“The first Apple Watch was a traditional first-gen Apple product: elegant in its design, but lacking key components; a more intuitive interface than a lot of its competitors had to offer, but glitchy and with slow-to-load apps,” Lauren Goode writes for The Verge. “But Apple is rich and influential enough that it can miss once and still get a do-over, something not every tech company gets. Apple can afford to iterate. And it has.”
“The Apple Watch is now both more and less of the things it was trying to be. The addition of GPS and better water resistance make it more of a fitness tracker,” Goode writes. “There are small differences in the new Watch’s appearance. The OLED display on the new Watch is brighter — in fact Apple says it’s the brightest display it has ever made. And if you look closely enough, you can see that the new Watch is just a tad thicker (0.9mm, to be exact). But again, it’s kind of like it just ate a big meal; you might be aware of it, but no one else will notice. Also, imagine that big meal was a bigger battery.”
“While the waterproofing is useful, the addition of GPS is a much bigger deal. It was easy to knock the first Apple Watch as a fitness device; I know because I often knocked it for this. A $349 sport watch without GPS was like an expensive sports car without turbo. Do you absolutely need it? No. But does it make the thing more legitimate? Yes,” Goode writes. “The Apple Watch is also part of a picture of modern tech — one that is slowly coming into focus, but might still be fuzzy for a lot of people. It’s a scene where the phone is basically a pocket computer that acts as the central processing hub, but our interactions occur through other things… There’s something effortlessly cool (and yes, expensive and even ridiculous) about having your phone ring across the room or in your bag, looking down and accepting the call on your wrist, and knowing the wire-free AirPods in your ears are going to pick up the call. We’re entering an era where technology hardware might eventually disappear into the background, as touch and voice and gesture become our more frequent interactions…”
Tons more in the full review – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is an excellent review with far too much information to excerpt here. If you’re in the market for your next Apple Watch, or your first, start with Goode’s review.
Here’s the thing: With the first Apple Watch units, our iPhones batteries magically gained some 20-30 percentage points of leftover battery per day because they stayed in our pockets more often. With Apple Watch Series 2, we expect our iPhones to gain even more battery life (perhaps enough to charge every other day) as they’ll be pulled from our pockets even less. (We have to wait until late October for our Apple watch Nike + units to arrive – ugh!)
Apple Watch Series 2 ticks off our four most important boxes, in order of importance: GPS, performance (significantly improved CPU and GPU), waterproofing, display brightness.
SEE ALSO:
Apple Watch Series 2: Apple refocuses its smartwatch – September 12, 2016
Have ordered a Nike+ model. I have also decided to keep hold of my iPhone 6 for a while longer this time around, so the saving of having it last three years rather than two will offset a lot of the cost of the watch.
I swim all the time with my Apple Watch. It’s pretty waterproof. The article is good, but to call the Apple Watch 1 a miss is a miss.
You’re right: I’ve showered with my Watch I since day one. No issues.
I only started showering with mine after it was a year old or so because the people in the Apple store said it was cool to do so. I never saw the spec that said “good to 3 meters,” but they all talked about it like it was common knowledge. I wonder if Apple buried that or I just missed the fine print. I’m sure they didn’t advertise it.
That being said, yesterday’s shower appears to have affected the speaker for a time and there was distortion for part of the day. I haven’t noticed that today since upgrading to watchOS 3, so maybe it just dried out?
Either way, I too am wondering if it’s worth upgrading and still can’t quite tell what (other than the band) is different about the Nike watch. Anyone else?
1. The unique Nike bands
2. Nike watch faces
3. Nike complication
4. Nike+ Run Club App
https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-nike/
The band is kind of cool and I wonder how it will look overtime. Will it get grody between the holes? Weird suntan patterns? Just wondering.
I guess I’ll have to dig deeper and see if the watch faces are all that compelling and what the complications add.
The main thing I think is missing from the watchOS is that it doesn’t AUTOMATICALLY detect what sort of workout you’re doing. I was really hoping watchOS 3 would solve this, but I don’t see that it does. Did I miss something?
Just seems so horribly UNintutive to have to tell your watch that you’re going for a walk or run… Particularly for Apple.
My first generation Apple Watch suddenly stopped receiving my voice. I went to the Apple Store, they checked it with their diagnostic test and found no problems. But we tested phone call, and their were unable to hear me. Since I didn’t bothered to buy an Apple Care they wanted to charge me 250$ to repair it. I mean, what the hell? How is that possible?! I didn’t swim or showered with them, no physical damage at all, and they want me to pay for the repairs? It’s pretty uncomfortable to use it without Siri’s help, but I can’t afford to spent more money on it. I’d better buy Series 2, but than what shall I do with current one?
Huh. My Apple Watch Series 0, which I received early May 2015, had the mic stop working a couple of months ago. I called AppleCare, even though the watch was out of warranty, to see if there was anything they could do to help, and within 5 minutes the folks at Apple told me they were going to replace my watch free of charge and even waived the shipping fee. Two days later, I had a new watch.
I also had a mic failure last year, I did buy Applecare, and they replaced it right away.
Not to buy Applecare with any WATCH is just plain dumb. It’s only $49.
Dear FutureMedia Guy,
AppleCare is a bit of a con when we’re paying top dollar for top shelf technology. It should be INCLUDED in the price, not an “extra.” The EU requires Apple to warranty their products far beyond the 1-year hardware warranty we’re all supposed to be fine with unless we want to buy AppleCare.
We’ve all been brainwashed here (self included) into believing that we MUST pay the manufacturer to warranty their own product for a reasonable amount of time. And I’m not talking “abuse” issues that AppleCare didn’t used to cover (till they added a program with the iPhone for smash/fix). I’m talking about logic board failures, display failures, top-cases, home buttons, power buttons, digitizers, etc.. If Apple really wants to be the consumer focused company they claim to be, 3 years (on Macs) and 2 years (on all other devices) should be included.
It’s just plain dumb to be forced to buy AppleCare for design and hardware failures.
I think it’s time for consumers to craft their own 500,000 word legal, click “agree” document for Apple, Samsung, Google and other monster tech companies to sign.