this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Technology
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… You do realize Apple Watches have had always-on screens for half a decade now? You don’t have to do anything to see the time.
And yeah, if all you use it for is to see the time, then it’s obviously not worth it. But can you listen to music through a mechanical watch? Can you use a mechanical watch to respond to text messages? Can a mechanical watch show you the map while you’re hiking?
Why even have a smartphone? You just need a landline phone. After all, it’s just pick up and dial, with a smartphone you have to unlock it to call.
Or maybe phones can be more than just phones these days? Just like watches can be more than just watches.
Yes. Like needing to be recharged every night, and being obsolete after a handful of years.
My Apple Watch needs to be charged ever night.
The watch I had before needed the time adjusted every night if I wanted it to be accurate to the second which I did. And adjusting was a painful process. You can't adjust the seconds - it resets the secondhand to zero and then you need to stare at a reliable timepiece (like maybe an Apple Watch), taking the regular watch out of time set mode at exactly zero seconds. If you miss it by a second... you need to wait an entire minute to try again.
I don't like sleeping with my watch on anyway, so placing it on a charger isn't a problem. And the battery lasts long enough it doesn't matter if I forget ocasinally.
There are very affordable g-shocks with multi band, using radio signals to accurately set the time every night with an atomic clock as the source. I mean if accuracy is an issue.
The solar models also charge using sunlight and fluorescent lights but will still last about 1-2 years in darkness. Regular wear will always keep it charged.
Not to say an Apple Watch isn’t right for you. Just stating that non-smart watch options exist for those who just want to tell time, date, weekday, accurately with added stuff like alarms and stopwatch etc.
That's an apple problem, not a smartwatch problem in general
Any smartwatch that has the utility of an Apple Watch will also have the battery issues of an Apple Watch.
Yes the batteries are small, but other brands last much longer than Apple watches. And really, setting your watch down on the wireless charger at night is no harder than plugging your phone in or taking your regular watch off and putting it on your nightstand
No they don't. Apple Watches have very large batteries and very efficient processors.
Other smart watches only get longer battery life if you avoid power hungry features... and you can do that with an Apple Watch. An Apple Watch Ultra will last a full 30 days if you don't use power hungry features like wifi, heart rate monitoring, music playback, Siri, GPS, etc etc.
Most smart watches that advertise long battery life have all (or at least most) of those features, and they don't last long at all if you take advantage of them. The Garmin FR965 (their largest watch) advertises "up to 25 days" battery life but that's with everything disabled (and it's also less than the 30 days you get with an Apple Watch). If you read the spec sheet for the Garmin FR965 it advertises only "Up to 8.5 hours" if you make extensive use of all of the available smartwatch features. And that's the biggest/heaviest Garmin. The popular Garmins have smaller batteries.
That's my bad then. For some reason I was getting my info mixed up. Anyways, yeah 30 days is a long time but companies always bullshit like that where they say "up to". My galaxy watch 3 is pretty good on battery life, like a day and a half of me just using it regularly for time and heart rate etc. The biggest problem I have is that if I want to sleep track with it I need to remember to put it on the charger when I sit down at my desk and most of the time I forget so it dies on me.
Those other brands will not have feature parity with the Apple Watch. I agree that charging the watch every light is not an issue.
I never really got this argument, to be honest. I put mine on the charger when I take a shower in the morning. If I did a long workout that day, shortly before bed, too. Other than that, I wear mine day and night. It really doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. I wouldn’t wear a mechanical (or quartz) watch in the shower either.
If you have an apple watch do you leave home without your smartphone?
I often go phoneless when I go hiking or jogging, yes.