⌚️: One Year Later

Casey Liss on Liss is More, in respect to the one year anniversary of the Apple Watch:

Increasingly, I feel like I’m the only one.

I still really like my Apple Watch.

Many of my friends and peers seem to be getting rid of their Apple Watches. They’re either no longer wearing watches at all, or are switching to mechanical watches instead. I can’t help but feel like it’s trendy to be smug about the Apple Watch.

I’ve been an Apple Watch owner since day one, almost exactly one year ago. I couldn’t agree more with what Casey Liss is saying. I was going to write essentially the same on the Apple Watch, but instead I’ll advise you to read his full piece. I agree with every word of it.

The Apple Watch is not perfect. But it’s imperfect in extraordinarily similar ways that the original iPhone was imperfect. The battery life is only so and so for a device of this category, true – that will get a little better, and we will adjust the rest of the way. The app situation is not good, and apps on the original iPhone were limited to Safari pages circa 2007. Sales are not massive, with impressive Watch sales unable to compensate for the decline in many of Apple’s other product lines. It’s slow, in the same way that the original iPhone was slow. And yet, the Apple Watch has not only sold more in its first year than the original iPhone, but it’s sold more than any other smartwatch, and still more than Rolex in the last year.

I still wear my Apple Watch every single day. It’s effortless – I don’t even think about it. The way that the Watch handles notifications alone makes the device completely worth it, and the convenience of using it to quickly accomplish small tasks that I would have otherwise had to delegate to the phone buried in my pocket seals the deal. I’ve even amassed a small army of Watch bands, and changing them out depending on my mood and apparel is a blast.

The Apple Watch may not be the best product that Apple has ever made, but that was never the point. Today’s Watch is a foundation that will be built upon, improved, and tweaked over time. I can’t wait to see what watchOS 3 and the Apple Watch 2 brings to the table later this year.