There’s a frustrating thing when using a device. If it highlights things as a tent pole feature, but then suddenly after some update doesn’t consistently do those things, it feels like you’ve bought a broken product.
Sadly the Apple Watch has felt like that for me recently.
It first happened a year ago - I had updated my “Series 0” Apple Watch to watchOS 3. I was excited about the new activity watch faces, the sharing capabilities, and the interesting new breathe app.
But then my “watch” had to be recharged every day at 4 pm, or else it wouldn’t make it through the day.
This lasted until December.
3 months of hauling around my Apple Watch charger, finding time to charge my watch, and putting unnecessarily extra cycles on the battery. Oh, and filing multiple radars that were ignored for months, and opening a case with AppleCare support that went nowhere.
After it did get fixed, I still found myself double checking the battery throughout the day, on my watch, to make sure it would last and I would get all my activity rings closed.
With watchOS 4, that cycle has repeated itself.
Even before getting my new Series 3 watch, watchOS 4 wreaked havoc on my Series 0 watch. I was back to babying the battery, turning off features that were useful, and just overall not using it as much, just to make the battery get through the day.
With watchOS 4, I also lost the ability to get breathe notifications, which I actually found useful. They have yet to reliably appear since September. And with watchOS 4, I also lost the ability to continually and reliably pair my external heart rate monitor, which I rely on to extend the battery of my old watch. GPS seems to randomly either not start for a while, lose elevation completely, or just suddenly have a gap in measurement. Both of these issues have persisted on my old, and new watch.
Edit: AND iMessage constantly crashing and reverting to SMS on my Watch. Bluetooth headphones not connecting to the Music .app despite showing in Airplay settings. Workout not adding up GPS. Not receiving Activity Notifications.
I still wear my Apple Watch and love using it, but these little issues, some that either go months without fixes, or some that are even said to be fixed in release, but still persist, are really annoying the hell out of me. And it’s still strange to me that such an expensive and powerful device as the Apple Watch is dumber than a relatively cheap and simple bike computer.