The Apple Watch Review
by Joshua Ho & Brandon Chester on July 20, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Wearables
- Apple
- Mobile
- Apple Watch
Final Words
At the beginning of this review, I said that I haven’t worn watches in any consistent fashion for my entire life. In a lot of ways, this will be an accurate characterization for many people. With the rise of the cellphone and its network-synchronized time, it became pretty much pointless for most people to wear a watch. The ergonomic annoyances involved with wearing a wristwatch strongly outweighed whatever functionality it provided. In this context, Apple is really facing an uphill battle with the Apple Watch. Apple has to sell people on the concept of a watch all over again, and not just on the idea of a smarter watch, which is a challenge that they never faced in smartphone adoption.
There are so many aspects of the Apple Watch that really have to be considered before we figure out whether Apple has succeeded, so we have to break this down into multiple aspects. The first is the design, because people that wear wristwatches all the time don’t really approach this the same way others would. What seems normal to people that wear watches all day long is easily uncomfortable and annoying to people that aren’t used to wearing watches.
As a result, this kind of discomfort can easily result in a wearable that ends up thrown in a drawer somewhere to be forgotten, which won’t bode well for long-term gains. I’ve tried other wearables, but nothing really interested me because everything was uncomfortable in some way. Over time, these small annoyances just made it easy for me to decide that the functionality of the wearable was outweighed by the discomfort of the design.
The Apple Watch on the other hand doesn’t suffer from discomfort issues at all, and in this regard, Apple has arguably pushed the industry forward. For the most part, it’s a pretty safe bet that pretty much anyone will find a band design that they like. In the case of a band like the Milanese Loop band, the problems I’ve always had with traditional leather buckle bands are pretty much eliminated. The Sport band is rather traditional, but the material used helps to alleviate discomfort when sweat starts to wet the band and evenly distributes tension around the wrist.
Meanwhile, although Apple’s wristbands use a proprietary mechanism to lock into the watch, like the Lightning connector it makes a huge difference in user experience because it’s incredibly easy to swap out bands compared to just about every other watch or wearable I’ve seen. The design is also executed well, which is good enough that it doesn’t look out of place when comparing it to analog watches. We can talk about whether the watch is too thick but on the wrist it blends it well without significant problems. The one problem that I’ve noticed in terms of ergonomics is that long sleeves are a significant impediment to usability because I have to pull my sleeve back to use the watch.
One crucial aspect of the Apple Watch's design and accessibility is its size. Apple sells two versions for people with different wrist sizes, and this alone is something that distinguishes it from most other smart watches on the market today. Even with two sizes, the larger 42mm Apple Watch is still substantially smaller than most other wearables. This makes the Apple Watch accessible to a wide range of people, and it highlights an issue that is prevalent within this section of the wearable market which is that smart watches tend to be sized quite generously to accommodate large batteries and PCBs. While this is fine for users with larger wrists, it ends up excluding a large portion of the market. A user who feels most comfortable with the 38mm Apple Watch, for example, will almost certainly find a watch like the Moto 360 to be far too large.
Outside of design, the other critical aspect to getting a modern watch right is SoC, which sounds absolutely absurd for a timepiece. However, it's important to emphasize that Apple cannot afford to only sell Apple Watch to people who already believe that it is sufficient for a watch to only tell time; Apple Watch needs the performance to do more.
In this regard, Apple has targeted the SoC correctly for a 28nm HKMG process. A 520 MHz Cortex A7 is ultimately the right choice to make to focus as strongly as possible on perf/W for this platform, given that average power draw over the course of 18 hours can only be about 40-50 mW at most it’s important to make sure that the CPU voltage and frequency curves are in the right place for the TDP of a watch and that the CPU spends most of its time in an efficient mode of operation. The use of an appropriately-sized GPU for the watch form factor is also important, and helps with making power stay at the 40-50 mW average power consumption over the course of a day.
The one catch here is that at 28nm the performance that the watch can deliver is on the edge of what’s acceptable in terms of frame rate and loading times. Apple Watch really needs a better process technology in order to deliver more performance without compromising power consumption, and a move to a leading-edge FinFET process would go a long way towards accomplishing this thanks to the rather significant voltage improvements FinFETs afford.
Ultimately, hardware is just one part of the equation. Hardware innovation is impressive in its own right, but without an application there’s no value to the end user. Fortunately, WatchOS delivers in a very big way. Force Touch is consistently used throughout the UI to provide additional controls that otherwise would reduce information density. The Digital Crown is used to allow for information density that allows for precise zoom and scrolling in a way that I never really experienced with other wearables, and is really an integral part of the WatchOS UI as capacitive touch is almost never used outside of tapping in everyday use.
Key features like fitness, music playback, text messaging, and email are all executed well with very little need for end user intervention which is really critical on a device where any sort of text input is difficult to say the least. Notifications are also well-handled and work as expected, with no strange behavior like not dismissing notifications on the phone if dismissed from the watch, and appropriate haptic feedback for various notifications. Apple Pay also works well from the software side even if there are some ergonomic pitfalls.
Out of all the wearable OSes I’ve seen, it really feels like WatchOS is what iOS was for smartphone OSes. Of course, Apple Watch isn’t perfect in the software department. Due to the relatively weak SoC in this version of the Apple Watch there’s a lot of time spent staring at loading screens when the app is loading from the phone or if the app needs to pull information from the network. There are also a surprising number of cases where the UI visibly runs below 60 FPS or otherwise stutters, which suggests that an extra CPU core and/or higher clocks would help a lot. There are also some problems with how multiple notifications from either the same or different apps are handled, but overall the execution on the software side is excellent.
Getting back to hardware, aspects like the display and battery life are also solid when examined in a vacuum. The display could probably be improved upon from an energy efficiency perspective, but given limited testing tools it’s difficult to have the same data that we do on the smartphone side, so this assumption is almost purely based on power testing of LG OLED and Samsung OLED displays in various smartphones. The brightness of this display is acceptable, and the calibration is excellent by any standard which surprised me given the reduced need for color accuracy in a wearable display. Subjectively, I didn’t have a lot of trouble with seeing the display in daytime but given the use of the more conventional glass on the Sport edition reflection should be greatly reduced relative to variants with the sapphire lens.
Although we don't have an objective battery life test, the Apple Watch never failed to last a full day, and charge time is acceptable although nowhere as fast as something with wired fast charging. This sounds like a relatively short comment, and it's because I sincerely never worried about battery life. Range anxiety just isn't a problem like it is on smartphones.
The Taptic Engine is also a seemingly simple change, but the result of a modified linear actuator incorporating the speaker has a pretty enormous effect because notifications become impossible to miss. Apple claimed that the haptic feedback would feel like someone is tapping you on the wrist, and that’s actually entirely accurate. I normally don’t pay that much attention to haptic feedback in something like a smartphone, but in this case it’s such a big deal because it’s far quieter than conventional vibration yet immediately obvious no matter the situation. I’ve missed notifications before on my phone despite strong vibration feedback, but I’ve never missed a notification on the watch because of this new haptic feedback system.
In light of all of this, we have to try and split up this review into multiple parts. Although this is a review of the Apple Watch, the Apple Watch will ultimately be quickly forgotten with the launch of future iterations of the Apple Watch. After all, Apple is not trying to sell the world on the idea of a smarter watch, but the idea of a watch altogether.
For those still deciding on whether the first Apple Watch makes sense, I have no reservations in saying that it’s the best wearable I’ve ever used. However, at the same time I find it hard to recommend this first-generation Apple Watch. It’s clear that there are far too many obvious areas to improve upon, areas where Moore’s law will help to dramatically improve the experience. In the case of smartphones, Moore’s law made it possible to deliver true all-day battery life and fluid app performance. After spending a few months with the Apple Watch, all I can see is a need for more compute and battery life, like what happened with smartphones.
Finally, we get back to the question of whether Apple will be sell people on the concept of a watch. In the months since I first used the watch I’ve ended up wearing it every day. I distinctly noticed its absence when I forgot the charger on a trip. I don’t know if Apple will succeed in convincing others of the utility of a watch, but they’ve definitely convinced me.
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Murloc - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
First!Murloc - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
the reviewer has no hair??ianmills - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
HAHAHAHA exactly. The apple watch is reviewed by someone who is self-concious enough to shave their arm hair. This explains why the review is so positive. Some people find self-esteem in odd places...supermoon - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
That's just what some people's wrists look like bruh, including mine. what are you grasping at??dsumanik - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
This entire article (photos and content) has been 'photoshopped' by apple PR. Hair and skin smoothed, bokeh added....look at how the watch is posed in the shots, it is amateur photography heavily post processed....in a lame viral marketing attempt.ANANDTECH STOP TRYING TO SELL US SH*T.
APPLE SAMSUNG CORSAIR WHATEVER
IF I WANT A COMMERCIAL, ILL GO TO THE MFG WEBSITE.
PS.
EVERYTONE IN INTERNET LAND THE REVIEWERS FORGOT TO TELL YOU THAT THIS WATCH DOES
NOTHING.
ZIP.
ZILCH.
NADA.
WITHOUT AN IPHONE.
IT COSTS $400 + AN IPHONE EASILY PUSHING THE PRICE OVER 1K.
PS
GO SEE IT IN THE STORE, ITS CHUNKY AND PRETTY CHEAP LOOKING, NOT LIKE APPLE'S WEBSITE PHOTOS AT ALL.
GO SEE FOR YOURSELF.
12K FOR THE 'EDITION' ?????????????
LOOKS LIKE IT BELONGS RIGHT AT HOME IN THE WALMART ELECTRONICS SECTION!
LOL!
navysandsquid - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Hate on brother lol butt hurt much its ok enjoy your droid turbo lolRyan Smith - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
"This entire article (photos and content) has been 'photoshopped' by apple PR. Hair and skin smoothed, bokeh added....look at how the watch is posed in the shots, it is amateur photography heavily post processed....in a lame viral marketing attempt."While we do use Photoshop for editing (once you get past basic cropping, you probably want Photoshop), to be clear here these photos haven't received any significant processing. The only work we do on our photos is lens/sensor correction and auto toning.
The fact of the matter is that Josh is an excellent photographer (the best one among us, in fact), which is how he's able to pull off these amazing shots. So the fact that you think it has been heavily edited is flattering in a sense; we didn't have to edit them, we were able to take those photos naturally in the first place.
And no, no one from Apple PR has touched the photos. Or the article.
BittenRottenApple - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Worship the holy apple.The apple way, selling over expensive crap to stupid consumers that like to
get robbed.
This has been a disastrous launch in every respect. The iwatch is such an
ugly piece of crap, it is truly unbelievable how a company, formerly known for
its remarkable design, dares to put out such a crap ton of shit. Some
characteristics are glaringly obvious and inherent to it: over expensive,
hardly innovative, limited functionality and usability (need of an iPhone to
make it work), looks exactly like a toy watch and so on.
There are of course way better smart watches out there, especially from the
likes of Samsung, Sony, Motorola, Asus, LG, simply put, there is no need for
another piece of over expensive junk.
Regardless of what the casing and strap are, it's still maybe $8 worth of electronics at best, a painfully tiny screen, awful battery life, absolute dependence on an iPhone for proper function, and in reality adding extra time to decide if the message your phone just pinged your wrist with is worth pulling the phone out for to reply with.
The smart watch is a dumb idea in its current form. The Apple icrapWatch (tm) with its "Wealthy - Rich - Look how obscenely rich I am" case material tiers (seriously, the upgrade from plastic to red leather band is $7k? Not even a gold band available to justify that $17k price?) is the ultimate expression of that.
Maybe in 5 years or so a transparent OLED screen over a traditional watch with these sensors to pop-up notifications long enough to be noticed but not need to be charged every two hours is when it'll make sense, but for now it's a useless gimmick that nobody really needs.
Let's face it, the Apple Watch is a total and utter failure. The one called Sport edition doesn’t even has a dust, shock and water resistant exterior and thus fails in nearly every "sports" related usage scenario, albeit still costing nearly as much as an iPad, or, you know, a real watch, which works for years to come.
And the luxury one? Oh god, 17k+ for this utter crapicious experience. If you’re a millionaire, donate that 17k+ to the EFF, the communist party, an union or consider that such an amount of money could save lives in many third world countries or help to preserve nature. Besides that, it doesn’t even look that luxurious compared face to face to Rolex standards, more like some sort of ugly, chubby toy enclosed in a thin, and tiny gold case. The functionality provided, if one even dares to call it that way, are utter crap too, nothing new, nothing exciting here, nothing Samsung, LG, Pebbles haven't been offering for years on a far superior basis. For example the Pebbles watch which costs
less than 79$ and has 8 days of battery life, shows many of the notifications and info someone might need, all the while being water and dust proof, with changeable wristbands. Seriously, fuck this overpriced, environmentally obscene, eco terroristic icrapWatch (TM).
Yet another fine addition to the long list of "Terrible Products Apple Makes to Gouge Money out of People".
The new icrapWatch (tm) is a testament to Apple's collapsing technical acumen. They eliminate all ports providing no cable based connectivity at all? This craven stupidity should send the last adherents running. But running to what? Windows isn't even a viable option anymore, since it now is the most widespread commercial NSA gathering tool available, closely followed by Android, iOS and OS X.
It's a sad day for people who need real smartwatches. Jony Ive is a pompous, clueless hack who should be fired and shot on the spot (or torn apart by a horde of rabid dogs) for introducing crippling regressions like this one.
Look at this POS: No USB port, which won’t require an adapter to do anything. So if you aren’t going to require an adapter anyway, why not make that nonexistent port a modern port one: Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt can carry USB, video, Ethernet, external storage... ALL AT ONCE. And it can be daisy-chained, which would be hugely important when the icrapWatch (tm) would have ONLY ONE PORT. So WTF is Apple doing in not making its nonexistant port into a thunderbolt port?
And again, are you kidding me? No thunderbolt connector? Now every sorry user of this pos doesn’t have to find a thunderbolt to USB C, a USB C to USB to HDMI, a USB to USB 3.0 period, a USB C to USB connector for apple’s time machine and also does not manage to don't short circuit all that with the AC/DC to USB C connectors, seriously ? Not worth 200$ new pile of hairy connectors for the brand new icrapWatch (tm), and that is called a revolution nowadays? No ********** way, the Pebbles is way superior, period.
By the way, they're perpetrating no connectors at all. Thunderbolt is a much-needed step to a modern I/O standard. No connector is an outdated, abused standard that was designed primarily for Rolex watches. It's not suitable for external storage, video, or anything else requiring bulk data transfer with minimal CPU overhead. A nonexistant connector at all is a regression, a major step BACKWARD.
Starting at $349.00----Less than $8.00 worth of hardware = ~$341.00 premium to use icrapWatch OS instead of windows. (Honestly the most expensive component of this icrapWatch (tm) is probably the screen.)
Anyone with real work to do will not even be able to buy this thing. My friend’s last Air was neat in that it was small and lasted all day, but it was so under-powered, it was frustrating. I can only imagine how limited this machine will be.
Who cares about price, weight and size, when this product is crippled by a hopelessly defective design? You can't hook up a power adapter and external storage at the same time. You can't hook up an external display and external storage. Hell, you can't even plug in a thumb drive!
This product is the most asinine piece of shit Apple has produced, and that includes the (thankfully) short-lived Shuffle that could only be controlled by a gimped Morse code.
$270 less gets you the new Pebbles which will eat the crapWatch's lunch.
If you need to do a lot of processor intensive work, than you would not even go near this thing. It would be useless to you. If you need to crunch spreadsheets or are heavy in corporate analysis, this icrapWatch (tm) would also be useless to you.
This is the kind of icrapWatch (tm) that Apple sells a lot of. This icrapWatch (tm) is largely useless for anything other than email and facebook. It cannot store many files, it cannot process much information, and it has no external port. There is nothing wrong with using this icrapWatch (tm) for casual tasks, but it is CERTAINLY not a productivity machine.
It is what it is. A status symbol/statement. Or some other statement. A statement that you just bought a $349 or icrapWatch(tm) with a $341 or more case so you can show off in front of your hipster isheep friends.
I hate to stick to Apple only facts here, but Apple said that the current Samsung Smatwatch is 24% thicker than this new icrapWatch (tm). That does NOT mean that the new icrapWatch (tm) is 24% thinner than the current Samsung Smatwatch , it means that it is ~20% thinner than the current Samsung Smatwatch. They clearly phrased it that way to make it sound more impressive and hence dupe the consumer, aka stupid isheep.
So, it's a toy watch plus with a display and no over expensive dongle so you can’t do everything a Pebbles can do, at more than four times the price while looking posh.
And here I thought technology was about function over form. I get it, functional art; art I can do things my phone does, but in a space that anyone can see me doing it, stylishly. Crippled and non standard in-house branded "business" software does great, can't do anything really artistic on it except maybe GarageBand or stock filter photo edits to my innumerable selfies, but it's got that partially eaten fruit on the back that screams "money I'm too stupid to keep or invest wisely."
Take my money!
I wouldn't hold my breath.
This is apple's marketing strategy: mind-numbing markup on dirt-cheap, mediocre icrapWare (tm). They throw together a cheap little toy like icrapWatch (tm), pretty it up with silver or gold paint, and ride the wave of ignorance, outrageous markup, and marketing that they've been using as a business model for many, many years now. The only thing Apple has ever made that's less worthless than all the other crap their conspirators like Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd excrete all day and night by taking advantage of child labour are iOS and OS X which, besides being notoriously crippled and constrained walled gardens, aren’t even worth the hassle unless you also dumped thousands of dollars into other apple products.
Many apple owners I’ve encountered never stop trying to belittle and demean others because they don’t have a Macbook or an iPhone (or an icrapWatch (tm) for that matter) and then try to act like their overpriced apple products are overall better when they are certainly not, by any standard.
Luxury cars, while still worthless crash grabs, usually offer some quality and features that are actually somewhat superior to cheaper competing vehicles and models.
icrapWatch (tm) such as this start already expensive as hell with little performance to warrant such outrageous costs. Apple isn’t the luxury car of anything. It’s the luxury car DESIGN with a 4-cylinder under the hood and a tape-deck in the sound system, all with the price tag of "luxury". They sell laptops made cheap in china, using child labour and the same hardware you can find in SO many other laptops, slap their OS on it, put it in a thin case, and then markup the price by 300% to 600%. These are the facts. This icrapWatch (tm) in question is nowhere NEAR worth that kind of money. I mean, smartwatches in general are overpriced, but apple has made their entire business model out of extreme markups backed by clever marketing with little actual technological superiority of any kind. Every single apple product on the market can be outperformed in every way by comparable products. Apple icrapWatches (tm) can be outperformed by smartwatches that are FAR FAR cheaper while relying on older tech. The only thing that apple has that nobody else does is OSX and iOS, their operating systems. These are mediocre operating systems, but they are literally designed to be limited on anything it determines to be "non-apple hardware". Other operating systems can be installed on just about any computer you can slap together, whereas OSX is specifically and deliberately designed to be non-functional on ANYTHING that isn’t made by apple. It’s nothing but a cash-grab.
Apple is indeed playing run-of-the-mill capitalism, they try to capitalize on the ignorance of the average consumer with marketing campaigns designed to make you assume you're getting your money's worth.
There are millions of consumers who are on the fence, who are actually interested in buying something that's worth the money they spend. Those people deserve factual information and do not deserve to be exploited for their ignorance on the topic. So excuse me if I have a problem with it. College students especially, who don’t have a lot to spend in the first place, are being taken advantage of in every area of their life. Buying a smartwatch should be one less area of exploitation. This is why I have a problem with apple and with many other companies and services that attempt to capitalize on ignorance.
Years down the road when the batteries in this model are dead and you have to keep it plugged in just to use then you'll have no way to plug in a flash drive or an external hard drive. I don't care how sexy it looks: sometimes and more often than not less means a serious lack of functionality.
We can only hope that consumers send this piece of diabolic garbage to oblivion, as they did the idiotic iPod Shuffle that could only be controlled with Morse code over a proprietary headphone wire.
The Apple Iphone 1 and Ipad 1 might have been innovative at their time,
but since then, the bitten apple has been continuously rotting from the inside
outwards, always swarmed by millions of Iworms which regale themselves with its
rotten flesh, not forgetting all other Americans who support apple by means of
their tax dollars to finance its bought US Treasury/Government bond interest rates.
Last but not least, every Apple product includes a direct hotlink to the NSA,
free of charge, something that might make it a good value, after all.
Ceterum censeo Applem esse delendam.
twanto - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
"There is nothing wrong with using this icrapWatch (tm) for casual tasks, but it is CERTAINLY not a productivity machine." I was really hoping it could handle some spreadsheets and a bit of 3D rendering, but I guess not.This post was either satire or the greatest literary achievement by someone with a bonus chromosome 21.
Schickenipple - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
Word. If you are trying to create spreadsheets on your watch, or any screen that small, you are an idiot.