I'm Returning My Apple Watch 3 Cellular | Hacker News Reader

I'm Returning My Apple Watch 3 Cellular

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5 pointsecesena17 comments

The reason I could (sic: should be couldn't) stream music yesterday is pretty simple:

"...because I can't read." It even says right on Apple's Watch page, under Apple Music: "coming soon". Okay, so maybe the author is not one of those geeky types that keeps track of the goings on in Apple's world.

Luckily I’m enrolled in the developer program

Oops, guess not. I really don't understand the complaint here. "I'm returning my Apple Watch because it won't stream music." Umm, no one said that an Apple Watch that you buy today (or "yesterday") would stream music without an iPhone. It will standalone stream music "soon", but not right now.

Sure - I'm not necessarily complaining with Apple. By reading more I could also have known that Spotify wasn't available. I tried to be pretty honest in describing my experience, and I don't blame them. It's also a consumer right, I think, to return a product if you discover that it doesn't meet your expectations.

Also, I thought that my experience could be useful to other people -- I don't think everybody's reading all details before making a purchase, so I wanted to share it.

Thanks for catching the typo, will fix it asap.

Also, I thought that my experience could be useful to other people

Despite bustin' your chops, I'll grant you that one. I constantly forget that not everyone has been occasionally disappointed with their tech purchase over the past thirty years, and therefore doesn't research their purchase with the necessary skepticism. Kinda like that XKCD "you're one of the 10,000" cartoon: "congratulations, you've made your first disappointing tech purchase! Now let's go get some Mentos and Coke."

I don't blame him for not paying close attention to "coming soon." If you watched the Apple Watch Keynote, the emphasis was on the experience of a tetherless Watch with streaming/phone/text services. If you're paying for that experience, I can understand why you would be frustrated. On the other hand, when you're on the bleeding bloody edge, maybe that experience is rough around the edges. A little patience would go a long way for this reviewer.

I have patience - but I don't want to pay the extra price during the patience time (in fairness, both verizon and apple music are free for 3 months). I'll downgrade and upgrade back when apps are there.

I'm going to downgrade because I know there's only a 14-day time frame for doing that, and I don't want to bet that apps will be there in the next 3 months. I hope I'm wrong of course.

For years Apple has released products that are dependent on a feature not yet available. (Apple Pencil, AirPods, etc on the hardware front, and OS features touted for new hardware not available at launch, like Portrait Mode) For those that are heavy consumers of Apple products, years of keynote announcements should have conditioned this expectation.

Agreed - and in fact my decision wasn't taken so lightly.

I guess another way of seeing what happened is this. I imagined a watch that could work disconnected from the iphone, which is a drastically new product. Beside making calls and paying, and beside the "watch-specific" uses such as activity tracking, I was under the impression that music streaming could be there. And I was wrong (and, as pointed out elsewhere, I could have read more).

Makes sense. I'm sure in the coming months support will expand.

In the "dark ages" before the Apple Watch Series 3, people would use products like the "iPod Shuffle" to solve first world problems like these.

It's unfortunate that simple products like the Shuffle just aren't good enough. Instead we're always looking for something new and much more complicated and fragile.

To be fair, the non-lte watch can work as a shuffle, you can store music on it -- and this is in fact where I'm thinking to land. The point was streaming using lte.

> On the bright side, earlier today I went grocery shopping, turned my iPhone in airplane mode, and paid with just the watch.

The author seems to be unaware that you can use Apple Pay on the watch without any cellular on either the watch or the phone - I have done it many times on my Watch 2 while my phone is at home.

I was definitely unaware, thanks for pointing it out. Just to confirm, the watch needs connectivity, right? So, I assume, it's over wifi. Correct?

It’s NFC, which is a radio signal, so no connectivity is required aside from the electricity needed to send the signal from the watch. It’s pretty analogous to swiping a physical card in that regard

Oh I didn't know it was just NFC, I don't know why I was convinced it was a 3-party protocol requiring device connectivity. Good to know.

> now I only need a speedo with a key pocket

Would be nice to have car and/or house unlock via the Watch too! Can't see any technical reason why this wouldn't be possible. :)

On the house, it's just because I'm renting... but maybe I can ask my landlord :)

Yeah, I rent too. I got a Sesame lock off the Kickstarter but I've been too lazy to install it...

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