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Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

This. Totally.

I would say I'm quite a power user usually. I very carefully explored every feature my apple watch has and tried to incorporate as many of them as I could. Very, very few features stuck because they were genuinely helpful. Almost everything being pushed is a gimmick or a feature bullet point from some product manager.

The actual good stuff:

Time

Workouts

Payments

The occasionally useful stuff:

Notifications

Noise DB levels to see if I need to put on ear protection

Workoutdoors app for on-device maps and path breadcrumbs

The once in a blue moon stuff:

Music controls and on device playlists

On device audiobooks

Weather complication

Voice memos

Alarm

Shortcut to call my husband

The feature I tried to get working but gave up on: Tap to talk to ChatGPT and get a 100 word or less reply

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Interesting that the alarm is such a far down feature for you. I use a galaxy watch 4, and i dont think i can ever go back from a silent alarm. Nicer to wake up to, and doesn't wake up everyone in the house as well

Can't speak for the OP, but I, for one, don't wear a watch while sleeping. I use a Junghans alarm clock from 1989.

I use my watch for time, step counting, and ringing/vibrating. Having my phone on silent and not missing calls (not messages, messenger are not allowed to send notifications to my watch) is such a step up for me :)

Silent alarm is an awesome feature. But it scales with battery life: on a watch with ~48 hours of battery you want to charge daily. And the most convenient time for that is in the night, which kills the silent alarm feature

Once you get to a week of battery life like a Garmin or those cheap armbands without screen that becomes a much better feature

I tried it a few times when I absolutely needed a silent wakeup. It’s very occasionally useful. But then you have to charge the watch for awhile before bed, wear it overnight, then charge it again in the morning. Not something I’m going to do for my regular alarm.

Payments should be the obvious feature. The commercials for various smart watches show the same thing: somebody buying a coffee with just their watch.

But the reality is different. On my smartwatch (an older Samsung, but same Google OS merged with Tizen) there's a PIN required if you enable payments on the watch. I understand why, the secure element requires it. But it makes every other feature of the watch useless to me. I don't have any secrets I want a watch to protect. I want to be able to time workouts while standing on a treadmill.

They could solve this, only have large amounts require the code while letting me buy a coffee without it, but I'm sure there's some line in an agreement between Google and the banks prohibiting this. The risk has to be transferred to the customer, even if the likelyhood of somebody buying a coffee with my watch is low.

Product design should consider all of these things, but getting out the next smartwatch without thinking it through is more inline with quarterly objectives. There isn't even a Steve around to piss off enough to do something about it.

>But it makes every other feature of the watch useless to me

How exactly? Samsung watches only require the pin to be enabled if you want payments enabled. You only have to enter the pin if you have taken the watch off. As long as it can detect that it remains on your wrist then payments continue to be enabled no pin required...

The Apple Watch doesn’t require any pin. Once the watch is unlocked it can be used to pay any time. Quite nifty.

Truth! I bought my Apple Watch so I could skateboard with my AirPods in and not lose connection. But the connection is a pain to make happen, not intuitive, and sometimes just doesn’t work. I like the watch for trying to keep me reminded to stay fit and active, but I have been considering just not ever buying another one and going without. I turned off all notifications on it because it’s useless.

This, but the music and podcast functionality is just frustrating. In my more than 5 years of being an Apple Watch user, I have been let down too many times

It seems just unwilling to sync anything to the watch, so there’s nothing to listen to when I go for a run without my phone

It’s just baffling, the watch has like 32 GB of storage?

I exclusively run listening to podcasts from my watch for years with no issues

I would happily ditch my phone entirely if i could have ms authenticator (needed for work), signal and my train ticket app working on it, alas no. Maybe someday.

MS Authenticator used to dispense codes on the watch app, but since about ~2022 MS decided that they would disable this feature.

No reason was ever given, especially as they actively removed an otherwise working feature, so I can only assume “user hostility” and/or “classic incompetence”. Probably both, being Microsoft.

I think you can get most of that working on a pebble.

Personal favorite: unlocking my laptop

The only thing I miss from switching to a Casio

I keep laptop unlock off. Touch ID on the MacBooks more than suffices for this.

I’ve had multiple instances of my Mac unlocking while I was more than 5-6 meters away. At some point I decided not to trust the time of flight calculation and disable it.

I listen to lots of music. Music controls are super useful to me.

I mainly own my watch for notifications and calendar reminders.

Timers, again every day.

To each their own.

Walking navigation is immensely useful for me when I am going somewhere in an unfamiliar town or neighborhood.

Time is definitely a killer app on watches

It wasn’t obvious to me! And I’m kind of not even joking. The time has always been on my phone. The watch seemed unnecessary. But having a clock in your face does change your perception of time so it is a killer app after all.

Find my phone

Camera remote

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