"Why I Have Finally Taken Off the Apple Watch For the Last Time"

Alex Hern writing for The Guardian:

It would be boring to go through every feature point by point to explain why it’s useless. But a few fundamental flaws of the watch suffice to explain 95% of the issues: the watch is too slow to act as a speedy alternative to your phone; the user interface is too fiddly to use on the move; the notification model is too limited to do anything other than encourage you to pull out your phone repeatedly; and Siri sucks.

Honestly, it’s hard to argue against any of Hern’s points. While I do wear my Apple Watch frequently, other than Health, I find the Watch to be a bit too slow at doing tasks such as responding to Siri. The ideas are good, but it honestly needs work, especially in the UI department.

Hern continues:

The future of the watch can’t be the same iterative improvements that Apple has pulled off with the iPhone, iPod and iPad. The interface is just too ill-thought-through to work, even if the device itself is sped up significantly. But the most obvious alternative is to massively increase the amount of voice control the watch offers, and Apple simply doesn’t have the technical chops to do so. While Google and Amazon have been creating voice assistants that people seem to actually use and wax lyrical about, Apple … hasn’t. There’s no easy solution there.

WWDC is only a few days away and I’m probably most curious about what Apple is going to do with Apple Watch. I’m not expecting new hardware (sources tell me fall), but I am curious about the entire user interface. Is Apple going to treat this like a small upgrade or are they going to rethink the user experience in order to make the Watch easier to use? I’m really hoping for the latter. If they don’t, I have a bad feeling that the Watch isn’t going to see much growth over the next 12 months.

In the end, I’m still bullish on the Apple Watch and wearables in general, but I think it may take more time than we’re hoping for. Next week will be telling.