“For the last several weeks, we’ve run 11 smartwatches through our labs to test for durability, health functionality, readability in bright and low light, ease of use, and ease of interaction,” Glenn Derene writes for Consumer Reports. “As part of our durability testing, we run all smartwatches through a scratch-resistance test with a series of picks calibrated to the Mohs scale, which uses 10 minerals of increasing hardness as reference points. As we’ve reported previously, the stainless-steel Apple Watch, with its sapphire crystal face, was a standout in this test. It survived a number 9 Mohs pick (just below diamond hardness) and earned an excellent score.”
“We set our depth-test chamber to match the water-resistance specification claimed by each smartwatch manufacturer. We submerge the watches, then check them for proper functionality immediately upon removal from the chamber, then again 24 hours later. The stainless-steel Apple Watch passed the test on the first try. The first aluminum Apple Watch Sport we put through our immersion test seemed fine when we took it out of the tank, but we experienced problems with it 24 hours later. We then tried two more samples, which showed no problems, so the Apple Watch Sport passed our water-resistance test,” Derene writes. “In the end, our top-rated smartwatch is the stainless-steel Apple Watch. Its performance on the scratch-resistance test and excellent scores for ease of pairing and ease of interaction make it our top choice.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Their “labs.” Pfft. Well, anyway, Grandma and Grandpa will be thrilled!
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MacDailyNews Take: Their “labs.” Pfft. Well, anyway, Grandma and Grandpa will be thrilled!
Hey! I resemble that remark!
But there’s no toaster oven app !!!
Consumer Reports has about as much credibility as George W Bush. Their ‘vote of confidence’ in Apple Watch means nothing. It will be real ‘consumers’ (users) who will verify Apple’s great products.
To be fair, please don’t lay out politics around here. It typically leads to the biggest waste of bandwidth possible. I’d rather read and write about the topic. Tnx.
I am sorry that is seemed political. I just used the name of a public figure who represented stupidity on an international scale.
I’m in complete sympathy! But this place can be a, ahem, contentious place for politics, at which point it goes off the rails.
CR may not be great at everything, but they do run some useful standardized tests on various devices. The Mohs scratch test and the submersion test are both useful, for instance. To completely disregard the value of CR test results is foolish. You simply extract the useful information and then formulate your own conclusions.
CR came to the rescue during the bogus ‘bendgate’ rubbish. Their scratch tests on the Watch are fun to, ahem, watch. Historically, they’ve made whopping blunders, particularly with regard to Apple. But it’s at least quaint that they’ve decided to catch up with Apple appreciation.
I agree. While CR generally rates the cheaper stuff higher than more expensive items, so take their overall ratings with a dash of salt, their objective tests are fine.
I stopped paying attention to CR with regard to anything technical (well, anything beyond basic refrigerators or toasters or automobile tires) when in about 1990 (it’s been a while so I might be off by one or two years) they *conclusively* “proved” that a Mac with a 68030 processor and a 68882 math co-processor was slower for floating point processes than an 8086 processor (and no math co-processor) running DOS. The also “proved” that that same Mac ran MS Office products a factor of 1.5 to 4 times more slowly than on a Windows machine. Their conclusion was: don’t get a Mac. It’s worse for anything you want to do.
I’m really tired of MDM’s snarky comments that only “old people” read Consumer Reports. I may be 60 now, but I was reading CR when I was in my twenties. And just because I’ve grown older does not make me some stupid “grandpa”.
So shut up and go back to listening Rush.
You just proved MDN’s point. You represent CR’s demographic perfectly: you started reading and trusting it in the 1970’s and followed it for 40 years and still think it is a good publication. Some people never learn.