For the last 3 years I have been diligently wearing my Series 7 Apple Watch day and night. It is the first smartwatch I have owned, and it will be the last, as this week I have gone back to my old school analogue watch.
The truth is, for all the benefits that you get from a smartwatch, for me personally it has more cons than pros.
Technically it is not my first smartwatch, as I did have a Fitbit Charge HR before that which had a clock on it and tracked my steps, sleep, and heart rate. I never really saw it as a watch though, as I still wore a watch on the other wrist.
The thing with smartwatches is they advertise a number of benefits which don't really materialize in real life.
The non benefits #
Spend less time looking at your phone I didn't have the cellular version, so I always needed my phone on me anyway. Yes I could technically read iMessages on my phone but with the small screen it wasn't a pleasant experience.
The watch also displayed WhatsApp notifications, except for photos, which for some reason where always blurred out, forcing you to look at your phone anyway.
The main issue is all the notifications. Even when your phone is on silent you would still get the notification on your watch that you have a message, prompting you to pick up your phone.
Without the Apple Watch I have fewer reminders to look at my phone, which is a good thing.
I did turn off the majority of notifications for my watch but by default whenever you install a new app on your phone it would turn its notifications on for your watch as well.
Track your sleep Yes the Apple Watch can track sleep and tell you how many hours of REM or deep sleep you got. I am not entirely convinced however of the accuracy of this information or whether it was actually useful.
Rarely did the number of hours of sleep logged correlate with how I felt in the morning. Sometimes it would say I got 8 hours of sleep, but I knew I woke up several times and still felt awful in the morning.
Apart from being able to find out what time I got up in the middle of the night, I rarely looked at the sleep data.
Measure and improve your fitness I am not the sportiest of guys (understatement of the year). I do however have a Fitness+ account and I do several workouts a week. It was definitely interesting to see my heart rate on the screen while doing my workouts, but it's not a game changer.
If my heart is beating fast I can tell without a number on the screen.
When it comes to “closing my rings” or getting in my 10,000 steps a day, I never found these metrics particularly motivating.
It was definitely handy for tracking my walks, but you can do that with just your phone anyway and still falls into the interesting, but not necessarily useful category.
If you are really into your sports and fitness then I can see this being useful but for me, it's not worth it.
What I will miss #
There are few things that I miss from not having an Apple Watch.
- Automatically unlocking my Mac. I have to type in my password to unlock my Mac instead of it detecting my watch and unlocking it for me when it wakes up from sleep. This is now costing me an extra 5–10 seconds every day! 😉
- How warm is it outside? I have to use my phone or the HomePods to find out the temperature outside. I have noticed I keep looking at my watch for the temperature by reflex which is going to take some time to get used to.
- Knowing I am sick in advance. When I have a cold or a virus, my heart rate stays above 100 BPM throughout the day. This often happens before I realise I am sick by a few hours. This at least gave me some validation that I am actually poorly. To be honest, I only get sick once every few years so it is not a big deal.
There were other small benefits such as being able to remotely control my phone when I am listening to music or listening to a podcast, but it's not enough for me to keep wearing it.
What I gain being Apple Watch free #
The biggest benefit is being able to wear my old watches again. Watches are quite a personal thing. They are essentially a fashion accessory, and they say a lot about a person. I wonder what wearing a screen on my wrist was saying about me?
I have 3 other watches that I have got over the years. All of which cost less than my Apple Watch but are a lot better looking and hold sentimental value for me.
Two of them were birthday presents (for my 21st and 30th) from my parents and the other was an anniversary present from my wife.
All of these watches I am still going to own and use in another 10, 20 and 30 years.
Even if I did carry on wearing my Apple Watch it would likely need a battery replacement in a year and would be made obsolete by Apple in less than 5 years anyway.
Other benefits include:
- Looking at my phone a lot less as I don't get notifications on my watch
- Not getting annoyed when I forget to track my walk before I start
- Not having to charge another device every night
- Not feeling guilty when I haven't closed my rings that day
- Getting back the custom message notification sounds (I have a duck quack for my wife's messages)
Another unexpected benefit has been my phone battery. My phone battery would rarely last a whole day without being charged. Since disconnecting my Apple Watch my phone now still has over 80% by the time I go to bed!
Hindsight is a wonderful thing #
If you had you sold me the Apple Watch with the following benefits, would I have spent £300 on one?
- Never miss a notification and spend 80% more time looking at your phone!
- Be prompted every hour to stand up, even when you are already standing!
- Feel guilty every day for not closing your rings!
- Get one more device to charge every day and get to charge your phone more often too!
- Be congratulated for getting 8 hours of sleep, even though you feel like a zombie.
That is the thing with hindsight, it is always easier to realise your mistake after the fact.
It has prompted me to be more conscious with my spending at least, and try to weigh up the pros and cons of each purchase.
I doubt however it will be my last expensive tech purchase that I didn't need. Yes, I am looking at you Oculus Quest that is gathering dust in my office.
Talking of dust, time to get the robot vacuum cleaner out.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
I found quite a lot of things interesting this week so apologies in advance for the long list (#sorrynotsorry):
📝 Article — The Joy of Literate Programming — I am not sure how well this would work for a large project, but it seems interesting. It is a bit like TDD, but instead you start with the documentation instead of tests.
🛠️ Tool — The First HTML LSP That Reports Syntax Errors — It does seem like a glaring omission that even VS Code doesn't highlight HTML errors correctly. This might be useful if you write a lot of HTML.
📝 Article — Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts — Last week I shared some of the shell scripts that I use every day. If any of them inspired you to write some then this is worth a read. I will be definitely coming back to this.
📝 Article — Why Scrum is Stressing You Out — From experience, Scrum can certainly be a cause of burnout if not managed properly. I have seen Scrum work well if you undercommit and then use the remaining time to tackle tech debt, help out others or controversially, do some training!
📝 Article — Unlearning Leetcode — Write simple code, can't be emphasised enough. Leave minimisation to the compiler. Your future self will thank you.
🎬 Video — The Lego Great Ball Contraption — I have seen small wooden versions of these that you can buy kits for in the garden centre (I know, you can tell I am nearly 40). This is brilliant, and I sat and watched the whole 16-minute video the other day.
📝 Article — CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process' — Oh really?! You would have never guessed! This is surprisingly common though. When a company pushes everyone to deliver faster, quality always suffers.
📝 Article — LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This — People always claim “this is the worst it is going to be”. Although that is true to some extent, LLMs are never going to truly trustworthy. They have their uses, but we are not yet at JARVIS levels of AI.
📝 Article — How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire — This has some good advice for the difficult times that the industry faces at the moment. Especially the parts about team moral and self-care.
🛠️ Tool — Nothing: Simply Do Nothing — I like the concept. Anti-productivity. Just sit and do nothing and watch the counter climb. Everyone needs some silence in their day.
🛠️ Tool — The Dune Shell — I spend a lot of time in the terminal and this looks like it could be interesting.
📝 Article — Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week — It makes me glad that I work remotely when I see articles like this. You can get the benefits of in office work without having to sacrifice your life on a commute.
📝 Article — The centrality of stupidity in mathematics — I think it is true if you aren't feeling stupid at least some of the time you aren't really learning anything.
📝 Article — A Friendly Introduction to Assembly for High-Level Programmers — I have never learnt assembly, although I think it could be useful to have a better understanding of the underlying system. Fun fact, the game Roller Coaster Tycoon was written by one guy in assembly! Now that's impressive.
📝 Article — Going between Finder and the Terminal — I will be using some of these. I always find it a bit frustrating going between terminal and finder. You can drag and drop a folder into the terminal, but this looks like a better way.
📝 Article — Gentle Guide to Self-Hosting — I really enjoy self-hosting tools which I have talked about before. I use Actual Budget as well, but I am not sure whether I would want to put it on cloud hosting.
❗ Action Needed — LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool — Urgh! The feature no one asked for. I am sure many of you are on LinkedIn, make sure you turn this feature off if you don't want your personal details used in some AI tool.
🛠️ Tool — Sidekick: A CLI tool to self-host any app with two commands on a VPS — Another roll your own platform as a service tool. See also Dokku and Coolify.
📝 Article — GitHub Notification Emails Hijacked to Send Malware — Something to be aware of if you get an email from “Github Security Team”.
📝 Article — Gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website — I am always interested to see how people discover these vulnerabilities. Plus the cat that chases your mouse is cool!
📚 Books — I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o — Last week I shared a link to this and said:
I wish he had this as a normal list as well. Although I may just need to parse the JSON response instead to get all the books.
Pieter actually saw my newsletter and implemented a list as suggested. I thought that was pretty cool, so I thought it was worth another share.
👨💻 Latest from me #
If you haven't bought my course on SOLID yet, what is stopping you? Haha, only joking.
If you hadn't seen, Dometrain still has it's “back to school” promotion on until the end of September, so if you did want to pick up my course or one of the other great courses you can use these codes below:
- BTS30 to get 30% off any course.
- BTS15 to get 15% off any of the already discounted bundles.
- BTS20 to get 20% off an annual Dometrain Pro subscription.
💬 Quote of the Week #
We have an inherent drive towards safety in the sense of not being harmed. But when we default to a comfort zone, we may feel unsafe any time we step outside of it, when really we’re safe, just uncomfortable.
From Paul Millerd in the article Why Today’s Organizations Are Failing To Unleash Human Potential
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