On Friday, Best Buy started selling the Apple Watch in select stores, marking the first time that the wearable will be sold outside a boutique or an Apple Store.
It’s arguably a bigger test for the Watch than its initial debut, since it’s launching into what could be less friendly, less tech-savvy territory. After all, the Apple faithful and the tech-minded aren’t really the ones who need to be convinced about this device; Apple should be most interested in mass-market appeal.
And the mass market? They don’t think about the speed of the processor and they certainly don’t read the instruction booklet. They want to know how it works at the gym, while rushing through the airport and at night while trying to read a book to toddlers.
So for a more everyday take on what it’s like to live with the Watch, in addition to spending time with it myself, I asked three of my colleagues to try life with the Watch for a few days and write up their observations. Here’s what we found.
The fitness buff: Danielle Douglas-Gabriel covers student debt for The Washington Post, and also teaches fitness classes. Here’s her take:
I’m not much for sporting heart-rate or calorie trackers while working out. The sweat on my brow and occasional panting are usually enough to let me know that I’m working hard. Still, I was curious to see how the Activity app on the iWatch would track my workout. Fitness devices are typically marketed to runners, not folks like me who lift weights and do high-intensity interval training. To get a good read on the watch, I took a variety of classes: strength training, boot camp and yoga. The results were a bit disappointing.
After a 55 minute boot camp, consisting of jump squats, burpees and vigorous push-ups, the app recorded a mere 180 calories burnt. Really? I was killing it in that class. Sure, there was a five minute warm up and five minute stretching, but I expected to burn at least 250 calories. Fine.
To mix it up, I taught a 55-minute strength training class, took a 55-minute yoga class and then taught another 55-minute boot camp back-to-back. After those three classes, the app recorded 320 calories burnt and 8,805 steps taken. I’ve since read tons of reviews that say fitness trackers are pretty bad at counting calories, which makes me feel a whole lot better about my mega workout day. But from now on I’m sticking to my old school method of tracking my workout: sweating and moderate panting.
The traveller: Hayley Tsukayama covers consumer technology for The Washington Post. Here’s her take:
Convenience is supposed to be the name of the game for the Apple Watch — the idea being that having information displayed on your wrist is a lot easier to get to than information buried in your pocket. Or, as is more likely, having information on your wrist is easier than going through life with just one hand.
In the course of normal, everyday life, I grew to like, but not love, getting notifications on my wrist instead of my phone. It was nice, but there was never really a time when I felt like there was a real benefit to those at-a-glance notifications — I’d never been too busy to look at my phone before, and having the Watch didn’t change that. But what about when I was out of my element? For a real field test, I tried it out on a trip to San Francisco _actually, to go to an Apple event. It only seemed appropriate.
Overall, I found myself loving the Watch. In the airport, the watch was key. Using the Delta app, I was able to pull up my ticket right on the watchface. Sure, it took a little bit of wrist acrobatics to get the square bar code over the reader. But it was way better than having to pull my phone out of my pocket and risk misplacing it in the chaos of the security line or keeping track of a paper ticket. (I always seem to lose those things within two minutes of printing them, only to find them months later in a book.) It felt a little bit like showing off_ a man seeing his son off actually gasped when I offered up my wrist_ but it was really convenient.
Once on the ground in San Francisco, the Watch really came into its own. I’d set up calendar reminders to tell me which BART station to take to my hotel, which popped up once I’d landed, which saved me more fumbling.
Where it really came in handy, though, was for directions. I used the watch to help me navigate to dinner with a friend in San Francisco. While a little warning about the elevation of the hills would have been useful, having the directions on my wrist rather than on my phone both made me a less conspicuous tourist. It also let me actually have a conversation with my friend as we walked, since I could count on the watch to buzz and let me know when I should be getting ready to turn. I didn’t have to keep my nose buried in my phone.
That was also helpful on the road — I didn’t have my eyes glued to the Watch while driving, but, again, it provided a useful heads-up when my exit was coming up on unfamiliar highways. And, because the Watch has a different series of vibrations to let you know when to turn right or left at an upcoming intersection, I wasn’t nearly as panicked about which lane I should be in; you’re welcome, drivers of Northern California.
Settled back into my normal life, I went back to finding the Watch convenient but not essential. But, I have to say, when you really want that extra bit of convenience? It’s well worth the price.
The parent: Ylan Q. Mui is a financial reporter at The Washington Post covering the Federal Reserve and the economy. Here’s her take:
Every night, after I tuck my 3-year-old daughter into bed, she lifts her big brown eyes up to meet mine, points a finger at me, and says: “Mommy, don’t forget your phone.”
It is a bedtime ritual for our modern age, one that speaks to the ubiquity of technology in my harried life as a working mother of two small children. For the record, I don’t even bring my iPhone into her room at night. But children have a way of revealing the unvarnished truths about ourselves, and my daughter is merely articulating the reality that I have been reluctant to accept: My smartphone is my constant companion. And when I lose track of it — which happens on a daily basis — the world stops until it is found.
One solution, of course, would be to simply give up my iPhone. Hahahahaha! This is not the essay to read if you’re looking for an epiphany about disconnecting in our digital age. No, I opted for the other extreme: the Apple Watch. Instead of hunting for my iPhone in a cluttered diaper bag or tucking it uncomfortably into the back of my yoga pants, I could keep my entire digital life literally within arm’s reach. The Post let me take an Apple Watch home for a few days, to provide a real world review of what is still a cutting-edge technology. Little did my editors realise how real it would get.
I started by not reading the instructions that came with the watch. This was supposed to be “real life,” right? And in real life, who has time for detailed instruction booklets? I already have an iPhone, an iPod and a MacBook. I figured I’d be able to learn how to work the Apple Watch on the go — while driving in the car, to be exact.
My first day with the watch, I was late coming home from work (again). I hopped into my Honda, and as I sat in D.C. traffic, I decided dinner would be to-go. My phone was buried in my purse, so I made use of the Apple Watch on my wrist. I felt like a pro as I easily called up my husband’s contact information and dialled his number with just a tap. Then came his voice, tinny and far away, from my arm:
How about Thai food? Extra rice?
I found myself driving one-handed, the arm with the Apple Watch raised close to my face so I could hear his faint words. I’m assuming that the watch’s phone was designed to work through Bluetooth, not through the device’s own paltry speaker. But we only have one car with fancy extra options like Bluetooth, so I ended up shouting into my wrist like a crazy person. Would this technically count as violation of D.C.’s “hands free” cell phone law? By the end of the short conversation with my husband, my arm was tired.
Once I got home, I worried that the watch would not be able to withstand the rigours of parenthood. It was repeatedly banged against the floor as I played one of my daughter’s favourite games, catch-me-after-I-spin-around-like-a-maniac-and-fall-down. It was splashed with water as I held my eight-month-old son’s hands under the kitchen sink to wash away the soggy remnants of his teething biscuit. And as I changed his diaper, I wondered how I would explain to my bosses if the watch got soiled in one of the baby’s surprise attacks.
The watch survived the evening with the kids, even miraculously remaining strapped to my wrist despite several strong tugs from the 3-year-old. After dinner, the two of us settled down on our living room couch to snuggle and read books — a rare moment of tantrum-free together time. My phone was on the kitchen counter, laying quietly in the background.
Then my wrist started buzzing. And buzzing. And buzzing.
Text messages were streaming in from my girlfriends about our upcoming getaway weekend. Typically, I would catch up with the chain on my iPhone after my daughter got into the bathtub. But I couldn’t resist sneaking a peek as we read books. What should we pack? What are we going to make for brunch? How many bottles of bubbly are we going to need?
Answer: A lot.
Yet I couldn’t join in the conversation because, well, I was ostensibly educating my child through the power of reading. But also, the tiny watch screen meant that a preset curt answer or cumbersome voice dictation were the only ways to respond.
After a few days, I realised that this was emblematic of my biggest frustration with the Apple Watch: It constantly nudges you with digital updates but trying to address them on the watch is a nuisance. It’s like a pesky mosquito that you know is flying near your ear but you can never seem to swat. More often than not, the watch would buzz, and I would fall into very same Pavlovian response that I had been hoping to avoid:
Go find my phone.
The IGMPTMKAR: David Cho is the Deputy Business Editor at The Washington Post. He somehow does work while raising rambunctious kids. Here’s his take:
OK, I admit it.
I. Give. My. Phone. To. My. Kids. At. Restaurants. I’m an IGMPTMKAR.
I know it’s probably bad for them. “Too much screen time,” researchers have scolded us. “You need to teach them to sit at the table without a smartphone.”
I get it. But when you’ve just spent every hour of every waking moment on a Saturday responding to their cries, laughs, beggings and stomach punches (I have two wild boys whom we mistakenly signed up for Karate classes), you need a break once in a while. Dinner outside of the house is when one of those moments comes.
And my kids know it, too. As soon as we sit down at the table, they put on their puppy dog looks and eagerly ask: “Can we have the phone until the food comes?”
We make sure to look reluctant and upset about the request. But after our iPhones are in their hands, a miraculous silence settles over the table. We no longer need to worry about our boys making too much noise for the people around us. My wife and I can have an actual conversation. Everybody’s happy for a few minutes. Except for the voice of those scolding researchers in my head.
But the Apple Watch brought an unexpected benefit to this ritual: I still got notifications even when my five-year-old was tapping away at Clash of Clans and Minecraft on my phone.
All it took was a little glance at my wrist and I had it all — texts, emails, and sports scores. It never even seemed like I was doing anything but having an uninterrupted conversation with my wife. (Um, maybe I shouldn’t be writing this down in a place where she can read).
So, yes, the Watch allows you to avoid the rudeness of taking out your phone and reading or swiping or tapping while you are talking to someone, a phenomenon that’s become all too common during work meetings or dinner conversations for IGMPTMKARs.
We now can get a lot of information quietly sent to our wrist. And absorbing those notifications is far less obvious. As we constantly glance at our watches, we now only look like we are late or impatient for a conversation to end, not outright oblivious and rude.
