“Make no mistake, the Apple Watch is a thoroughly optional accessory,” Andrew Cunningham writes for Ars Technica. “Even if you think you want it, wait if there’s a shadow of a doubt in your mind — if not for the inevitable hardware revision, then at least for the OS and the surrounding app ecosystem to firm up. A $349-or-more pricetag is still a lot of money to spend on a question mark.”
“But after spending a week with an Ars-purchased 42mm space gray model (and spending a substantial amount of time with Android Wear), I can tell you that unnecessary things can still be useful,” Cunningham writes. “If you buy or like using your Apple Watch, you’re not an idiot who is wasting both your money and your precious time on this earth.”
“I still find ‘notifications on your wrist’ to be a poor reason for any device to exist, but the fitness features, the general quality of the first-party apps, and the potential of the third-party apps are all real positives,” Cunningham writes. “The biggest shortcoming for buyers today, aside from the general 1.0-ness of the hardware and software, is that the watch is more complicated than it looks. It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to learn how to balance the watch’s potential usefulness with its potential irritation.”
Read more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is the rare Ars Technica verdict that misses the mark. Read the review for usual incursions into battery life, etc., but not for buying advice. Perhaps Cunningham would have had reached different conclusions if he spent more than just a week with the Apple Watch.
Andrew, nobody needs anything beyond food, water, and shelter. Everything else is gravy and therefore unnecessary. And, BTW, nothing worthwhile is achieved with a trivial amount of effort. The Apple Watch is extremely useful in the right hands, namely, in the hands of someone who can afford it (who’s not constantly fretting over the money spent and therefore nitpicking it to death and/or inventing negatives in order to reassure themselves that they were right not to spend money they couldn’t afford to spend) and who is willing to take the time necessary to attune the Watch for their needs. This is Apple’s most personal device ever. It doesn’t come that way out of the box. You make it so by first really learning how to use it and then tailoring your Notifications, Glances, third-party apps, etc. to fit your personal needs.
We come out of this “review” with the idea that Andrew thinks the Watch costs too much for himself, personally, and so he’s going to do his damnedest to convince himself that Apple Watch isn’t worth the money while taking everybody else along on his his self-delusional ride.
Here’s the basic fact, from us Apple Watch-wearers: If you can afford an Apple Watch, it offers a wide ranges of features (that grow every day with new apps) and, once you use it properly, you’ll find that it’ll become indispensable.
Once the world gets it and its collective wrist is festooned with Apple Watches (and the inevitable Apple Watch knockoffs), it will be fun to look back on this review, with its nonsensical, untrue, and weirdly fatalistic quotes like “of all of Apple’s products, it offers the fewest features for the price” and “no matter how many gadgets you buy, one day you will die” and laugh at it.
