Apple Watch Series 2

My friend and old co-worker Brent Simmons on the Apple Watch (cherry picked from a post about Apple in general):

Here’s a case: my wife bought a Fitbit when I bought my Apple watch. I envy her iPhone app which is so much cooler than Apple’s fitness software; I envy her not having to charge her device every night; I envy her not having to wear a heavy thing on her wrist.

And her Fitbit does sleep tracking, which I’d like to do — but my Apple watch is charging while I sleep, and there’s no way I’d be comfortable sleeping with that bulky thing on my wrist anyway.

 I was not a fan of my original Apple Watch. The battery sucked. It was slow. The apps seemed useless. The sports band was uncomfortable. 

When WatchOS 3 came out I started to change my mind. I was part of a team that developed my first professionally released watch app. I also made my own for fun app. 

So I bought an Apple Watch Series 2 this year instead of upgrading my iPhone (which is a 6S+). I also bought one of the nylon weave bands.

The results?

I put my watch on this morning at 6:45am. Here’s the battery at 9pm:

For fun I decided to charge it for 20 minutes – about what it would take for me to take a shower and get dressed in the morning:

 

I’ve slept with it on many nights. The band is definitely the difference. I don’t even notice I have it on anymore. I’m more surprised when I look at my wrist and its not there then being annoyed at the band making me uncomfortable.

I also find myself taking time to meet my exercise and move goals everyday. I had a perfect month in October for both. I’m on track for the same in November. Forcing myself to do something that registers as exercise for 30 minutes everyday is pretty easy during the week as I walk ~2 miles to/from the train to the office but on weekends it really drives me to get outside. I’ve been doing 7 miles a day on the bike over the weekend the last two months or doing my own 30 minute workouts in the basement on days when that’s not feasible.

This morning when I saw the Thanksgiving Challenge I was in right away. I’ve been fighting with the idea that I might not hit my goal that day so maybe slipping for a day this month was OK. But now I’m even more driven to keep up the pace.

Is the Apple Watch perfect? No. But I’m happy that the engineering efforts at Apple are being spent on them instead of monitors and routers. I’m an Apple convert that never bought those things anyway. I could get what I needed elsewhere at a better price.

Next up for me I suppose is seeing if CloudKit can replace Dropbox and Flickr.

I don’t really trust in Apple web services…