Apple Launches Apple Watch 9 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Launches Apple Watch 9

apple.com

14 pointssparshgupta20 comments

For those using the Apple Watch: would you recommend it?

I was an early(ish) adopter of smart watches/wearables - think Pebble and LG G Watch era. I walked away from that experience with the perception they exist solely as expensive distraction machines with an extremely short functional life and have been enjoying mechanical watches since.

This tech has me on the verge of trying again. It's seems to be getting pretty close a ubicomp device. There's enough compute onboard to do useful things with the sensors, particularly with the addition of the neural cores. The UWB proximity awareness look interesting too for someone with other apple devices (HomePods etc).

What I'm not familiar with is the current software ecosystem. Are there any core functions or third party apps that make use of this outside of just slinging notifications?

I like mine but mainly use the health / activity features, such as the daily tracking of movement, calories burned, etc. I use it as my sport watch for running as well and it is comparable to Garmin now. I have disabled pretty much all notifications on it though.

Mine is a series 6 and have at least another year left on it. I may consider buying series 10 if Apple decides to do some substantial changes for the 10th anniversary release.

I’ve had the series 3 for almost six years now. It still works fine, and even though I’m very tempted to upgrade there is no immediate need. So the lifespan of these devices is actually pretty good.

I like the Apple Watch a lot. There’s not a single killer feature in my opinion, just a bunch of small stuff that together makes it very nice. Like using it as an alarm clock without sound to not wake the rest of the family. Or timers when cooking. Or seeing how much (or more likely how little) I move about in a day. Seeing how many hours of sleep I got, taking into account my toddlers wake me up a few times every night. Having my todo list (Todoist) on the wrist, even though I’ll admit it’s pretty slow and I can’t quite get used to dictating my tasks. Seeing the weather for the day through a glance at a my wrist, to quickly know whether to bring a rain coat or not. Seeing the UV-index on a sunny summer day, to know how worried I should be about sunscreen for my kids. Seeing my schedule for the day without having to pick up my phone. Always having the phone on silent without missing calls or texts. Pinging my phone when I forget where I put it.

None of these features make the watch worth it on their own, but in aggregate it’s an amazing device and if it ever breaks down I’ll buy a new one in a heartbeat.

The aggregation of a sufficient number of small useful tools is a good point.

I wouldn’t carry a voice only phone, or a text only messaging device, or a standalone GPS, music player, or PDA. But I do find a phone that combines these pretty useful.

The gesture thing (double tap?) seemed like an odd announcement, since they pretty much already announced that feature a year ago. They tried to tie this feature to the AW9, as if the new processor made it possible. But it seems basically identical to the accessibility feature they announced last year: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-hand-gestures-control-a...

The double pinch recognition (enabled in Accessibility) seems a bit hit or miss on Apple Watch 8. Maybe they improved it a lot more in Apple Watch 9, because in the event they mentioned the use of the gyroscope, accelerometer and heart rate sensor to detect the motion.

I imagine it will be a better experience, but it's a bit deceptive to talk about it like it's a new feature, when it's really just an improvement of an existing feature. And I wonder if the new OS update will improve the performance of this feature on older AWs.

> And I wonder if the new OS update will improve the performance of this feature on older AWs.

Given Apple’s way of adding new features as exclusive to new devices or making some features better in new devices, I believe it’s quite unlikely that older Apple Watches will see any improvement on this gesture.

I generally agree, but if this was an accessibility feature that was not fully-baked at launch, I could see them improving it quietly on all devices.

They also said something about analyzing blood flow for the gesture, I think.

Link is 404 (and yet 6 upvote points as of this writing?). Perhaps https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-introduces-the-...

5 billion transistors, GPU, and a 4 core neural engine - in a watch! Just do mind blowing to me. It could power a desktop gaming PC if Apple would allow it.

Mh, seems to be a lack of innovation. Double tap and UWB as the only new sensor features.

What can they add now?

Blood pressure would probably be nice, but I imagine it's probably difficult to get accuracy in an apple watch style device.

Galaxy watch 4 and later have it

Oh cool.

I hope they add it in the Watch 10 then.

Maybe since 9 is such a small change they have been working on a bigger change for the 10.

There are some caveats to the BP measurement on the Galaxy watch, I'm not too surprised Apple isn't quite ready to implement it with similar requirements. They're probably holding out until it can be an "it just works" feature.

Yeah it requires calibration using a "traditional" BP monitor before using which means it doesn't just work...

Measuring BP with a watch is probably most accurate while lying down, eg during sleep, given yesterday’s Blood pressure should be measured lying down: study https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37471354

It always "seems" to be "lack of innovation" when you check the diff from year to year.

You, who gets the new device every year, is not the target market.

People who upgrade from devices that are falling out of OS support are. For them it's 4-6 "lack of innovation" diffs that sum up to a huge chunk of new stuff and improvements across the board.

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