Ever since the Apple Watch was first introduced in 2015, I’ve always thought it was an interesting accessory, but I never seriously considered one because of what I saw as an exorbitant price tag, and very limited battery life, compared with a conventional watch. At the time, I was also using an Android smart phone, so I wasn’t fully in that ecosystem. Still, the idea never really left me.
Around 2020, I did buy a generic smart watch, and while I liked it well enough for what it was, it kept lousy time and there was no good way to manually reset it, so I put it aside after a month or so of active use and went back to my conventional analog watches.
The one thing I’d always said would make me buy an Apple Watch is if they were to make one that could monitor my blood glucose levels. While that technology has not come to pass, I recently started using Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitoring sensors, which will communicate with an Apple Watch. That was enough to rekindle my interest, but I still wasn’t prepared to pay the full freight for a brand new one, so I turned to eBay for an affordable second-hand model, an Apple Watch 5 series 44mm in space gray aluminum, with two plastic straps in chocolate brown and off white.
Plastic watch straps have never been my thing, so I ordered a black stainless steel deployment style bracelet that’s more to my liking. It came with a link removal tool, which made adjusting the bracelet's size to fit my wrist very easy. I had to remove a total of three links, two from one side of the buckle and one from the other. The whole process took about ten minutes to give the watch a much different--and more sophisticated--look.
Still, now that I have the watch, I might have held off on the band. It is several years old, too old to receive further WatchOS updates, and even though it is in good cosmetic condition, the battery barely lasts a day. On my second day with this watch, I put it on around 9:00 a.m., and the battery was down to 36 percent by supper time, and went to low power mode by bedtime.
After wearing it a couple of days, I have changed a couple of settings to noticeably improve battery life. According to everything I've read online, the always-on display isn't supposed to affect battery life much, but turning that feature off does indeed buy a few extra hours of life between charges. It seems like a minor thing, but it definitely helps me warm up to the watch a little more.
I also discovered that the watch is one generation too old to fully integrate with the Dexcom sensors, so all I can receive on it is high and low glucose alerts. That’s better than nothing, but I was looking forward to being able to read my glucose levels on demand. Oh well, that one’s on me for not checking more carefully. Live and learn, I suppose.
The jury is still out on whether my Apple Watch experience will end up somewhat like my generic smart watch experience. I’m going to give it a week or so, and see how I feel about it. Will I wear it frequently, or leave it on the charger for increasingly extended periods until one of the cats eventually knocks it off, and I find I’m too lazy to pick it up and put it back on? Time will tell.
I've already determined this is not my ultimate smart watch. What my ultimate smart watch would need are a battery that lasts at least three or four days between charges, a week would be better, direct blood glucose monitoring, and an affordable price. Yeah, none of that exists right now, and we are talking Apple products here, so if and when it ever arrives, it definitely won't be affordable, at least not my idea of affordable.
UPDATE: I've now had the Apple Watch for about a month and a half, and things have gone pretty much as I had predicted. My feelings toward the watch are lukewarm at best, I wear it maybe once, maybe twice a week, and by the time I put it back on the charger that night, I'm happy to choose one of my more conventional watches for the next day, and then wear it for several days, maybe week or longer. And on the days I do wear the Apple Watch, I actually find it to be mildly annoying, vibrating and displaying every email, text message, and phone call that comes in. And when I want to see what time it is, it may or may not display the watch face. Quite frankly, I'm failing to appreciate the value proposition of the Apple Watch. Maybe that's me, maybe it's the watch, or maybe it's a combination of the two. Honestly, I'm just not feeling it the way I'd hoped I would.
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