Apple Watch Series 7

Yep, I'm hanging onto my Pebble until that happens. The battery life is deteriorating, but I can still get 5 days out of it if I put it in airplane mode overnight.

Not going to happen.

The only upgrade that makes sense is 7 days.

2-3 day battery life means that people will forget to charge, because there is no routine. And then they run out of battery and blame Apple for shitty battery life.

45 minutes from 0 to 80% isn't that much. You won't be ending many days at 0% and don't need a 100% every day.

Is it really that low? My fitbit sense gets around 4 days but I just use it for health tracking and nothing else.

Likewise. I suppose an always-on display is a big boon for most customers, but I would like if I had the option to opt out of that and get considerably longer battery life instead. Conceptually I really like the watch with all the health-related sensors and such, but until the battery life improves, it's hard to be convinced.

How long do you want/need it? I have the series 6 and get around ~30 hours. I've been wearing it since 9am and it's now 2:52am, it's still 55% remaining.

It turned out to be more battery than what I thought (18 hours?!?)

My Series 5 definitely lasts longer than a day…

my series 6 definitely lasts way longer than a day, and i use it for tracking gps on hikes almost every day. i think being judicious with screen brightness is very impactful.

I just use two watches and alternate every night.

I wish it had a charger similar to the Whoop fitness band. It's a separate battery that you place on top of the band while wearing it, so it can charge while you're sleeping or even while you're just wearing it throughout the day.

Same. Not into smart watches until they have a week long charge at least.

The Steel HR from Withings is the perfect middle ground for me. Doesn’t look like a slab, 3 weeks charge, still some smart features.

It charges to 80% in 45 mins. I don't wear it overnight, but some friends who do, charge it in the office without much of an impact to usage.

For me it's never been a problem, it wouldn't have changed my usage pattern to have 1 week of battery.

I feel like a broken record but I'm in the same boat. I can't stand a watch that has to be charged daily or is useless. After switching from an early android wear with ~30 hours of battery life to a Garmin watch I just can't imagine being stuck with nightly charging anymore. Countless times I forgot the charger at home on a trip and basically had a fancy bracelet for the week. I don't understand why there seems to be 0 focus on extending battery life, I can't see buying an Apple watch until they get it to at least a week with normal wear and 3+ days if I'm doing hour+ fitness activities every day.

My series 5 lasts from after breakfast to when I wake up the next day (I sleep with it, it charges while I eat, shower and dress). If that isn’t all day, I don’t know what is.

But I miss my Pebble’s ability to last the week…

Or at least decently fast charging. The new onePlus can get you 0 to 100 in 30 minutes.

Knock it down to 20 minutes and you can charge the watch while you shower in the morning.

It does last longer than a day, but not a full 2 days; more like 30 hrs or so (even with sleep tracking). Using GPS does ding the battery quite a bit.

Apple hasn't flaunted the tech specs of Watches ever.

Usually we find out the specs when iFixit cracks one open.

Maybe more relatively to the languages they have available? Also, licensing video content also tends to be per country.

Cultural differences in sensitivity to the appearance (clothing, gender, race, etc) of those appearing on screen seems to me a plausible explanation.

Music licensing is probably the biggest one.

For me, there's enough from the Series 4 to 7 to make it worth upgrading.

I was about to say same, but I think one of my family would like a watch and my series4 makes a great handmedown.

Still waiting for the blood glucose monitoring. I wonder what tech remains to be developed.

It can't help.

I'm looking at -no joke- 100 week lead times on an ARM cortex m4 we have in an existing product.

I was wondering the same - another article claimed they were aiming for the ability to measure blood pressure, but were having trouble with it. I can't imagine how that works, it'd literally squeeze my wrist?

I recently purchased a Galaxy Watch 4. It is similarly specced as the apple watch, but it has quirks. It uses the new Wear OS, which is great, but compared to what i've seen from the Apple Watch, i'm not sure it's in the same league software wise. The Apple Watch just seem superior in software and hardware quality.

Love my Garmin Instinct. It's just enough of a GPS smartwatch. Super durable, waterproof, great battery life, modest price.

My 3.5 year old Garmin can easily track activity for 18 hours with normal GPS mode (high accuracy) and probably much longer with power saving (less frequent data recording).

I don't think it's a great smartwatch, but I don't know because the last thing I need in my life is a device on my wrist with push notifications.

I have a Garmin 945, lasts a whole week and love the thing.

I replaced my Fitbit Versa with a Garmin Vivoactive 3 Music and have been a huge fan. Many day battery, GPS for runs etc, can play music and podcasts from the watch.

Galaxy Active 3 is fine, but the software and android app are just meh.

Xiaomi MiBands are surprisingly good at what they do, especially for the money. Not a premium product by any stretch but still nice. I like it especially because it looks more and more like a simple bracelet with each iteration, instead of trying to be watch, huge watch or mini-ipad like the others.

The bands also last way longer than any fitbit I had.

Of course, you health data is probably going straight to CCP but then you already have Android.

I have a 645M that's almost 4 years old (purchased Jan 2018). It has outlasted by a factor of 2x my previous smart watches in terms of taking physical abuse. It still has nearly a week of battery life when not using GPS, and variable if using GPS.

The one drawback to it is that on iOS, the notifications suck. I have no control over what apps can send notifications to my watch; its all or nothing. Back when I had a Pixel on Android, I could control which apps could send notifications to my watch. I'm assuming there is some API limit to 3rd party watches in the Apple ecosystem that prevents Garmin from being able to filter out notifications.

Looking at the processors behind the watch, it seems like Snapdragon 4100+ is the latest and greatest for Android [1].

I've been using a TicWatch Pro 3 and I'm pretty happy with it, although I'm not a "smartwatch poweruser", if there's such thing.

1: https://www.smartwatchseries.com/a-list-of-snapdragon-4100-s...

Response from Kosta Eleftheriou, founder of FlickType:

https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1437845736951992321

Most basic Casio watches last at least 10 years on one battery.

PTSD from notifications hit hard.

I thought a phone was addictive, but at-least you could put it in your pocket / bag / car and keep a distance.

A watch is like that tightly hugging tail-wagging dog.

"Look at me, look at me, look at me !"

It baffles me that notifications are on by default. It’s also weird to complain that you didn’t turn them off, but each to their own.

I guess it's a matter of perspective. I could never replace my smart phone with a flip phone... because I don't really use it as a phone. In the same way I don't really use my smart watch as a watch. My smart watch is a fitness tracker first, and the watch part is a bonus feature.

But no voice recording. I bought mine mainly to have a recorder one tap away. Don't really care about them showing time.

Stopped using my calculator after it broke and bought an abacus.

- Always on

- Infinite battery life

- No accidental resets

- Looks pretty on my desk

I look at my abacus with joy everyday.

That's why that famous model number (can't look up at the moment) for $12 will never die, it's fashionable, cool, practical, and no one know if you're wearing the one you got when you were 12yr old or you vanity seek and seen a celeb in GQ and thought yeah minimalist man I'll dip that trust fund twelve dollars and have it air delivered. Decent watch for a watch, apple watch can potentially disrupt the medical scene though so thats my interest in these new devices (cgm, EKG,sleep) but fully agree on the casio

Having music and podcasts without taking my phone with me to go for runs or bike rides and still having the ability to make a call in case of emergencies.

Personally, the wallet, health tracking, and music w/o phone is enough to justify the purchase for me. Actually, jogging / exercising without my phone is enough to justify the cost.

Notifications on my wrist let me receive phone calls/alarms without waking up my partner. That is probably my big reason, but since I use it for that, I also use it for run tracking and fitness+ app.

I can detach further from my phone because notifications go to my watch. I hate being tethered to my phone, so that's the killer feature for me. With the cellular model, I leave the house without my phone sometimes, which is nice. When I worked in the office, the phone stayed in my bag most of the day.

It pushing me to be active, Siri and Wallet are probably the ones that I use the most. Instantly getting to glance notifications doesn't hurt either. And while Siri may have trouble understanding me properly, I still use it constantly to control the house and set timers since I can do it by simply lifting my wrist.

This all applies to other smart watches: getting the vibration on my wrist for notifications is the killer feature. When I travel without it, I miss so many notifications because I didn’t feel my phone vibrate. Similarly, having the vibration on my wrist makes a big difference in not sleeping through my wake up alarms. I can’t recall the last time I slept through one.

Gamifying my exercise and workouts, also making it more social.

Ever since getting my Apple Watch I basically don't use my wallet anymore since Apple Pay is so convenient and ubiquitous where I live.

I look at my phone less because I just glance at my wrist for new notifications and don't get hooked into a whole 15 minutes of distraction.

Using Siri is surprisingly easy and not awkward when you can just lift your wrist and speak quietly into the watch.

Unlocking my Face ID iPhone while wearing a mask, using time-of-flight from the watch on my wrist.

It works perfectly.

Nice 2FA 2nd factor, quick spoken messages ("tell wife on my way"), Apple Pay (killer app - much easier than phone or wallet), Strava/workouts, plays music/audible on AirPods or BT headset, opens my garage, can lookup calendar without opening phone or PC.

Autosleep app. The best sleep tracking I've used so far.

By using it for around 3 months I figured out patterns that lead to better sleep. Highly recommended.

> Also, the watch presumably can't tell how fast the ball is served, which depends on the racquet speed and whether you make good contact with the ball.

I think I disagree here. It should be possible to build a model that infers things like racquet speed and where the ball made contact with the racquet based on accelerometer data. At the end of the day you have an arm attached to a racket moving at some speed, that impacts a ball that is relatively not moving.

A straightforward model could calculate the lost momentum in the arm + racquet, assume the ball's mass, and work backwards to the ball's velocity from there. I'm assuming there is more ML magic behind Apple's implementation though.

Pretty sure that was SwingVision, an app based on real-time video analysis of your swing, rather than the hardware on your watch. The watch is just a screen to relay feedback to the user.

https://swing.tennis/

The big screen + keyboard might be the headline feature, and as silly as it sounds it may be enough.

A 20% screen size increase is pretty significant.

There are a huge range of sensors they can add in future.

I am waiting for a fully standalone version that does not require an iPhone at all and can get me through the day with its more basic capabilities. Would love to be able to stop carrying a phone on most days. The current capabilities are close but would need to add a camera, even if it wasn't particularly amazing.

An radio for ANT+ sensors would be helpful if they want to compete against Garmin in the fitness market. There are a lot of sensors like heart rate monitors, bicycle power meters, running foot pods, etc which work best with ANT+ and support Bluetooth poorly or not at all.

Front-facing camera would be nice.

What is your source for the tech being "ready"? I'm sure they are trying but it is extremely difficult. Also, CGM will require FDA approval. You can't make a mistake or people die. If your measured pulse or respiratory rate is wrong, it is nbd. If your steps are wrong, who cares. Glucose is different. We are just now getting to CGMs that don't require frequent recalibration.

It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve gone a year without a processor update. The series 5 had no performance gain over the series 4.

Related to chip shortages?

At least on Series 6, processor is more than enough. Batterylife improvements with new provessor is another story.

FWIW, I've swum and surfed with my 5 and 6 for countless hours with no problems what so ever. And Im awful at surfing so the watch has taken an absolute _beating_.

I never use that crown.. at least I never rotate it. They could get rid of it without any functionality loss, no?

That’s why I use a cheaper sportwatch: it’s too expensive for “extreme” situations. Lost one while windsurfing, it’s at the bottom of the ocean. Fortunately the price wasn’t too bad, 140 euros, so less painful to replace. I won’t consider an Apple Watch until price comes below 150.

That’s weird, my series 4 that I bought on October 18’, use it every day (except in the shower) and of curse when I swim (we have a sea not an ocean but it’s the same) and I never had/have an issue

All anecdotal but I regularly swim laps (a few times a week), shower, and free dive with my Series 4.

Just last week jumped off a 30 foot cliff and the clasp came loose, it literally flew off my wrist and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A friend helped me retrieve it, maybe 30-40 feet down. Perfect working order as of today!

I once did get some sand in the crown and needed to wash it out thoroughly but no other hardware problems in the 3 years I've owned it.

Anecdata comparison: My series0 is still functional (retired for a couple of years now) but I power it on once in a while just for kicks. I took it to the ocean about 10 times, swam with it several dozen times and showered with it hundreds of times.

YMMV I guess. But my series4 is doing great for 3y with similar levels of activity.

Have a series 6, used it in the pool (salted) the first time and the watch died. Had to get a replacement from them which took one week. I couldn’t do fitness tracking all that week. So, I am not planning to use the watch in water at all.

That would increase the price [and weight] of the aluminum models, which makes it harder to sell because aluminum is not a premium material that can command a higher price.

I’d recommend to get a fitness watch then. The Apple Watch is so much more, but for fitness enthusiasts the battery life is probably more important than the smart features (which fitness watches mostly lack).

I didn't think so but I had to borrow my wife's for a week to do some testing on a mobile app. I really enjoyed it and ended up keeping it. The ability to start Spotify without taking my phone out of my pocket, open the garage door as I approach the house on my bike, see text messages and know I can ignore them, etc.... It really makes me use my phone less.

It was a Series 3 and eventually died. I plan on getting this new Series 7 once it's available to purchase.

I really like the Apple Watch. Beyond the fitness/health functionality, I love the on-wrist notifications (which I've tuned to only include the things I want there), and I also really like using Apple Maps for directions and having the watch guide me. Stuff like having my groceries and todos on my wrist are handy, as is being able to see my next-up meeting.

I've found the sleep function super valuable, it let's my quantify how small changes can affect me sleep. The smart alarm is also useful (wakes you up while you are in a light sleep cycle as opposed to deeper sleep).

As a runner, i've found the heart rate data useful for gaining insights.

I like it because I can login to my iMac without typing the password when I'm wearing it.

Whoop. It has been great for life style adjustments that improve my health.

I don't play golf, but I do run a hell of a lot. I also recently have been swapping back and forth between my Garmin Fenix 3 HR (yes, several years old) and my Apple Watch 6 on runs. It would appear that the more recent Apple Watches have upped their GPS game (or maybe its software, dunno). Whereas previously the Garmin would track more accurately in general (say, measured against race mile markers), and certainly more accurately on twisty trails and the like, than my old AW4. But now I'm annoyed by the fact that the Garmin shorts me on distance more than the AW6; looking at tracks, the AW6 hews closer to the actual trail than Garmin does. I believe DC Rainmaker had similar results, or at least confirmed that the AW does better than it used to.

Of course, Garmin's more recent watches are probably better now, too. And they have golf functionality. But as it concerns the AW, it would appear to me that it is as good as anything else these days.

DCRainmaker is pretty good at comparing the various sensors on different sports watches.

This is for the series 6 Apple watch: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/09/apple-watch-series-6-fir...

Maybe they watched StuffMadeHere

What’s wrong with it?

This gets rehashed every time the topic comes up. It charges fast enough that you can wear it 24/7 and just put it on the charger while you shower.

Comparing it to a Casio that doesn't do anything other than tell you the time is pointless.

I like mine for sleep monitoring and heart rate monitoring, but that's my main usage.

My watch did save me when my phone fell down an elevator shaft. I didn't have a phone for about 4 days, so I was able to use my watch to make phone calls with Apple to get a replacement.

I purchased mine for fitness tracking but the feature I ended up liking the most is the Apple Maps integration.

The watch was never really useful enough for you, let's not forget that Apple sells a ridiculous amount of the things. More than long-standing traditional watchmakers.

you're kidding. fitness tracking, music and podcasts during walks/runs, less intrusive notifications, taking calls and receiving messages with GSM module, heart rate monitoring including arrhythmia and other issues.

right now the only thing you can possibly complain about is battery life, but personally i found it to be a routine/habit building exercise to just put the thing charging when i'm showering after morning walk.

I think there's potential for a whole new category in this space for wearable EEG's which really only 1 company is playing in at the moment. There's a million possibilities with the right hardware and software.