It’s complicated.
What’s the point of the Apple Watch? As one of the suckers who bought the original Watch, I often fielded this question from friends. You can take the man out of Apple retail, but you can’t take Apple retail out of the man.
It was a difficult question to answer, and if you rewatch the keynote introducing the Watch, I’m not sure that Apple knew either. They were hyping “an incredibly precise timepiece” absolutely no one cared about, and the world didn’t fall in love with the friends ring or ‘digital touch’1 either. The first Apple Watch was like a delayed CCTV feed of your phone screen; it was quicker to just pick up your phone. Much like the original iPhone’s relationship with your Mac, Apple Watch had dependency issues. It simply wasn’t useful when separated from your phone.
2024 marks ten years since the Apple Watch was unveiled, and everything has changed. Once Apple Watch Series 2 bumped the lethargic processing power of the original Watch and added GPS, it became an excellent sports watch and soon an essential companion for your iPhone.
When I bought my first Mac, I was staying with my grandparents in Belfast during the university summer break of 2008. I had a new computer with an alien landscape compared to Windows, they didn’t have the internet, and YouTube wasn’t the universal repository of knowledge and nonsense it is now. So I picked up a copy of Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual and worked through it from cover to cover. It was the first time I’d systemically learned about using a computer rather than through experimentation, and by the end of the book, I knew more about Mac OS X than I had ever learned about Windows.
For today’s Mac switchers, Google and YouTube searches will have the answers, or you could read the free user guides, which I make a habit of reviewing for iOS and watchOS every few years.2
Yet, there is more to understanding technology than reading the instructions. Google and YouTube are great when you know which questions to ask, but what about questions you hadn’t thought to ask? The Apple Watch seems simple on its face (pun intended) but like the movement of a mechanical watch, there’s beautiful complexity beneath the surface. It’s simple to setup and use – everyone can track their health metrics and set up Apple Pay without much fuss – but there are also unwritten rules you won’t find in the instructions, which I’ve learned through years of experience.
Shut up!
Silence please
The Apple Watch has a powerful speaker, which you should use as little as possible. Just as loud phone calls and message notifications in a quiet train carriage are obnoxious, and blaring music and videos through a phone speaker should be punishable with jail time, it’s unbecoming for your watch to ping and chirp all day.
The ‘Taptic Engine’ on the Watch is one of Apple’s best inventions: it’s similar to modern phone haptics or ‘HD rumble’ on the Nintendo Switch. When you receive a notification, it’s a literal tap on the wrist from an assistant. It’s invisible to anyone except you, and subtle enough not to distract if you’re in the middle of a conversation. (If you’ve set an alarm or receive a phone call, that tab becomes a throbbing, miniature earthquake.)
I only ever take my Watch off silent when I’m running while using my iPhone for music and want to hear the pace breakdown every kilometre; if I forget to mute it again, the lack of silence is jarring.
Purge your notifications
When you receive a message, a tap on the wrist is useful. If your phone’s Lock Screen is constantly sprayed with notifications, then that tap becomes a deluge of nudges. There’s only one way around this: you need to purge those notifications once and for all, turn most of them off, and carefully consider what you allow in future.
I recommend:
- Set your Watch notifications to ‘mirror’ your phone. It’s easier to manage one set of permissions than two.
- Before you disable notifications, ask yourself: should I just delete this app? Do I want these social media apps and exploitative games in my life?
- Disable notifications for email (who needs them?) and anything on your Lock Screen you would have deleted without actioning anyway. You can do this quickly from the Lock Screen: gently swipe left on a notification, tap Options, then ‘Turn Off’. (’Add to Summary’ will also purge notifications from your Watch: I use this for new Music).
- Disable some Watch-specific notifications unless you really, really think they add value to your life: handwashing, mindfulness, and the ‘daily coaching’ under Activity. I keep the other Activity reminders on, they’re motivating! More on that later…
Getting personal
When your watch is attached to your wrist all day, it’s more of an explicit fashion statement than your phone. It’s an inherent more personal device, and there are two main ways to customise your watch to suit your personal style: straps, and faces.
Straps are obvious: you picked one when you bought the watch! My favourite is the Sport Loop, which is made from comfortable and breathable nylon and adjusts perfectly to your wrist size (important for accurate heart rate measurements during exercise). I’m wearing the orange and beige Trail Loop right now, the Ultra version of a Sport Loop. I also have a couple of Sport Bands, made from ‘high-performance fluoroelastomer’, a rubber-like material. These are waterproof and easy to clean, perfect for swimming, gardening, or anything where you don’t need heart rate accuracy while you work up a sweat. My fanciest band is a Milanese — a cheap knockoff, not a genuine Apple band! — which is a stainless steel mesh. Great for the office or when you’re dressing up nice, and very comfortable, but it shreds knitwear3.
Strap customisation is fairly obvious, but the real art of customising your Apple Watch comes through setting up multiple faces that meet your different needs and personas throughout the day with different complications. I have a face for work with my next calendar appointment, while making sure I’m taking regular stand breaks. My weekend faces focus on the weather, water consumption, and a compass for hiking. I have a dedicated fitness face with music front and centre, plus UV, so I remember sunscreen before a run. For formal events, I use a complication-free California face. Some of my faces (work and fitness) are tied to a Focus on my iPhone, so I can get into the right mindset before a workout or deep work.
The new Smart Stack feature in watchOS 10 lets you keep a few widgets underneath all your watch faces. Some faces like photos, portraits and the new Snoopy face looked pretty but with little practical utility: now that doesn’t matter, and you can drain your watch battery by summoning those charming Snoopy animations to your heart’s content. On the new Series 9 and Ultra 2, you can double-pinch your finger and thumb to scroll through the Smart Stack, which is genuinely useful.
One watchOS 10 feature I really dislike is the removal of swiping between watch faces. This feature returned to watchOS 10.2, but it needs to be enabled under Settings > Clock > Swipe to Switch Face. I suspect Apple did this to encourage use of Smart Stacks, and I’m glad they changed course. The nightmare is over. Trust me: you want this!
Another less obvious customisation trick: you can change which wrist your Watch is on, and you can choose whether the Digital Crown is on the left or right-hand side. I’m a leftie and prefer my Watch on my right wrist, with the crown on the left, so I can control it using my left index finger. There’s no right or wrong way to wear any watch, but the ability to change crown orientation is a big benefit over traditional analogue and digital watches.
Why so Siri-ous?
Despite the big touch screen and Digital Crown with that satisfying clicky action, you should primarily use your voice to interact with your Apple Watch. That’s a little off-putting because Siri has a justified reputation for unreliability, slowness, and general shittiness. I recently upgraded from an Apple Watch Series 4 to an Ultra 2, which has dedicated hardware to improve the speed and accuracy of Siri interactions and dictation (as does Series 9). It’s better for speed and accuracy, but the real question is whether it will convert your speech into the right actions. Fortunately, your usual voice interactions are fairly simple: sending messages, setting timers and alarms, adding reminders, checking the weather and calendar appointments all work well.
By default, you can raise your wrist and start talking. You don’t need the “Hey Siri” command, and you might want to turn that off, unless you want every device in your home lighting up when you want a cooking timer. Our house is full of iPhones, iPads, Macs, and a HomePod mini: every utterance of “Hey Siri” triggers a race where your devices fight over who’s closer and best placed to help.
Spin the (black) circle
The fitness tracking features of the Apple Watch are obvious. What’s less obvious, until you’ve strapped one to your wrist, is what a powerful fitness coach and motivator it can be.
The three Activity rings are the main fitness tracking gimmick, now ripped off in every other device: red for Move (active calories burned), green for Exercise minutes, blue for Stand (hours up and walking around for a few moments). Your Exercise and Stand goals are 30 minutes and 12 hours respectively, and they are great motivators, but Move is what really counts towards an activity streak.
There’s a fine art to balancing your Move goal. If you reach your goal every day for a week, your Watch will suggest increasing that goal. It will keep doing this until you exercise your legs off, so you need to exercise caution to get this right. You want to feel the urge to go for a walk or hop on a bike every day, but you don’t want to feel that your goal is unreachable (so why try?). My Move goal is set to 450 calories4. For me, that’s a few short walks or a 30-minute run.
Unlocking the data silo
My watch knows how high my feet are clearing the ground, and for how long, with every step I run, through algorithms alone. It can calculate measures like V̇O2 max with an accuracy that was previously unfathomable outside a dedicated fitness test. But that’s just in the moment of the workout: smartwatches are attached to you all day — and maybe all night; I don’t track my sleep — monitoring vital signs such as your heart rate and blood oxygen saturation. This creates vast troves of personal health data: your resting heart rate, heart rate variability (an important measure of recovery), and less obvious measures like your walking stability. The latter can prompt you to take interventions to improve your future health outcomes. It’s all available through the Health app on your phone. If you dip into the data sources, you will see a constant stream of data points passing from the Watch into Apple Health.
What makes an Apple Watch a more compelling tool for me than a Garmin or Coros watch, is that this data is also available to third-party apps through Apple Health APIs. It’s the same principle as the iPhone: the core apps are great, and the third-party apps make it that much greater.
I only use the built-in Workout app for running to ensure the best reliability and battery life. Tempo gives me a breakdown of my run intensity over time, tracks shoe wear (using tags) and gives quick access to metrics such as elevation and heart rate zones. It’s better than Strava Premium and far more affordable. I use Healthfit to export my runs, hikes, and bike rides manually to Strava for more control over the data. If you’ve previously synced running information to Runkeeper, Strava etc. and want to import it to Apple Health, check out Rungap.
I believe it’s only a matter of time before Apple exposes heart rate variability in the Fitness app to indicate your training effort – Garmin already provides this, and you can add it to your Apple Watch with Training Today. It’s free for the basics and while I don’t rely on it heavily, it seems to reliably know when I’ve been working hard.
Heartwatch exposes more heart rate data than you realised you had been tracking and partners well with Autosleep, another app by the same developer. Although I just said, “I don’t track my sleep”, that’s not strictly true; I don’t track it with my Watch every night. Instead, Autosleep assumes that when I’m not wearing my Watch and haven’t used my phone for a few minutes, I’m sleeping. 99% of the time that’s a valid assumption, and so I have reasonable sleep metrics without the stress of really keeping tabs on sleep, if I ever want them, which I usually do not. As much as I love health and fitness tracking, I can figure out for myself when I went to bed too late.
- Unbelievably, this feature still exists in watchOS 10 and iOS 17. Send your heartbeat to your spouse today! (?) ↩
- iOS 14 and watchOS 4 are the latest guides in my books library. Ironically, seems like a good time to review watchOS.↩
- Possibly a consequence of buying a counterfeit band ↩
- Note to self: include a long, tedious aside about kilojoules. Who likes them? Why does my watch try to default to KJ after I’ve insisted I want to see energy measurements in calories? I’m all for the metric system, but I just can’t accept kilojoules. ↩
