I Don’t Wear My Apple Watch Everyday Anymore

Has it become my least favorite Apple device?

I have always loved watches.

That’s not an exaggeration; as a kid, you could find me in the watch section of Wal-Mart as often as you could find me in the toy section. I’ve got cabinets full of cheap, dead watches that I don’t wear but I’ve stopped short of throwing out. I’m not sure why I’ve always been fascinated by timepieces, and it has for a long time been true that more often than not, you can find me not wearing any watch at all, but none of that ever stopped me from buying a new wristwatch.

Now, I’m not one of those people who will spend thousands of dollars on watches; that, to me, is absurd, especially when I see how hum-drum plain some of those expensive watches appear; if I’m wearing a watch, I want it to be interesting, and I don’t care if it says Rolex on the inside. The most I’ve ever spent on a regular (read: non-smart) watch was around $200, and to me, that was an extravagance.

If you’ve read many of my previous works on Medium, you’ll know that one of my other big loves in life is technology. And naturally, when tech started to make watches do more than tell the time, I was intrigued. It didn’t take me long to get a Pebble watch when they first came out; after all, I’d spent many summer days as a kid wearing my cheap Wal-Mart watches and pretending I could talk to people on it or whatever made me feel more like Maxwell Smart or Inspector Gadget (both played by Don Adams, btw). But the smartwatch I always wanted was Apple’s own (even before they made it; I was one of those people who wore my 6th-gen iPod Nano as a watch).

The Apple Watch is a damn useful device. But it isn’t really the most useful device for me.

Since their debut, I’ve owned two Apple Watches: the Series 3 and the Series 6. My Apple Watch has been my constant companion. But lately… lately I’ve realized how little I actually use it. This discovery hit me completely by surprise, too; just a few months ago, I called the Apple Watch "the most useful gadget I own”. I praised it for its health tracking capabilities, its rich notification functions, music controls, silent alarms, and timers, etc., and so forth.