Goodbye, Apple Watch

My first Apple Watch was the Series 2, in 2016 – so I’ve been wearing them for almost exactly 10 years. I started with the 42mm – the larger of the two sizes – despite my extremely narrow wrists, probably because of some lingering gender indoctrination that I had yet to overcome at the time.

Eventually – especially as the watch continued to grow to disappointingly larger sizes – I switched to the smaller size, which, painfully, meant abandoning my band collection at the time, but was otherwise a much better fit for me.

I’ve lost track of exactly how many units I’ve owned over the years, but I would generally get about 2-3 years of use before the battery would start failing to make it through the day, and that’s when it seemed like it was time to upgrade. There’s the first problem: The mandatory upgrade cycle always seemed too short; shorter with this than with any other Apple product. I always resented that.

At first, I was skeptical of the watch. What problem does this solve? Given how quickly the software changed early on, Apple didn’t seem to know the answer to that question either.

I was sure of one thing: I didn’t want more distractions and interruptions. Thus, the second problem: Notifications on the watch have always been opt-out, rather than opt-in. This is backwards, and infuriating. By default, the watch shows you every single stupid ad and engagement bait that arrives on your phone. To make it stop, you have to manually uncheck every single app in your entire list of apps. This is awful and I hate it, and I have always hated it. By the time I was ready to try the watch, I knew about this and I was prepared for this, and I had resigned myself to spending the time and effort to deal with it. Even so, it was a design mistake to begin with, and Apple should fix it. I don’t understand why they haven’t.

So why did I get the watch? By that point in my life, I was spending more time outdoors, and I was particularly interested in weather and workout tracking. And a lot of people I knew had Apple Watches, so I suppose there was a bit of FOMO as well.

I should take a moment to talk about something that I really love about the Apple Watch: the bands. I have always hated the traditional “belt buckle” style watch bands (I hate actual belt buckles in that style, too - Arcade Belts are my preferred brand, for what that’s worth). Apple’s watch band designs are all brilliant, and I love them all. I’ve built up quite a collection, and the thing that makes me the saddest about all of this is that they are no longer of any use to me.

So how has the watch been working out for me? Well, as you might expect given the title of this post: Not great. WatchOS has always been – and continues to be – much, much too slow. The weather information – that I had assumed I would rely on so much – may as well not even be there; I’m still in the habit of grabbing my phone any time I want to look at the weather, because the watch app is still so agonizingly slow to load anything, even on relatively recent hardware. The “complications” on the watch face are useless too, since they are almost always out-of-date, especially when you live in an area where the temperature regularly changes by almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the space of an hour (in either direction).

As for workout tracking? It’s cool to see a map of where I went, and I suppose it’s interesting to see in the moment what my heart rate is. But ultimately, none of this workout data is actually useful to me in any way that I can articulate. Most of the time, I don’t even look at it. As for the automated coaching? No thanks. I absolutely despise it when a robot talks to me like a person. I want fewer talking robots in my life, not more. In any case, the iPhone is now able to track some types of workouts without a watch, and there have always been apps like Strava that could do it, so I’m just not really feeling like there’s much of a point any more. As for activity rings, I could just never bring myself to care or pay attention to them; and after years of ignoring the “time to stand” reminders, I finally just turned them off.

The biggest disappointment in my entire history with the watch was in 2023 with WatchOS 10, which removed the Dock and didn’t even bother trying to provide any similar replacement for it. I relied on the Dock constantly to access my most frequent apps. This change singlehandedly made my watch almost entirely useless to me because it was no longer worth the frustration of digging through the huge alphabetical app list (to say nothing of the absurdly stupid honeycomb-style app grid, which was such a terrible design that it is beyond belief to me that it continues to exist to date). With the Dock gone, I simply stopped using apps that weren’t easily accessible any more, to the extent that I find it hard to even remember now which of those apps I used to use. But I do remember that I used to use my watch for a lot more things, and now I rely on my phone for those things instead. So, what is the point of the watch any more?

And then there’s the neverending “paper cuts”: The animations are so slow, and glitchy. The UI is weird - it doesn’t really look like anything else Apple makes. The watch faces are frustratingly limited in customization, and seem to have a baffling obsession with projecting a circular analog display onto a rectangular screen. But the biggest ongoing annoyance of all, for me, is that it fails to tell me the time quite often when I look at it. Why? Because I take my watch off and put it back on at various times throughout the day (it’s not worth explaining), and I don’t use my iPhone very much, so I can’t really benefit from the iPhone’s ability to auto-unlock the watch. So I’ll be doing some chore with my hands, and I’ll look at my wrist to see what time it is, and I’ll see: A keypad screen. No time. Even though I’ve gotten used to this, it continues to make me upset in a constant, simmering rage kind of way. You are a watch. Your single, most important job is to tell me the time. You are supposed to work for me. It’s not my job to attend to your needs. I do not care what you think you need. Show me what damn time it is!!! My hands are full and I don’t have time to drop everything and type in my passcode right now because I’m busy living my life. This is such a complete and utter failure for a timekeeping device.

By the way, I’m working on my Mac most of the day - why can’t my Mac unlock the watch? Because we’re all supposed to be using our iPhones constantly, I guess.

Speaking of the Mac, I deeply resent the integration that the watch does have with the Mac - because it is constantly buzzing my wrist for no good reason. My Mac has Touch ID, which is great and very easy to use. I can use that to unlock my Mac. I don’t want or need the watch to do it. But every time I sit down in front of my Mac, it buzzes. Every time I use a Passkey or Apple Pay in Safari, it buzzes. Every time my Mac needs me to authenticate with anything, it buzzes. Listen, Apple: I’m not sure if you know this, but the Mac is, in fact, a full-featured computer, and I do not need any help from my other devices while I am using it. Please tell the watch to chill the hell out while I’m using my Mac. Please.

I struggled to think of any reason why it would be worth keeping the watch. I like the idea of fall detection; although I’ve only just entered middle age, I ride my bicycle in the suburbs of America, so I’m always worried about getting hit by a car, and I liked the idea that the watch could automatically call for help. I also have a vague recollection that there is some sort of continuous monitoring for heart problems, which I’m told has saved some people’s lives, although I’m fortunate to not have any known history of heart problems thus far. These both seem like good things I would rather have than not, but it’s hard for me to make the case to myself that these two features alone are worth keeping the watch.

The last straw was, of course, that WatchOS 27 abruptly drops support for my watch, the Series 9. I had already been feeling down about the watch in general lately, and wondering if I might just be better off without it. So far, I’ve kept my phone and my watch both on iOS 18 and WatchOS 11, respectively, in order to avoid the disaster that OS 26 has been. But I know I can’t stay on the old software forever, so I was planning to update everything to OS 27 later this year. The fact that my watch was going to be forever stuck on OS 26, the worst operating system that Apple has ever created, was just one last insult that I could not take.

And so now, my wrist is bare, which feels very strange, like I’ve somehow forgotten to get fully dressed this morning – but I suppose I will get used to it, in time. I’ve started the process of trading in my watch for an Apple gift card, with no particular plan for what to use it for. I will replace the watch with nothing, and go back to wearing nothing on my wrist, as I did for most of my life prior to 2016.

I’ve gotten better at putting my phone away and ignoring it for longer periods of time - which was, ironically, a large part of the reason why the watch wasn’t working for me.

I will probably miss some texts and calls. I will definitely miss out on whatever apps are trying to badger me about. I think it’s going to be okay. And I think, and I hope, that this will restore some much-needed calm to my life.