Elliot Jay Stocks’ 1 month with the Apple Watch

Elliot begins thus:

Yesterday afternoon, I realised that I wasn’t wearing my Apple Watch. In fact, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been wearing it for the entire day. It was back in my bedroom, still attached to its charger and very much not on my wrist.

This is not an isolated event. This sudden realisation late in the day has happened now a good six or seven times in the month that I’ve owned the Watch. And the prompt for this realisation? I had lifted my wrist to see what time it was.

And he concludes:

I can’t recommend the Apple Watch, because it’s almost useless. Take away my Macs, my iPhone, or even my iPod, and I’d be stuck. Powerless. Lost! But take away my Watch and… I probably won’t even notice. Unless, of course, I need to tell the time.

I’m still excited to get a Watch (though haven’t ordered one yet, because we’re buying a house, and want to make sure we won’t need that $700 for other things), but I may have really low expectations for it. It’s a really beautiful watch that does some other stuff, and I think that may be enough for me.

Having said that, the offline experience is crucial. I know the Watch has a “Power Reserve” mode in which it is only a watch, and in fact only a specific kind of watch. Reserve mode limits you to a single watch face, no complications, no apps, and certainly no wireless communication with your phone. I’m glad that mode exists, but also have to hope there’s some graceful degradation between Reserve mode, and the full experience enabled by being in wireless range of an iPhone, and that the degraded, offline Watch experience is good and satisfying.