It’s BIG. The 44mm Series 6 is my first Apple Watch since the original, and the screen is bigger and the bezels smaller than before, to the point that my arm feels like it’s got some sort of Jitterbug AARP phone on it. You can feel the weight – I was wearing my Fitbit Inspire HR and my mechanical watch together this weekend, and I think it’s a wash.
I chose the velcro sport band (sorry, “hook and loop”) because I didn’t much trust the sizing on the Solo Loop and want to buy it once I can evaluate in person. Turns out this was the correct move, not least because if you don’t like the Loop it came with you have to return the whole watch. Which is a debacle now that the wait time is a month for shipping. It turns out I can barely squeeze my hand through it, but that’s fine for now; it may be a bigger deal after a few days of charging.
Which is really the trick, isn’t it? I finally went to the Charge 3 over a year ago after tooling around with a mechanical watch plus a Fitbit, and actively avoiding taking the Apple Watch abroad or anything, because I couldn’t be arsed to charge it every day and because the performance was slower than waiting for Christmas morning. Five years on, we have adequate storage for a dozen local playlists AND adequate processing power to actually make Siri responsive in less than a year AND sufficient telemetry on movement, heart rate and blood oxygen to make it a useful addition to one’s health care information. It occurred to me as I went out for the first time with it that this watch has to last at least until the end of 2023 to match the original, and I suspect there may be issues with that depending on how the battery works out.
But the battery is bigger, as the Watch gets on the iPhone train of ditching Jony Ive’s ridiculous 3DTouch and replacing the space the circuitry took up with actual battery. A mostly-black OLED display will help with this too; no wacky photo displays this time. It’s supposed to charge faster, probably when I’m in the shower, and even if I don’t it can explicitly stand up to some water now in a way the original could not. There’s a watch face with eight complications for real-time environmental awareness (UV, dB level, air quality, temps with high/low, heart rate) and next stuff up, there’s the Siri face (in eternal optimism that maybe this time Siri will be useful), and there’s three swappable faces for shutdown time to give me a clock and either the AppleTV remote, the music playlists or just the temperature outside. And one of me, a Memoji with a face mask on, just for the hell of it in this year of Hell.
I could theoretically use the walkie-talkie function if I had anyone I spoke to regularly who owned another Watch. I could theoretically use it as a SmarTrip card on the DC Metro. I could theoretically use Citymapper to navigate around JNUC in Minneapolis, or a weekend in Portland, or two weeks in London, if any of those were remotely feasible. It’s a new gadget, it’s health monitoring taken away from Google’s acquisition, it’s a little slice of a pretend future that it doesn’t always feel like we’re going to last long enough to experience for real. And it’s the phone on the shelf every Sunday or Tuesday night, surplus to requirement, with me still able to listen to podcasts and music and step out of the world for a smidge.
Now if only it had the space-time GPS and the quantum time-travel suit in it. I could go work on getting those stones.