I’ve worn an Apple Watch on and off since the Series 2, which came out in 2016. I’ve owned two watches. One disappeared one day. I have no idea where it went. For a while, I wore two family members’ watches because they never used them. Then I bought my own.

Buying that watch was a really stupid move. I don’t think the Apple Watch is totally stupid, but I think for the vast majority of users, it’s just a glorified pager.

For myself, I found the most compelling use of the watch was paying for the bus. Something I could also do with my phone in my front pocket or the wallet in my back pocket.

It’s not that I didn’t try to love the Apple Watch. I wore it every day to see my health trends, I designed and 3D printed a custom dock to minimize the effort to charge it, I even bought a case I could pop on while I was woodworking so it could stay protected and remain on my wrist. I tried using it for Siri, controlling my smart home, sending messages, monitoring workouts (ok this use case is good).

The problem is that the watch never tried to love me back. The features just aren’t useful. And I think more people need to come to terms with this rather than just buying it because of the Apple hype train. Siri sucks on the wrist, especially if I’ve got a phone near me idk who’s gonna pick up my call to “hey Siri”. When it does pick up, it takes way longer than my phone to provide feedback. Same for controlling my smart home. It doesn’t update nodes in the home app until I actually open the app on the watch, so when i want to turn off my bedroom light, I need to wait 5 seconds for it to realize the bedroom light is currently on in order for me to turn it off. This is just a waste of time to sit there and wait. In fact I’m coming to think smart homes in general are still far from being useful. It’s health monitoring appears to be very detailed and accurate, but as someone who deals with health anxieties that stem from my whacky brain rather than actual diagnosed health issues, having all this data on myself doesn’t actually seem to be benefitting me in any way.

Regarding workouts, I find the watch makes me less likely to exercise because I have this pressure to wear the watch every time I leave the house for a run because if I’m not wearing it, then the run never happened. So if I don’t have a charged watch, or I forgot to load up some music or a podcast on it beforehand, count that run out.

My least favorite, yet most common use of the watch is for field notifications I don’t need to be looking at in the first place. Why do I need my wrist to buzz every time I get an automated email to my work inbox that I don’t read anyways? Why read “Mom just sent you a photo. Open iPhone to see”? What’s that doing for me? Is it anything positive, or is it just getting me to check my devices more.

If you use the watch a lot for tracking workouts, or you have some health issues you want to monitor, I think you should by all means go for it and use a watch. But for any other purpose, I’d say it’s not worth the expense, nor is it worth the mental stress the notification machine puts on your brain.