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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I love my Apple Watch. Alerts mean I don’t look at my phone which means I don’t unlock it and get sidetracked. I have plenty of ways to tell the time so it’s actually kind of useless for that. It’s a passable golf watch, a passable fitness tracker for running and it pairs with earphones so I can not bring my phone with me. I’ve occasionally used Apple Pay with it but that novelty wore off pretty quickly.

I don’t care that the battery doesn’t last, I’ve got a wireless charger at my desk and at home and 30 minutes on that a few times a week keeps it alive for my usage.

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> I love my Apple Watch. Alerts mean I don’t look at my phone which means I don’t unlock it and get sidetracked.

I've noticed and interesting social shift in recent years: friends who get distracted mid-sentence by an Apple Watch notification, pause the conversation to check the alert, and then continue the conversation afterwards without realizing they had paused/were momentarily not present. It's fascinating because these people will not realize they were momentarily sidetracked, and remain convinced a watch keeps them more present than their hone.

There's a term waiting to be coined for this concept, but I'm not clever enough to come up with one...

Horolophasia?

It would be "horologoaphasia", you need the go and the a.

I started noticing this with smartwatches in 2019-2020, with my coworkers. They would just stop mid convo, check watch, and resume talking.

It's only about 5 seconds but it feels so weird on the other side. Like, sure, I'll wait for you. But it feels really rude when you do it 3 times in 5 minutes.

I loved my Apple Watch at first but due to exactly these sort of distractions no longer wear it and have more recently turned off most of the notifications on my phone. I am sick of my attention being stolen away by everything around me.

Why not just turn off the notifications on the watch, so you can enjoy it for what it's good at? I won't give up the functionality, but I am extremely selective about what it notifications it can put in front of me.

Because it's ultimately not very useful. Sleep tracking - I've become convinced this is actually a bad idea, and since I stopped I stress less about sleep and ultimately sleep better. Step tracking? Phone does that adequately.

I do wear it for workouts, but once it's closer to end of life will replace it with something dedicated for workouts like a Garmin that holds a charge for 14+ days.

I’ll add that if you care about working out with a watch to track heart rate, the Apple Watch is pretty dismal. I moved to pairing mine with a Polar H10 strap so that I could get much faster feedback on heart rate recovery post sprint. In addition to using an optical sensor, the Apple Watch may also be doing something to smooth out the signal. I just know that the Polar seems much more responsive and matches how I am feeling.

Chest straps work with ECG, so they're hard to beat for heart rate tracking. That said, Apple watches are some of the best wrist wearables for heart rate tracking. Most other brands aren't as accurate and many don't come even close.

Check out the Quantified Scientist on YouTube, he does some interesting testing on health devices.

Well aware of Quantified Scientist and it’s actually what I have pointed many Oura, Woop, etc users to in the past.

But as you say the always-on ECG of a strap like Polar H10 always going to provide a superior result.

I’m not using it for live-live data, or for mapping recovery times, I’m just using it to gauge 120 vs 140 vs 175 heart rate while running

Agreed on the sleep tracking, I don’t bother with that. I use it primarily for time, timers, outdoor temperature, workouts, Apple Pay, Tesla key card, and EKG. I have started leaving my phone at home fairly often. Which then leads somewhat regularly to me needing to use another feature of the watch - find my iphone.

Not the person you replied to but - I do my best to disable as many notifications as possible. It’s just DMs, group chats, email and banking.

Wristrot

I worked with a woman who, in 1-on-1 meetings no less, would stop mid-sentence when she received text messages and reply via her Apple Watch. It was maddening. I finally had to kindly ask her to be present and stop playing with her watch.

> I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexii are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.

Nothing new here, but I have several friends who do this with their phones, and I honestly wish they had a watch instead, so they'd be absorbed for 3 seconds instead of 30 seconds.

I think it depends on the alternative. Compared to no interruptions, this kind of behavior is annoying. But if the alternative would be pausing to pull out their phone and look to see why it just buzzed/dinged, the watch glance may be the lesser evil.

More important to me, in either case, is to tame the notifications no matter where they go. It is your choice what gets to the phone screen or the watch, and if you are pausing a conversation to glance at the watch and then it does not cause you to need to do something else urgently, this is a strong indication that you should have that notification turned off. Let it go to a low priority queue you can look at later when you have time, not something that buzzes or dings at you.

People do the same thing with phones, too.

My reaction: I'll stop speaking once they are looking at their phone/watch. And I actually wait to start speaking again until they prompt me with a "what were you just saying," or similar. This awkward feeling of "oops, I stopped the conversation, so now it is I who must get it going again" works well. And if they don't "prompt" to continue the conversation? They weren't listening in the first place, or don't realize they were being kinda rude.

There's a krazam video satirizing that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJwPb_76jqU

Is that really new compared to the friend who will look at their phone every time it pings, or my parents who will stop mid conversation and answer a phone call?

The novelty of Apple Pay on watch wore off? I use this all the time but it’s not noteworthy or interesting, just a great feature that’s seamless and doesn’t require pulling out my phone.

> that’s seamless

I wish it were. The double click to pay is pretty annoying compared to “express mode” Apple Watch apps like Suica and UniFi Touch Pass.

It does give you the option to change cards when you double tap, before you pay.

But I think the real reason is that people would walk around with card readers and scan peoples watches to collect cash. I can only guess it doesn't happen in Japan for cultural reasons. You could try and do that with purses/wallets too, but since most people are carrying multiple cards, they interfere and largely prevent RFID skimming.

This is one of those things I thought would be great and never use. When I see people do it (very rarely) it gives 'glasshole' vibes (no offence). I can't bring myself to do it and I've been using Apple Pay on my phone since day one. It's a me problem obviously but given how people use phone payments for everything and so many people I see wear Apple Watches I'm surprised how infrequently I see people use it for payments.

You know the other killer feature of the Apple Watch? Find my phone!

See someone with an Apple Watch on frantically looking for something, just say "Hey you know your watch knows where it is". Just press the button, DING.

Guilty as charged. It helpfully points the direction and distance, so even if I cannot hear the phone ding I know how to get close enough.

As a Fitbit user, I would agree. Sleep tracking and heartrate monitoring are ok, but what's really cool are Tap to pay and Find my phone.

I find the whole “get the thing close enough to the reader” action to be difficult with the watch.

People at my supermarket still generally need longer to pay by watch or phone than me with using my card, so I'm not sure what to take away here.

I found it was even better to turn off all the notifications entirely, then you don’t get distracted by the watch interrupting you either. There are very few things I actually need to know about right now.

I'm really interested by what notifications people have toggled. I only ever have text messages and whatsapp (urgh, I know!) enabled and don't get a huge amount of notifications during the day to distract me.

Do other people have more notifications enabled? More friends messaging them? Or just a lower threshold for what counts as too many?

Messages and weather are basically the only things I allow to ping/vibrate, anything else only appears on the phone and I get it when I look at notifications. Email is pull only, have to open the Mail app to get messages.

The annoying apps are the ones I have to toggle permissions on and off for like eBay and Uber because occasionally they have time sensitive important info, but 99% of the time are bombarding me with useless spam.

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