The Death of an Apple Watch ☠️

After going for a swim with my Apple Watch on, it stopped working the following days. Already two years ago, when I went swimming in salt water, its function to blow out water stopped working. Now, the final blow—or no blow, which might have been the culprit.

Here's some last words.

I've always loved my Apple Watch. Its primary selling point was to have something in my life that motivated me to exercise. And it did! The workout rings pushed me to achieve my movement and calorie goals; goals that I never thought about setting, while I was still Apple Watchless. It even decided I needed "standing goals", which is weird and I'm still not convinced that I actually do, even after four years of being an Apple Watch user.

Another selling point was that I could track my workouts and listen to music without having to carry my phone around. I just downloaded music on Spotify and went about my runs! Now, I can't say that this experience always went smoothly. Issues with downloading music to my watch were quite common; if not to say: typical. Over the years, the downloading functionality became a little more reliable but until the very end of my watch's life, still far from convenient. I actually had to plan far in advance whenever I wanted to download new music—instead of minutes before I went about my run. As it turns out—I never did. I just ended up complaining every single time: why haven't I downloaded new music again? I also had occasional trouble connecting my AirPods to the watch and boy did that make me furious.

But yeah, all in all, it was pretty sweet to do my exercise phoneless. I never wanted to have the cellular version of the Apple Watch—it wasn't just about the convenience of not having to carry around a phone but also that I often choose to have time away from my it.

Apart from that, the Apple Watch had some other useful features. Often, when I returned from my morning runs, I would grab something from the bakery on my way back, conveniently paying for it with Apple Pay, which works offline; super convenient because I never have my wallet on me when I run.

The watch was obviously deeply ingrained in the Apple ecosystem, which allowed me to control the playback of other Apple devices in my vicinity: when I played music on my iPhone in the living room, I could pause the music, turn up the volume or skip a track using the watch, while I was cooking in the kitchen. And then of course, by far the most used feature of them all: locating my phone whenever I misplace it, which tends to happen a couple of times per day. In these situations, it came quite handy to use the watch's control center to make my phone play a sound.

You can't trust the Apple Watch as a stopwatch tough, which sounds absurd because after all, as its name suggest, you would expect it to have the essential features of any watch out there. But it happened often that I started a stopwatch or a timer, left the app and returned to it some time later, only to find that the stopwatch/timer was reset. I can't understand how a watch can be so unfit when it comes to taking the time.

In the last weeks of using my Apple Watch I changed my habit of listening to music when I went on my runs as I shifted more to podcasts. Downloading podcast episodes is even worse than downloading music. It takes a considerable amount of time and you need to make sure to leave the screen on while you wait. Downloading podcast episodes apparently should also work while you charge the watch, but this has never worked for me. Anyway, in these last weeks, even though I was still in possession of a working watch, and even though this was one of its primary selling features, I started to carry around my phone on my runs. And while this was a little annoying, the user experience of downloading podcasts was so awful, I really saw no other way.

My Apple Watch died on me well over a month ago and in all this time it took me to write this post there has been a new development. Here I was, ready to put my mind in order and already clear about my intentions that I didn't want to have it fixed. While many of its features are convenient, I decided that I can live my life without it. And then my dad sends me his old Apple Watch Series 5. For two weeks now, it has been sitting in its box, unopened and unwanted.

I think I've made my peace and don't need another Apple Watch for the time being. And considering that I'm currently looking to rid myself of optional technology, this might be for the better.