[kimburgess]

For those using the Apple Watch: would you recommend it?

I was an early(ish) adopter of smart watches/wearables - think Pebble and LG G Watch era. I walked away from that experience with the perception they exist solely as expensive distraction machines with an extremely short functional life and have been enjoying mechanical watches since.

This tech has me on the verge of trying again. It's seems to be getting pretty close a ubicomp device. There's enough compute onboard to do useful things with the sensors, particularly with the addition of the neural cores. The UWB proximity awareness look interesting too for someone with other apple devices (HomePods etc).

What I'm not familiar with is the current software ecosystem. Are there any core functions or third party apps that make use of this outside of just slinging notifications?

[larsnystrom]

I’ve had the series 3 for almost six years now. It still works fine, and even though I’m very tempted to upgrade there is no immediate need. So the lifespan of these devices is actually pretty good.

I like the Apple Watch a lot. There’s not a single killer feature in my opinion, just a bunch of small stuff that together makes it very nice. Like using it as an alarm clock without sound to not wake the rest of the family. Or timers when cooking. Or seeing how much (or more likely how little) I move about in a day. Seeing how many hours of sleep I got, taking into account my toddlers wake me up a few times every night. Having my todo list (Todoist) on the wrist, even though I’ll admit it’s pretty slow and I can’t quite get used to dictating my tasks. Seeing the weather for the day through a glance at a my wrist, to quickly know whether to bring a rain coat or not. Seeing the UV-index on a sunny summer day, to know how worried I should be about sunscreen for my kids. Seeing my schedule for the day without having to pick up my phone. Always having the phone on silent without missing calls or texts. Pinging my phone when I forget where I put it.

None of these features make the watch worth it on their own, but in aggregate it’s an amazing device and if it ever breaks down I’ll buy a new one in a heartbeat.

[kimburgess]

The aggregation of a sufficient number of small useful tools is a good point.

I wouldn’t carry a voice only phone, or a text only messaging device, or a standalone GPS, music player, or PDA. But I do find a phone that combines these pretty useful.

[sceptical]

I like mine but mainly use the health / activity features, such as the daily tracking of movement, calories burned, etc. I use it as my sport watch for running as well and it is comparable to Garmin now. I have disabled pretty much all notifications on it though.

Mine is a series 6 and have at least another year left on it. I may consider buying series 10 if Apple decides to do some substantial changes for the 10th anniversary release.