Depends where you are at in life but I found as I have gotten older that some of the data points are helpful to track to see how my body is aging and when/what to adjust.
TBH I only use the Apple Watch as a dumb watch. I have disabled all notifications and smart features. Just time and heart-rate when I exercise.
- Apple Pay (I don't have to take out my phone to pay for things). One really cool feature is that the apple watch maintains your credentials as long as you don't take it off your wrist, so you don't need to unlock anything to pay for something.
- Apple Car/Home Key (I don't have to take out my phone to unlock my front door)
- notifications on my wrist when my washer machine is done
- notifications on my wrist when an unhoused neighbor door checks my car in the middle of the night.
- Apple Health: metrics on my daily workout.
- Screen time: grant kid 15 minutes of Roblox without taking my phone out of my pocket
- Edit: I'm embarrassed to admit that I also use the "find my phone" feature a lot when at home.
I don't really need an ultra for any of that, and I don't see a reason to upgrade my 2-3 year old Apple Watch now.
Did you actually get 7-8 hours? Did you actually get good quality sleep? Did you actually move some target amount every day?
The Whoop is like 90% accurate compared to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SzUDTBK-i0
It's just trade-offs: if you're using the Whoop, you don't want a screen and you like two weeks battery life.
* Notifications (imessages mainly, but anything that sends a push notification to your phone can also notify you on your watch)
* Quickly responding (thumbs up/down) to messages
* Apple Pay
* HomeKey (I can unlock all the doors in my house with my watch)
* Some apps (like AllTrails) have nice watchOS apps which give you the important info by glancing at your wrist.
When I visit Japan though, Apple watch works fine with SUICA. Unfortunately, in China, AliPay is too complicated to be used on a watch and you have to whip out your phone regardless because of the QR code thing. If China ever upgrades to NFC, it will work fine.
The watch will tell you if it thinks you have sleep apnea, heart rate irregularities, drops in fitness, out of baseline sleep, dramatic trends in any health statistics, and high blood pressure.
That said I sleep with AirPods and iPhone next to me so who am I to judge.
The fact that it remembers my best 5k time and notifies me when I’ve beaten it is very motivating.
I tell myself, eh first world problems. But agreed that it's also a Seattle Process problem.
For a city with so many tech companies, the city itself isn't very technological.
I really need to just put in a better fence eventually, but for now I just rely on yelling them off.
So many people fall in this category, but a lot of them seem to min-max their gear more than anything. I know casual runners with $400 carbon plate performance shoes, I run with them, in my $7 decathlon shoes, unless you're paid to run or aim for a record I really don't see the point, especially since these thing barely last a few month of serious running. Same for hikers with $3k of ultralight gear, they spend more time reading reviews and flexing their 0.1g hacks than actually hiking.
There is a huge overlap between tech nerds and "gear hobbyists", I assume because they have too much money for their own good.
Sounds like an AliPay problem, not necessarily a "China" problem because in the Apple Wallet app, there is a list of nearly 50 Chinese transit cards that can be added.
Perhaps someone in China can provide more information.
Americans count like people: 1, 2, 3…
Europeans count like machines: 0, 1, 2…