to a gym or paying for a trainer. And maybe I can use it for food tracking, too. So tuesday morning, I ordered a new Series 7.
My first Apple Watch ever.
Despite being a computer professional (or maybe because of it), I’ve never been a fan of new technology. The closest I’ve ever been to the bleeding edge was my iPhone 2, and my commitment to the iPhone platform has served me well for years. So when the Apple Watch came out, I rolled my eyes a bit, especially in light of the zillion other “smart watches” that came out in the same era. It struck me as a solution in search of a problem, and badly compromised to boot. I do think they’ve found their problems to solve, but compromised? Yes, it’s definitely compromised.
Apple Watch, Fitness+, and iPad
I’ll say right up front that getting the Apple Watch, my iPad, and Fitness+ working together was hell. It took a couple of hours of googling and fumbling around with different things to try to get the Watch and iPad talking to one another, so I could watch Fitness+ video routines on my iPad while getting tracking info from my watch — which was the whole point of dropping five hundred bucks on the Watch! Apple, this experience sucked, and you need to make this work much, much better. Go read the random nonsense people have had to try on the internet
(And here, I took a break from my irritated rant, because my Watch just informed me I’ve been sitting on my ass for an hour writing instead of moving, and insisted I get up and stand for a minute. After one minute of walking around, it congratulated me on my obedience. Which is nanny tech, but it’s also right.)
Anyway, back to how much the Watch/iPad experience sucked. I did get them working together, eventually. I believe the final fix was re-doing the wi-fi on the Watch to my home network. But I may be wrong; I am often wrong. It could have been one of the other bullshit things I tried like rebooting devices, logging the iPad out of iCloud and back in, etc, finally shaking it loose. Again — Apple, this experience sucked and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Syncing the Watch with my iPhone was a breeze and delight, and the iPad experience should be just as good. This was the opposite of good.
That said, once I got the devices and Fitness+ working together, it seemed great. I went through a couple of nicely produced, well designed routines of strength training for beginners (I’ve done strength training before, but as I said, I’m badly out of shape and out of practice right now). Both routines had two other people besides the coach in the background, doing modifications to the workouts to make them either easier or more challenging, including using a chair for stability. I didn’t need it, but I think it would be welcome for someone coming in from a worse place than me. Syncing the Watch and the iPad meant I could see my pulse and other feedback onscreen while doing the routine, which is a luxury, but a pleasant one. I think it will be more useful as I get to be in better shape, and my workouts become more intense.
A digression — Watches and planned obsolescence
The Apple Watch replaced a Seiko 5 Automatic that I’ve been wearing for the past couple of years. The Seiko is a timeless piece of technology. It’s self-winding and doesn’t even have a battery. With a little maintenance, it will probably still work a century from now. It’s essentially the same watch that NASA took to the moon over 50 years ago. Fine watches are beautiful, collectable machines. As such, the Seiko appeals to the same part of my self-image that still drives a stick-shift car and insists on cooking rice in a cast iron pot rather than a rice cooker, the part of me that wants to feel engaged in the process and loves fine tools for their own sake.
Five years from now, my Apple Watch will be an obsolete piece of junk, ready to be replaced by a new model. Ten years from now, bit rot in the software ecosystem will probably render it totally unusable. It will pass into the archaic realm of “unsupported” and basically stop working. This bothers me, a lot. In the here and now, it’s pretty awesome. But it feels toxic, like a crime against the future — unlike the Seiko, which feels like a gift to the future.
Hmm. Maybe I should write about this in its own article. But it is what it is.
The three circles
The Apple Watch has many useful and interesting health monitors, but the big one is the “three circles” — red for activity, blue for standing, yellow for exercise. Having them at your wrist is good feedback for how active you are being that day, and trying to close all three is a good daily goal. For me, this is excellent feedback. I have not been exercising, and now I have a meter to encourage a half hour a day, along with a Fitness app to provide structure for that exercise. This is really what I got the Watch for. That said, tracking pulse oxygen, the EKG, and atrial fibrillation detection may well pay off in the future, as I am well and truly old enough to just keel over from a heart attack, and I don’t wanna.
I believe that, if I use it properly, the Apple Watch could literally add years to my life. What’s that worth?
An annoyance
Battery life kind of sucks. I mean, Apple makes a bit of a selling point of “at least it doesn’t suck as much as our previous watches”, but it still needs charged daily, and that charging cycle takes a while. I charged it to 100% yesterday afternoon, but at 9:15am, it was at 33%. If I’m charging it, I’m not wearing it. This is significantly annoying — especially coming from the Seiko, that “charges” with nothing but a good shake and actually wearing it.
I dream of a day when we can charge a smart watch just by wearing it, feeding off our body heat. But that may be a while.
An end to my rambling
I’ve been writing too long and I want a nap, so in conclusion… it seems like a good purchase, and I expect to get some good use from it. But it also feels like a waste. Sigh.
