Tech

A year with the Apple Watch: What works, what doesn’t, and what lies ahead?

Some features are more useful than others, and there’s lots of room to improve.

Andrew Cunningham – Apr 22, 2016 8:00 am | 189

The Apple Watch is turning one. How has its first year treated it? Credit: Andrew Cunningham

About a year ago, Apple announced and released its first Apple Watch. The long-rumored product was Apple’s first all-new product category since the iPad and its first under CEO Tim Cook. To say that expectations were high would be an understatement.

To date, we don’t really know much about how the Apple Watch has sold—Apple folds it into the “Other products” category along with the iPod, the Apple TV, Beats headphones, Airport routers, iPhone and iPad cases and covers, and whatever other little odds and ends the company sells. While revenue for that category has increased year-over-year by a significant margin since the watch was introduced, the only thing we can really infer from that fact is “someone somewhere must be buying Apple Watches.”

However well it’s selling, Apple’s strategy with new products is to release them and then iterate continuously, working until all of the biggest complaints about the first-generation model have been addressed (or until people have forgotten about them or moved on to something else). After a full year of wearing the Apple Watch every single day, it’s time to revisit the hardware, software, and some things I looked at in our original review to see where the platform is and where I think it ought to go in the next year or two.

Table of Contents

Software updates: WatchOS 2.x

To start, the software has changed quite a bit since we initially reviewed the watch last year. Apple released WatchOS 2.0 in September of 2015, just a few months after the watch’s launch. That quick turnaround time meant this update didn’t change a whole lot of the first-party stuff. The release notes, available here, list the upgrades: tweaks to Siri and Workouts, expanded card support for Apple Pay, Transit view for Apple Maps, e-mail replies, Activation Lock similar to the iPhone feature of the same name, and a fix for an odd design decision that would let people reset a locked Apple watch without having to unlock it first.

The largest features in WatchOS 2.0—third-party Complications for watch faces and a “native” SDK that allowed third-party developers to access hardware features like the Digital Crown, heart rate monitor, and other things—relied largely on third-party developers. These developers haven’t exactly fallen all over themselves to put out high-quality native apps for the watch (and there are still limitations to what third-party developers can do).

WatchOS 2 has gotten a few updates between September and now. WatchOS 2.0.1 added support for new emoji to the platform; WatchOS 2.1 focused primarily on adding support for other languages and fixing bugs; and WatchOS 2.2 tweaked the Maps app and added support for even more languages. I haven’t had any problem with stability or battery life running any of these software versions, though the Apple Watch’s performance has always been sort of an inconsistent crapshoot.

In all likelihood, Apple will share details about a “WatchOS 3” update at WWDC in June, and it should hopefully continue to extend the platform while opening up more possibilities for developers. WatchOS is still young software with a lot of room to improve, though its weak internal hardware may limit the kinds of things that Apple and developers can do with it.

Hardware updates and subtle repositioning

Apple hasn’t provided any updates for the watch’s internal hardware yet. At this point, this is absolutely where the Apple Watch needs the most work, but the small size of the watch means that there’s less room to put things. We’ll likely have to wait longer for meaningful hardware upgrades to be possible.

To keep the watch feeling fresh and in the news, Apple has leaned heavily on the fashion/personalization aspects of the design. In September at around the six month mark, the company introduced gold and rose gold versions of the aluminum Sport design that used the same finishes as the then-new iPhone 6S, a boon for people who like gold as a color but don’t want to plunk down five figures for an Apple Watch Edition. A few new Sport band colors and other band combinations were also announced as was a partnership with Hermes.

The company did the same thing in March at around the one-year mark, introducing yet more Sport band colors and the new, (relatively) inexpensive woven nylon bands alongside a $50 price cut for the Sport models. No other Apple product requires the user to make so many choices about what it looks and feels like. That’s by design, and the company is leaning into it to lengthen the product cycle.

Most emphasis has been on the bottom end of the lineup; Sport models got a price cut, but not the standard stainless steel Apple Watches. The $50 Sport band is offered in the widest variety of colors, and the new woven nylon bands are available for $50, too. The Apple Watch Edition, which only really ever made sense as a status symbol for people with so much money that they don’t need to think about how much money things cost, has been quietly de-emphasized on the Apple Watch product pages and in Apple’s stores.

These tweaks are too small to be called “course corrections,” really. The Apple Watch is still primarily a luxury accessory, and it has a price-to-utility ratio far south of anything else in Apple’s lineup. But the price drops and focus on cheap bands are an admission on Apple’s part that the vast majority of Apple Watch volume, growth, and revenue is going to come from people with no interest in paying more than $400 or $500 for one, let alone $1,000 or $10,000.

It will take a couple of product generations before we can really be sure what replacement cycles and prices will be in the long run. Based on the last year, though, we can safely assume that watch replacement cycles will be longer than they typically are for the iPhone and that Apple will keep the accessories and partnerships coming to keep the watch feeling fresh even when it isn’t.

What am I still using/what do I like?

I’m still wearing the Apple Watch because it does a handful of things that I quite like and have grown used to, even if this is just a subset of the watch’s feature set.

It’s a watch

Most people traded in their watches for phones years ago, but it’s convenient to be able to look at my wrist and see what time it is. Usually, the watch knows when I’m looking at it and lights up when I want it to, so the fact that the screen dims quickly isn’t a huge deal. Once every week or two I need to tap it forcefully to make it acknowledge that I want to look at it.

I can use it to find my phone

The Apple Watch does just enough that I leave my phone in another room more often, which means that I lose track of it more often. I end up using the phone pinging feature on the watch once a week or so, and it also came in super handy on New Year’s Day when I had to find what New Year’s Eve Andrew had done with his phone.

Some notifications

The ones I like the most are primarily from Messages and Mail and Slack, and these let me know whether I can safely ignore a message or whether I should go to my phone or computer and take care of it. Actually replying to and interacting with notifications on the watch is relatively rare for me.

Setting timers

My wife and I started getting Blue Apron deliveries a few months ago, which means quite a bit more cooking. Being able to lean down to my wrist and set a timer has been invaluable in situations where the oven’s built-in timer is already set for something else and/or when both of my hands have been busy with something else or coated in raw meat juice. It’s one of the few things I like well enough to keep using even though Siri flubs it one in every 10 tries or so.

Weather forecasts and other Complications

I’ve settled on the Modular watch face as the most functional one for me, and I’ve enabled Complications to tell me the day and date, calendar reminders, the current temperature, my Activity circles, and the watch’s current battery level. The temperature and weather forecasts are the ones I use the most, especially as winter turns to spring and I want to check quickly to see whether I should have a coat or umbrella with me when I go outside. I haven’t found third-party Complications to be especially plentiful or useful, but it’s nice that they’re available.

Fitness, kind of?

I definitely still pay attention to my Activity circles, and I end up hitting them more often than not. Hitting them registers as a tiny blip of accomplishment on my emotional radar. But I can’t say that the watch has substantially changed my behavior or that it’s really affected the normal seasonal cycle of weight gain/loss. I still need to take my phone when I run.

I appreciate that the watch makes me more mindful of how much or little I’ve moved in a given day, but I wouldn’t say it has changed my life. I’m still moderately active for someone who works at home and writes about technology (but that’s probably a low bar).

Battery life isn’t a problem

Would I like a watch that I could wear for a week without charging it? Sure, I guess. But nightly charging has never really been a problem, and there were only two times in the entire year where the watch’s battery ran out before I went to bed. It’s usually got 40 or 50 percent left after a 16-ish hour day, and on a few occasions I’ve managed to stretch it for a couple of days between charging. Apple has a lot of wiggle room to make future watches a bit faster or more powerful without endangering battery life, even if power consumption increases while battery capacity stays the same.

What am I not using and why? What are the biggest problems?

I wouldn’t be wearing the watch every day if I didn’t get something out of it—I’d wear it when software updates came out and I’d put it in a drawer otherwise. But there’s plenty of stuff Apple advertises and pushes about the watch that I either barely use or actively avoid for one reason or another. In many ways, the watch is defined by these shortcomings.

Siri

Hey Siri. Hey Siri. Hey Siri. Siri on the iPhone and iPad has occasional accuracy issues; there’s no way around that. But the hardware and software normally at least try to work. Speech recognition and Siri’s own limitations are the primary barriers. On the Apple Watch, these issues are compounded. For one, Siri’s capabilities are further limited on the Apple Watch—you’re going to see that “Continue on iPhone” button with some frequency. For another, Siri is frustratingly unreliable. Sometimes your watch will just stare at you without responding. Sometimes it’ll act like it’s listening and then just sit there and churn without ever actually doing anything. And sometimes it’s just a run-of-the-mill misunderstanding. It messes up often enough that I don’t know that I can trust it, and if I can’t trust it I don’t use it unless I have to. And if I don’t want to use it, by extension I don’t really use it for…

Texting, e-mail, and other basic communication

If the Apple Watch’s primary job is to save you from digging your phone out of your pocket, it utterly fails on this point. I will, on occasion, use the quick replies if I’m walking and something needs a one-to-three-word response. To try to dictate messages to the watch is to risk being misunderstood, and if you’re misunderstood you might as well have just gotten your phone out in the first place. Names are a particularly bad sticking point, but minor voice-to-text errors are frustratingly common. It’s usually more convenient to just type everything out on my phone rather than risk losing time to a flubbed transcription.

Heartbeats and drawing and those animated emoji things

I’ll admit, early on in my life as a Person Who Wears an Apple Watch, I sent a bunch of animated emoji to people. The face is very expressive (and sometimes funny and sometimes inappropriate), but after a few months the novelty wore off and I stopped using them. And I’ve never really used the heartbeat and drawing features—neat as they are to show off to someone in a three-minute demo, they don’t mean much if the people you talk to regularly don’t have Apple Watches (none of my close friends do, and several of them are actively disinterested in smartwatches as a concept).

Apps

Third-party apps are a cornerstone of Apple’s marketing effort across all of its platforms. In its iPhone and iPad advertising in particular, the company focuses on the versatility of apps as much or more than the devices’ core first-party apps and features. Apps are an important part of the sales pitch for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, but truly indispensable apps haven’t really materialized. The initial WatchKit SDK was woefully limited. The “native” version introduced in WatchOS 2 was an improvement, but it was not enough to woo major app developers to the platform in droves.

The iPhone apps I enjoy and use the most don’t have super-compelling watch apps, and I’m not willing to switch iPhone apps for the sake of a better watch app. The Apple Watch hardware is still painfully slow and inconsistent when it comes to loading times, which discourages the use of the few apps that do seem decent. We’re still going to need some combination of hardware and software updates before watch apps can live up to their (admittedly limited) potential.

Performance and consistency are big issues

I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it’s worth really driving home: the issue isn’t even that the Apple Watch is always slow, just that it’s sometimes slow and you never know when or why you’re going to run into weird delays. This impacts my app usage to the limited extent that I actually want to use watch apps, but it’s a bigger problem when I try to pull up the forecast or Glances or something that’s supposed to be fast. Instead, I often end up staring at a little loading circle for four or five seconds. Is this a communication problem between the phone and the watch? A lack of processing power in the watch itself? Whatever it is, it needs to be fixed.

Hardware re-review: How’s it holding up?

For the most part, I’m happy with how the Apple Watch has held up over a year of use. The finish on my space gray Sport model shows no signs of damage, though there are a small handful of barely noticeable hairline scratches in the glass in my display. The stainless steel Apple Watch’s harder sapphire screen will probably show fewer signs of wear, but the bodies of those watches are reportedly more scratch-prone.

The one sign of wear on the watch itself that I find worrying is on the back—weeks and months of placing the watch on its charging cradle over and over again seems to have worn out a spot of the glass covering the heart rate sensor on the back of the watch. The sensor still works fine, and since the Apple Watch primarily uses light to take your heart rate, it may continue to work fine even if the LEDs and photodiode sensors are completely covered by scratches. But given that the wear is significant and that it’s happened because of an entirely normal, routine process that every single Apple Watch owner is going to perform every single day, it gives me pause.

The band I’ve used the most often is the black Sport band that came with the watch in the first place, and with semi-regular cleaning it has held up fairly well. There are a couple of smudges and marks, a couple small patches where the finish has worn smooth (usually hidden away under the clasp), and the band is clearly warped a bit based on where I fasten it, but this is normal watch wear-and-tear stuff, and it’s nothing that I notice or that people comment upon. If you expect these to look new forever, you’ll be disappointed, but you also have unrealistic expectations.

For the last few weeks I’ve been wearing one of the woven nylon bands, and I already think I like it better. It’s more breathable than the Sport band, and it’s still durable and waterproof. I prefer the multicolored patterns to the more monochromatic Sport bands, and I personally like the woven texture more than the rubbery, flat fluoroelastomer finish. It’s nice to have more viable entry-level band options that aren’t just another Sport color.

Software and hardware wish list

All of the above should make it clear that I don’t dislike the Apple Watch, but I also don’t think it’s really living up to its full potential. With that in mind, here’s a list of specific hardware and software improvements that should be realistic given the kinds of things the watch can do now and the hardware improvements that ought to be possible a year after the first-generation model.

More speed

This one’s pretty obvious, but it’s important given how much the Apple Watch experience is still hampered by delays and inconsistency. Improvements in SoC and wireless performance should be easy to achieve without damaging battery life; the Apple S1 is built on a 28nm process, and both TSMC’s 16nm process and Samsung’s 14nm process are more power-efficient. I’m very much looking forward to an Apple S2.

More watch bands that match the non-silver watches

As a space gray Apple Watch owner, I have made peace with the fact that the only watch bands that totally match my watch’s color are the black ones. The default color of all lugs and clasps is silver, either to match the stainless steel Apple Watch or the plain aluminum Sport version. So if I want to dress the watch up at all (with a nice Classic or Modern buckle, for instance), I have to be OK with the band not quite matching the body.

It’s a small thing, and I understand the logistical difficulties of taking every band on offer and producing four-ish versions of each one with matching lugs and clasps for the space gray, silver, gold, and rose gold finishes. But it’s the kind of detail the company prides itself for thinking about, and you know Apple thinks about it because it makes space gray, gold, and rose gold clasps to bundle with watches in the first place.

Expanded APIs and app capabilities

When apps have enough freedom to do what they want, they can be pretty decent. The RunKeeper app, for instance, is just capable enough when separated from the iPhone app to be a good running companion. But there are still too many kinds of apps that can’t do everything that Apple’s first-party apps can do. For instance, there’s no way to use a third-party music app to sync playlists or songs to the watch’s local storage. Podcast apps (including Apple’s own, strangely) have the same problem, even though it should theoretically be easy to sync individual episodes and listening progress between your watch and your phone. Just like on the iPhone, you can’t decide to use third-party apps as defaults in place of any of Apple’s own apps.

In some cases it’s not clear where the app situation is Apple’s fault and where it stems from lack of effort from developers, but in any case it needs to get better.

Better fitness features

The Apple Watch’s heart rate monitor is reasonably accurate, and even without a GPS it does a fairly good job of step tracking and distance measuring. The Fitness app on my phone has months of records about my activity levels. But as we’ve seen in countless fitness trackers, recording and organizing that data is just part of the battle. The most interesting dedicated fitness trackers also try to make exercise recommendations for you based on your specific fitness and activity levels. Third parties could easily step up and fill this gap (and some have already tried to), but lots of fitness gadgets and apps are targeted toward more serious athletes than regular people who want to be more active but don’t want to invest a ton of money or time. The watch already gives gentle, common-sense activity reminders in the form of Stand alerts; other, similarly low-key recommendations based on tracked activity seem like a natural extension.

Third-party watch faces

This one’s easy. Apple’s series of built-in watch faces tend to be either hyper-functional (“Modular,” “Utility,” “Chronograph”) or simple to a fault. Letting others make watch faces can fill functionality gaps and let users personalize their watches more thoroughly, which is a key part of Apple’s sales pitch for the device in the first place.

More independence

At this point I’m still not arguing that the watch should be able to operate for extended periods away from the phone; putting in LTE and GPS chips would either make the watch huge or kill the battery, and those changes would be the bare minimum for some kind of completely autonomous device. But even the watch’s ability to connect to known Wi-Fi networks and communicate with your iPhone over the Internet is limited; you can’t use 5GHz networks or anything that requires a login page or some kind of profile. That excludes the majority of home and public networks I use, which means you’re better off carrying your phone everywhere.

The iPhone wasn’t built in a day

The Apple Watch is doing fine. It’s certainly not the abject failure that some people have already tried to declare it. But if Apple wants to keep people’s interest and, more importantly, attract new interest, it needs to keep improving the watch and expanding the number of things people can use it for.

The iPod and iPhone weren’t overnight successes. They took a few years to ramp up into mass-market moneymakers, and Apple spent those years iterating on the hardware and software, revising constantly until all the rough first-generation edges were smoothed away. The Apple Watch as it exists is still rough and limited in a lot of ways, but hopefully another year or two of improvements will help it realize its full potential.

Listing image: Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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