Upgrading My Apple Watch

I first got an Apple Watch about a year after it came out, just in time for the first redesign, as I recall. And it’s served me faithfully ever since then. In addition to just telling the time, I’ve used it primarily as a way to get notifications from my phone, track my exercise each day, check my heart rate, and occasionally serve as a timer. (Well, the biggest thing I’ve used it for is to ping my iPhone when I lose it, which is often, but let’s try to downplay that one.) The convenience of always knowing anything urgent going on is a big plus, though I really throttled down on the notifications, to make sure I only got one if it was something I cared about.

However, the watch was now seven years old, give or take, and it started to have a few issues I wasn’t happy with. The biggest was that it would run out of batteries each evening around 9pm. That’s less than useful, and at the edge of being downright inconvenient many days. Beyond that, it’s just been much slower than I’d like it to be. If I asked it to do something, I felt like it had to hold up a finger and then groan as it got out of the recliner before it could do as asked. There was a decent sale on a new Apple Watch 8 (a year old model, which was significantly cheaper than the newest version), so I decided to go ahead and get a new one.

Overall, I’ve been very happy with the update. The watch is peppier all around, doing anything and everything that’s asked with nary a peep. It’s got a larger screen, which allows for more complex watch faces. The current one I’m using shows me the weather for the next five hours, the time and date, my exercise goals, and let’s me start a workout or check my pulse at a touch. Better yet, the battery is much better, going for around 36 hours. This has allowed me to wear the watch while I sleep, which in turn makes it so it can track my sleep and tell me how I’m doing with it. (I’ve averaged 7.5 hours a night over the last week. A smidge lower than I’d like, but pretty good.) (And yes, it still pings my iPhone.)

So while it’s nothing mind blowing, it fixed a minor problem that was becoming more irritating, and it’s made some of my day to day things smoother. I’ll take it. Should you get one? The good news for that is you probably already know the answer to that yourself without me telling you. Nothing here that’s so life changing it demands an eWatch, but if your watch is getting long in the tooth, it might be worth swapping it out.