One year of using an Apple Watch Ultra as a phone replacement

- Apple Watch receives calls forwarded from your phone which creates a bunch of weird problems: 1) Imagine you’re at a bar and get a phone call. You need to either answer on your watch immediately on speakerphone which is means its hard to hear the caller and hard for them to hear you, and your conversation is not private. Or, dismiss the call, go outside, put your airpods in, hope they connect, call back, hope they answer, and hope the traffic isnt too bad around you because airpods do not have best mics. 2) connecting airpods really suck, especially at home. You have to have your phone in the charger for it to forward calls to your watch, so when you put on your airpods, they will likely connect to your phone, so you run to your phone, then your airpods “magically” connect to your watch all the while your caller is shouting “hello” into the void. Not ideal for work calls.

- I really hated not having a notes.app

- messages are kinda bad, especially if you’re non-english. And again, if you’re out at a bar and meeting someone, you cant really wait to get home to message back, you have to noodle around on the small screen.

- Your friends will tease you. I didnt mind, but its good to be prepared.

- its a teeny bit annoying wearing a tech-watch. Can get a bit hot etc.

- You need an iphone to update the watch. This really suck because you never really feel you actually let go of your phone, its a hassle updating over bluetooth, installing apps etc. I would LOVE an ipad/mac watch.app.

- You need Siri for many things, like maps.app, searching for certain things etc. It really sucks, like, completely unusable.

- doesnt work well switching from wifi to celluar. So many of the watches problems stems from connectitivty issues between wifi, bluetooth and celluar.

That said, i agree with every upside the OP mentioned. I will go back to watch+airpods again when it can work without an iPhone for calling and software updates. I think one new way to get around it is to setup watch with Family Setup. That way it can get calls without iPhone.

EDIT: what i can definitely recommend is ditching your laptop and replacing it with mac mini + ipad. Its really great to not have every work task be mobile.

Read: I was forced to use apple reminders for all my TODOs because Apple Watch can only talk to Siri.

Like the author, I was using my phone too much. I got the watch as part of the ongoing effort to curb the abuse. It worked exceptionally well in this regard, but it was helped tremendously by my insights into just how much I was missing out on by using my phone too much.

Watching my screen time reports drop induced a special kind of shame. I went through periods where I was hitting 3.5 to 4 hours in a day. I used it around my kids too often. I gapped out on it without realizing it. I was a paragon of the unexamined life.

So, if you don’t have the same issue then the watch might not serve the same purpose or yield the same returns.

As far as what the watch can do, frankly I don’t give a shit anymore. I’m in the camp now that I more or less grew up in. I never had this stuff and I was fine without it. At times, I was better off without it. I like timers and reminders, otherwise texting and phone calls are the primary reason it’s on my wrist.

I’m glad I made the switch, but it’s definitely not suitable or otherwise necessary for everyone. If you’re a slave to impulse like myself, give it a shot. Put your phone in a cupboard and leave the house. Retrain your brain to do more with less.

Edit: Something mentioned in the article is the difference between phone screen time and computer screen time. It’s quite remarkable in my experience. I’ve come to think of it like the healthy association of sleep and bedrooms, though. For example, I’m conditioned to think of my computer as my place of work, research, and learning. Sometimes it’s for play, but that’s highly regulated for all kinds of reasons (it helps that I can’t pull a Mac Studio and 32” monitor out of my pocket at any given time or location). Over the years I’ve taught myself that a computer isn’t for wasting time. On the other hand, the phone was rarely anything other than that.

The parallel here is that a treatment for insomnia which sometimes works is retraining yourself to think of your bedroom as a place of sleep rather than anxiety, phone use, tv or movie watching, etc. You only allow yourself to sleep there and do all other activities elsewhere in the hope that over time, your bedroom provides the set and setting which encourages and supports a restful state.

I suspect similar mechanisms are at work here, and if so, I’m grateful because being productive on a computer is what keeps bills paid here. Had that association not been cultivated early, my life could be a lot different. Similarly, I suspect we should be very careful about allowing ourselves (and our kids) to associate phones with slacking off, spacing out, doom scrolling, etc.