The only problem with Watch is that vast majority of apps for mass market have very poor Watch versions. Some on pathetic level. And everything is very slow... Apple hasn't figured out itself yet, how to change that, so Watch is used not much more than the wrist bands are. Sorry to admit that....
wtf -- you're commenting here but you haven't heard of watchOS 3?
I dont bother with with most features very often because it's annoying.
Cant say say that about my iMac 5k or iPhone 6 Plus.
watch OS needs a complete rethink.
You will always get dislikes for any criticism of Apple stuff but this is well said. Some apps, most, are useless except the fitness apps - which is why comparing to Fitbit makes sense.
no, its not "well said". its ignorant nonsense -- since watchOS, where apple did a complete rethink, is in beta and very soon will be released.
I love reading the comments when an article that isn't kissing Apple's ass is posted. So many of you bitches react like a teenage girl who read something bad about Bieber on twitter.
I'd say many defenders don't even have the watch. Those of us criticising it do, because we have real world criticisms. And I'll probably buy the next one as well. And criticise it if necessary.
orly? please link to a defender post of someone you suspect of not even owning an AW. we'll wait.
I really like my Apple watch, altough its little shortcomings such as speed and some times battery life but hopefully witc Watch OS 3 at least the speed will be better.
I love reading the comments when an article that isn't kissing Apple's ass is posted. So many of you bitches react like a teenage girl who read something bad about Bieber on twitter.
I'd say many defenders don't even have the watch. Those of us criticising it do, because we have real world criticisms. And I'll probably buy the next one as well. And criticise it if necessary.
Based on what I have read here and on other threads, most defending the Apple Watch claim to have one. I certainly do, and absolutely will defend it against false statements or purely negative commentary. It is a first generation product, and of course things can/should improve in all areas. That said, I think it is by far one of the best "first gen" products that Apple has released in terms of quality, stability, fit/finish, and new functionality.
Personally, I am very satisfied with the functionality of AW1. Everyone's mileage may vary, but I have found usefulness in the following areas: - Time functions (changeable watch faces, alarms, timers, stop watch). Always accurate and more useful than a regular watch. - Apple Pay. Perhaps a result of the Canadian landscape, but I can use AW Apple Pay very broadly (multiple times every day) and for up to $100. - Notifications. Texts, sports scores, meeting notifications. - Calendar - seeing my next meeting at a glance, and getting a taptic notification - Phone (I leave my phone on silent mode, and get notified via taptic on AW, ensuring I only pull out the phone if it is a call I want to answer) - Fitness and health. Motivated to exercise more, and more interested in following the calories burned & heart rate trends - Music. Use BT headphones at the gym, so no need to take the phone or carry separate iPod (but yes, existing BT headphones have lots of issues themselves...) - Swappable bands. Keeps the watch interesting to change bands for occasions / uses. Comfort and fit of bands better than any watch I have had. - Minor interest/amusement in maps usage, Apple TV remote, Apple Wallet for boarding passes, etc.
Watch OS 3 will certainly improve things, especially in the time to launch apps. While I would not expect the average consumer to know this, I would expect it of people that post on this forum. So this complaint (which I read at least 5 times here) is no longer an issue.
Yes, AW gen 1 is not enough to entice that many persons yet (only 15M or so...). This is a very new category (much more so than "smartphones" at the time of iPhone launch), and most need to see the benefits right in front of them before they make a decision to purchase. It will take time to refine the product & for "usefulness" knowledge to make its way into popular culture.
I am not one to criticize someone who says the AW isn't for them at this time, but I do think it funny when people use the reason "it isn't something I absolutely must have, or can't live without". People buy things they "don't need" every day - for fashion, for entertainment, for a whim. People don't all wear the same clothes, purchased for lowest price and maximum function. They don't buy the cheapest electronics, nor furniture. Most prefer to live in homes that have some character. None of that is necessary or must have - but they still want to do it.
It has been 1 year & 5 months since Apple Watch 1 was launched, and 2 years since it was announced. It is well overdue for a new model to generate increased sales.
I remember crying when I received one as a gift on Christmas Eve 2015. I knew from being a chat agent for fruit company that I would have to start working out or the AW would taunt me.
Fast forward to now..... Yes, I am 50 pounds lighter. At 5'3 1/2 inches, 117 pounds. Mom of five, I can't imagine my days without my AW. I was not really excited when they came out and would have NEVER purchased one. My husband got me the AWS and he purchased AW with loop. He feels not need to work out and has not lost a pound. He just loves everything APPLE.
I remember crying when I received one as a gift on Christmas Eve 2015. I knew from being a chat agent for fruit company that I would have to start working out or the AW would taunt me.
Fast forward to now..... Yes, I am 50 pounds lighter. At 5'3 1/2 inches, 117 pounds. Mom of five, I can't imagine my days without my AW. I was not really excited when they came out and would have NEVER purchased one. My husband got me the AWS and he purchased AW with loop. He feels not need to work out and has not lost a pound. He just loves everything APPLE.
wait... a fitbit watch is being compared to Apple Watch?!?!
People compare obsolete Android phones to current generation iPhones all the time, why not here?
Fundamentally, it's not even the right category. It's like comparing a Nokia 2260 to a N95, the former is a basic device that operates on the slow network, and the latter was the bleeding edge device that every Nokia nerd wanted and ordered off eBay at a premium (the very year the original iPhone came out.)
The fitbit devices are "basic" devices that happen to have a clock in them, usually as their default face. This is by design because it lasts 5 days without a charge. Where as the Apple Watch barely lasts 18 hours. Who is going to only wear their watch for 3/4 of a day? This is not how you get people to sleep for 6 hours. So effectively the Apple Watch is a fashion piece, not a functional one.
Sure, Apple may seem to value style over substance, but that only goes for devices that don't run on batteries. Devices that do (eg iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook Pro/Air) are already short-changed in the battery life department, and do not last as long as people actually want to use them for, thus people lug around batteries that are larger than the device. Do you want to be doing that with a watch? No.
I love reading the comments when an article that isn't kissing Apple's ass is posted. So many of you bitches react like a teenage girl who read something bad about Bieber on twitter.
I'd say many defenders don't even have the watch. Those of us criticising it do, because we have real world criticisms. And I'll probably buy the next one as well. And criticise it if necessary.
Based on what I have read here and on other threads, most defending the Apple Watch claim to have one. I certainly do, and absolutely will defend it against false statements or purely negative commentary. It is a first generation product, and of course things can/should improve in all areas. That said, I think it is by far one of the best "first gen" products that Apple has released in terms of quality, stability, fit/finish, and new functionality.
Personally, I am very satisfied with the functionality of AW1. Everyone's mileage may vary, but I have found usefulness in the following areas: - Time functions (changeable watch faces, alarms, timers, stop watch). Always accurate and more useful than a regular watch. - Apple Pay. Perhaps a result of the Canadian landscape, but I can use AW Apple Pay very broadly (multiple times every day) and for up to $100. - Notifications. Texts, sports scores, meeting notifications. - Calendar - seeing my next meeting at a glance, and getting a taptic notification - Phone (I leave my phone on silent mode, and get notified via taptic on AW, ensuring I only pull out the phone if it is a call I want to answer) - Fitness and health. Motivated to exercise more, and more interested in following the calories burned & heart rate trends - Music. Use BT headphones at the gym, so no need to take the phone or carry separate iPod (but yes, existing BT headphones have lots of issues themselves...) - Swappable bands. Keeps the watch interesting to change bands for occasions / uses. Comfort and fit of bands better than any watch I have had. - Minor interest/amusement in maps usage, Apple TV remote, Apple Wallet for boarding passes, etc.
Watch OS 3 will certainly improve things, especially in the time to launch apps. While I would not expect the average consumer to know this, I would expect it of people that post on this forum. So this complaint (which I read at least 5 times here) is no longer an issue.
Yes, AW gen 1 is not enough to entice that many persons yet (only 15M or so...). This is a very new category (much more so than "smartphones" at the time of iPhone launch), and most need to see the benefits right in front of them before they make a decision to purchase. It will take time to refine the product & for "usefulness" knowledge to make its way into popular culture.
I am not one to criticize someone who says the AW isn't for them at this time, but I do think it funny when people use the reason "it isn't something I absolutely must have, or can't live without". People buy things they "don't need" every day - for fashion, for entertainment, for a whim. People don't all wear the same clothes, purchased for lowest price and maximum function. They don't buy the cheapest electronics, nor furniture. Most prefer to live in homes that have some character. None of that is necessary or must have - but they still want to do it.
It has been 1 year & 5 months since Apple Watch 1 was launched, and 2 years since it was announced. It is well overdue for a new model to generate increased sales.
Well said. I will supplement this with my own personal user account. I work in an operating room environment where I function in a critical role that does not typically allow me to leave the OR suite for the duration of the case which can last 3 - 10 hours. In addition to my the performance of my duties in the OR I am required to handle a significant amount of administrative/supportive duties on a daily basis. In this environment it is disruptive to answer or make phone calls and as such my phone is always set to silent. So in my work case I get the following benefits.
1. Haptic feedback is an absolute lifesaver. Prior to Apple Watch, I can't count the number of times I had an urgent iMessage come through requesting immediate support and I simply failed to notice my phones vibration, and by the time I noticed time had rendered any response by me irrelevant. Being able to feel the haptic feedback has completely solved this issue and by extension has made me far more effective in my role. This has helped so much so that after the new Apple Watch is released we will start issuing Apple Watch along with the iPhones provided to each employee.
2. Reminders to stand. I spend a lot of time looking sitting looking at a screen, being reminded to stand up has made a noticeable reduction in the stiffness in my lower back and neck.
3. Fitness. The fitness tracker constantly reminds me that I am not as active as I need to be. While, truthfully, this has not been enough for me to make great changes in my health routine or lack thereof, it does prompt me to make smaller changes such as opting for the stairs instead of an elevator or opting for a walk over a drive for shorter distances when time is not a factor.
IDC reports are typically junk as they skew the data with the "other" category and make nonsensical comparisons ex Apple vs the rest of the world, ASP $30 fitness tracker vs ASP $500 smart watch.
I was in the market for a fitness tracker earlier this year, and bought the Garmin Forerunner 235 (FR235)...but I knew that I wanted a serious fitness tracking device, and bought one. The Apple Watch (AW) outclasses the Garmin in many ways - nicer notifications, better integration with the iPhone, Apple Pay, unlocks your laptop, higher resolution display - but the Garmin's fitness tracking features were much better implemented (e.g., heart rate zone training when you're running, built-in GPS, sunlight-visible LCD display) so that's the direction I went. With that said, the FR235 was in the same price range as an Apple Watch and I seriously considered going the AW route because many of the Garmin's features can be added to the AW by 3rd party apps. In the end, the feature that "chose" the Forerunner for me was the *lack* of a touchscreen - for me, at least, I found it much easier to control the FR through the side buttons while running than control the AW through the crown and touchscreen. Others, obviously, may have different experiences. Unadvertised side benefit - the FR235's battery lasts about 6-8 days with about an hour of GPS use every morning. Most AW owners I've spoken to get about 1-2 days by comparison. Based on my experience with the FR235, I'm not surprised that Garmin's sales have doubled in the last year - it's a good product, with good fit and durability, great battery life, and well-implemented fitness features if that's what you're looking for...and I get that not everyone wants that. As a side benefit, it can display notifications, control your music player, and accept/reject phone calls.
I cross-shopped the Fitbit Blaze and Surge but they just seemed, frankly, junky and clunky compared to the Apple Watch and the Garmin...like products from 2009 and 2005 trying to compete with products from 2015 (both AW and FR235 came out last year). My brother is a Fitbit devotee and has had both the Surge and the Blaze; his Surge barely lasted a year and was replaced at least once. His past Fitbits all seemed to barely make it a year.
I wore a Microsoft Band for a while (got one on closeout last year on a whim), and while it did some things better than the FR235 (sleep tracking and notifications, for example), its fitness features seemed like an unfinished beta that no one could be bothered to finish coding. The fit of the Band was awful, battery life was acceptable (I got about 2 days per charge, using the GPS for an hour every day), but durability was a huge problem...it just disintegrated after about 10 months of use. Apparently the Band 2 was even less durable than the Band 1 was, so I had to scratch it off my list.
Why is IDC comparing the watch with basic wearables?
It's a continuum, very basic (ie, one-trick-pony) fitness trackers on one end and, perhaps, the Apple watch on the other. But between them there is a very broad array of devices. So where do you draw the line to separate them into categories? I'm most familiar with Garmin's lineup, and there you can find relatively inexpensive "fitness watches" which display notifications from your iPhone (which is probably the #1 use for the Apple watch). You can get watches that have HR monitors and some that let you install 3rd party apps (which, yes, pale in comparison to apps on the Apple watch). Would you put their $600 fenix in the same category as the Apple watch or lump it in with the basic fitness trackers?
I think some folks here believe the Apple watch is in a category of it's own. Ok, that's fine. Apple dominates the market for high-end wearables. But, if the Apple watch is overkill for what most folks need, wouldn't that make the Apple watch subject to competition from lower-end wearables? If so, it's valid to make a cross-category comparison.
I think the issue is not comparing Fitbits to Apple Watch, rather comparing what people are wanting in wearables to what the Apple Watch offers. It seems to be overkill and especially at $300-$600 a pop.
If Apple Watch is trying to identify a new segment between classic traditional high-scale watches and low-end health monitoring only models, it would appear that this is a niche market at best, and more importantly, not sustainable by Apple's sales expectations....their kind of R&D can't be paid for with only 1.6 million sold.
Market share? I don't need no stinking market share, just five me the money. Apple Watch revenue second only to Rolex in total revenue (in just 18 months).
Comments
Personally, I am very satisfied with the functionality of AW1. Everyone's mileage may vary, but I have found usefulness in the following areas:
- Time functions (changeable watch faces, alarms, timers, stop watch). Always accurate and more useful than a regular watch.
- Apple Pay. Perhaps a result of the Canadian landscape, but I can use AW Apple Pay very broadly (multiple times every day) and for up to $100.
- Notifications. Texts, sports scores, meeting notifications.
- Calendar - seeing my next meeting at a glance, and getting a taptic notification
- Phone (I leave my phone on silent mode, and get notified via taptic on AW, ensuring I only pull out the phone if it is a call I want to answer)
- Fitness and health. Motivated to exercise more, and more interested in following the calories burned & heart rate trends
- Music. Use BT headphones at the gym, so no need to take the phone or carry separate iPod (but yes, existing BT headphones have lots of issues themselves...)
- Swappable bands. Keeps the watch interesting to change bands for occasions / uses. Comfort and fit of bands better than any watch I have had.
- Minor interest/amusement in maps usage, Apple TV remote, Apple Wallet for boarding passes, etc.
Watch OS 3 will certainly improve things, especially in the time to launch apps. While I would not expect the average consumer to know this, I would expect it of people that post on this forum. So this complaint (which I read at least 5 times here) is no longer an issue.
Yes, AW gen 1 is not enough to entice that many persons yet (only 15M or so...). This is a very new category (much more so than "smartphones" at the time of iPhone launch), and most need to see the benefits right in front of them before they make a decision to purchase. It will take time to refine the product & for "usefulness" knowledge to make its way into popular culture.
I am not one to criticize someone who says the AW isn't for them at this time, but I do think it funny when people use the reason "it isn't something I absolutely must have, or can't live without". People buy things they "don't need" every day - for fashion, for entertainment, for a whim. People don't all wear the same clothes, purchased for lowest price and maximum function. They don't buy the cheapest electronics, nor furniture. Most prefer to live in homes that have some character. None of that is necessary or must have - but they still want to do it.
It has been 1 year & 5 months since Apple Watch 1 was launched, and 2 years since it was announced. It is well overdue for a new model to generate increased sales.
Fast forward to now..... Yes, I am 50 pounds lighter. At 5'3 1/2 inches, 117 pounds. Mom of five, I can't imagine my days without my AW. I was not really excited when they came out and would have NEVER purchased one. My husband got me the AWS and he purchased AW with loop. He feels not need to work out and has not lost a pound. He just loves everything APPLE.
He lives for these anecdotes.
[email protected]
...and welcome to AI...
Fundamentally, it's not even the right category. It's like comparing a Nokia 2260 to a N95, the former is a basic device that operates on the slow network, and the latter was the bleeding edge device that every Nokia nerd wanted and ordered off eBay at a premium (the very year the original iPhone came out.)
The fitbit devices are "basic" devices that happen to have a clock in them, usually as their default face. This is by design because it lasts 5 days without a charge. Where as the Apple Watch barely lasts 18 hours. Who is going to only wear their watch for 3/4 of a day? This is not how you get people to sleep for 6 hours. So effectively the Apple Watch is a fashion piece, not a functional one.
Sure, Apple may seem to value style over substance, but that only goes for devices that don't run on batteries. Devices that do (eg iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook Pro/Air) are already short-changed in the battery life department, and do not last as long as people actually want to use them for, thus people lug around batteries that are larger than the device. Do you want to be doing that with a watch? No.
1. Haptic feedback is an absolute lifesaver. Prior to Apple Watch, I can't count the number of times I had an urgent iMessage come through requesting immediate support and I simply failed to notice my phones vibration, and by the time I noticed time had rendered any response by me irrelevant. Being able to feel the haptic feedback has completely solved this issue and by extension has made me far more effective in my role. This has helped so much so that after the new Apple Watch is released we will start issuing Apple Watch along with the iPhones provided to each employee.
2. Reminders to stand. I spend a lot of time looking sitting looking at a screen, being reminded to stand up has made a noticeable reduction in the stiffness in my lower back and neck.
3. Fitness. The fitness tracker constantly reminds me that I am not as active as I need to be. While, truthfully, this has not been enough for me to make great changes in my health routine or lack thereof, it does prompt me to make smaller changes such as opting for the stairs instead of an elevator or opting for a walk over a drive for shorter distances when time is not a factor.
IDC reports are typically junk as they skew the data with the "other" category and make nonsensical comparisons ex Apple vs the rest of the world, ASP $30 fitness tracker vs ASP $500 smart watch.
I cross-shopped the Fitbit Blaze and Surge but they just seemed, frankly, junky and clunky compared to the Apple Watch and the Garmin...like products from 2009 and 2005 trying to compete with products from 2015 (both AW and FR235 came out last year). My brother is a Fitbit devotee and has had both the Surge and the Blaze; his Surge barely lasted a year and was replaced at least once. His past Fitbits all seemed to barely make it a year.
I wore a Microsoft Band for a while (got one on closeout last year on a whim), and while it did some things better than the FR235 (sleep tracking and notifications, for example), its fitness features seemed like an unfinished beta that no one could be bothered to finish coding. The fit of the Band was awful, battery life was acceptable (I got about 2 days per charge, using the GPS for an hour every day), but durability was a huge problem...it just disintegrated after about 10 months of use. Apparently the Band 2 was even less durable than the Band 1 was, so I had to scratch it off my list.
I think some folks here believe the Apple watch is in a category of it's own. Ok, that's fine. Apple dominates the market for high-end wearables. But, if the Apple watch is overkill for what most folks need, wouldn't that make the Apple watch subject to competition from lower-end wearables? If so, it's valid to make a cross-category comparison.