Comment by hakunin
19 hours ago
I think Apple Watch is a great device for wearing to gym, to sleep, and somewhat during the day + occasional quick text reply maybe, and otherwise forgetting all about it, because the true value lies in what's being collected in the Health app. Stop trying to do things on it imo. Maybe there are a couple of useful things you can do, or if you're a runner, maybe you can leave your phone at home. I don't have these use cases, but it's valuable to me even without them.
My recommendation is: buy the cheapest material one every few years. I only ever had 2 and 5 (upgraded due to always on screen), and am considering to finally upgrade to 12.
Over the years I have had Garmin Fenix 3HR, 6, Instinct, 7 Pro, Apple Watch 8, SE3 and now I have S11. The last one I must admit was an impulse buy. I realized that marketing works really well selling people the idea that all that collected data is actually important and may improve your life in a meaningful way. In fact, the formula is simple: eat clean, move, sleep well, do blood tests twice a year to ensure you don’t have deficiencies. It’s that simple. You don’t need your every heart beat to be recorded or your sleep tracked. You wake up and you already know if you slept well. I even consider health tracking wearables doing more harm as they distract people from what is important giving them a false sense of comfort if they managed to close all the rings.
One a side note, I tried CGM out of curiosity and seeing how your body (and this is quite individual) reacts on various food, how high glucose spikes you can get from only a handful of blueberries has had a tremendous effect on my diet. Controlling glucose levels has helped sleep better, recover faster, lose some weight and overall have more energy. Wearing CGM for only one month has had more impact on my life than years of wearing various health trackers.
I ditched the screen and got a band with health metrics on it. Its tiny and comfy, no screens, only a wakeup buzz in the morning when I'm most able to wake apparently. Battery lasts maybe a week? Been great. Best of all no advertisements pinging me every few hours.
I wouldn't mind this (a ring is another option), but 1) you can disable notifications, which I tend to do and 2) the problem is that all independent experiments keep claiming that almost everything is inaccurate out there, and Apple Watch is one of the few surprisingly accurate ones, as compared to real medical equipment.
> Best of all no advertisements pinging me every few hours.
Skill issue.
The first thing anyone should do when they get a smart watch is disable all notifications. It's so easy to do and it makes the experience so much better. It's completely backwards that notifications are opt out. Sadly, I've never seen anyone change their defaults.
Agree. Was really hoping for a Fitbit style band this year that just has a Siri button and Apple Pay. An iPod for your wrist perhaps.
I don't know. Apple marketing has been really effective at this health thing. Whereas, studies of continuous monitoring of eg heart with even better sensors and higher risk populations have shown conclusively no improvement in health outcomes.
Yeah, I only see anecdotal evidence of Apple Watch helping people: individual heavily-promoted stories.
Still, on a personal level, having my health data over time is something I find interesting to collect.
Things like my sleep, gym heartrate (I mostly pay attention to zones rather than specific numbers), sleep heartrate, occasional ECG reading, steps, with added smart scale and EMR data… It does show interesting trends over time.
I would have guessed the opposite.
Could you share a couple of these studies you are citing? Curious to read more.