A friend has his kids use LTE Apple Watches. He set them up with his iPhone and they don't have them. It supports "Kid" mode on the watches and everything. They can call and text him when ever they want, which is really nice.
How old are the kids? My wife can’t find well fitting watch bands for the smallest Apple Watch due to here thin wrists. Can’t imagine finding some for a kid.
You can find handmade Apple Watch bracelets on Etsy. Alongside a lot of dropshipped crap ones from Aliexpress - but the point is it seems like third parties are able to make bracelets that replicate the mechanical “interface” for the bracelets, so you should be able to find any size you want.
I last tried to ditch my phone and just wear the watch with a Series 4, so things might be different now, but you give up way too much compared to using a smartphone.
Only being able to take calls on speakerphone, not having access to the long tail of apps you might need on occasion, and not being able to effectively input text into the apps you do have are the biggest problems for me.
Its alright for the kids and old people thing they have now where you really want a life alert/GPS tracker combo and calling/texting is a nice bonus but the form factor isn't viable for solo use.
You can but in practice this doesn't end up working well. By the time your airpod is out of your pocket, out of the case, in your ear, and connected to your watch, the call has stopped ringing.
If you are only worried about placing calls and not receiving them, it works better but you still have to contend with bluetooth, which is less than 100% reliable, being an essential component of your setup.
The kind of situation where not carrying your phone works is one where usually you either have your AirPods in your ear, or when you're driving and it is connected to your car audio, or you don't mind answering via the speaker phone.
Transparency mode is good enough on AirPods that I feel safe using them when I am cycling or running, and not having to carry a phone during those activities is a big win for me.
Of course this means getting even more locked into Apple ecosystem, but I even forget that AirPods are bluetooth devices given the way they seamless work with other apple stuff.
>"You can but in practice this doesn't end up working well. By the time your airpod is out of your pocket, out of the case, in your ear, and connected to your watch, the call has stopped ringing."
How is the form factor of this any different than when you connect AirPods to take a call on your iPhone? This exact order of premeditation prior to the action of taking a call is already commonplace if for the iPhone - why not for the Apple Watches too?
Well the difference is that I can hold my iPhone up to my ear to take a call in public, whereas the only options with the watch are airpods or speakerphone.
That's fair enough - I wonder if the sales pitch for users already accustomed to taking calls with their AirPods will be a lot more susceptible to being swayed into using the Apple Watch for them instead, then?
Probably! I see a lot of people, particularly young people, out and about these days who seem to keep their airpods in all the time, which probably helps too.
I use my LTE watch for smaller errands where I don't want to lug around the phone, yet can still take or make a call if it is really necessary, make payments, etc. Like going out for a walk, or leaving my desk at work for a few minutes. It's a nice convenience, not a substitute.
I 100% agree, and this is the only reason that I have not purchased one.
I've got an Android phone and an iPad pro (with active eSIM). There is no technical reason for Apple to not allow me to "tether" to my iPad, or even any reason to require me to have another device in order to have/use all the features of the watch. It's purely a marketing decision, so I will continue to pass on the Apple Watch until they untether it, or let me access all features with my iPad.
It's not, many applications don't really work without your iPhone connected via Bluetooth even if your watch can make it's own internet connection. It basically seems like Apple and app developers are not considering people using their watch without their IPhone present as well.
Amen to that. I only bought an Apple watch for the fall detection so that if I have a seizure it calls 911. Even got the LTE one so that I could use it when my phone is dead etc.
So imagine my surprise when I switched my handset to Android and my watch reported "no service". Keep in mind that this is marketed as a stand-alone product, that had its own data plan. But once I didn't have an iPhone activated, a soft switch in my watch (read: medical device) was flipped in order to disable it.
It was at that time that I sold every apple product in my possession, and bought a pixel watch. My pixel watch does everything better than my apple watch did, without exception.
Am I being irrational here, or is it wrong for a company to disable device B because you don't have device A anymore, when they're marketed as independent devices with independent data plans and eSIM etc?
This. I have cellular activated on my watch, and I seldom, if ever, carry an iPhone outside my home. It does everything I need from tech, when I am on the go, and that includes recording hours long bike rides.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. There are many studies showing that age is strongly correlated with reduced smartphone use, additionally, youth only makes up a small portion of the whole population.
Youth are fewer, youth have an outsized affect on consumption however. Meanwhile, older people tend to slow down consumption a lot, and therefore you can't really make as much money catering to them.
I think you have the reasoning backwards. Older people have considerably more purchasing power, after all they've had all their life to make money. There are many industries that do extremely well catering exactly to that fact.
Ya, they have more buying power, but they are choosey about what they buy and aren't so interested in new gadgets. Younger people have less buying power but they are full of wants. They also get more money and will buy more over time, whereas baby boomers are going to retire quickly and their buying will fall off.
Visit any restaurant that has Michelin stars and look at the clientele, the more stars the restaurant has, the higher the age of the average customer. The same holds for any luxury goods and services, whether it's cars, housing, jewelry, etc. You can easily spend a new phone's worth of money per person per evening at one of those restaurants, and these people go out to eat way more often than a young person can afford to buy a new phone.
You're still reasoning backwards. Apple produces new gadgets that appeal to young people, so they don't have as strong consumption from older people. That's a decision they made, but there's nothing baked into the laws of the universe that prevented them from designing around older consumers.
> They also get more money and will buy more over time, whereas baby boomers are going to retire quickly and their buying will fall off.
You're assuming this is a generational thing and not an age thing. If older people (and to be clear, I'm talking >40 vs <40) naturally gravitate away from smartphones for some more fundamental reason than generational differences, then that high-buying-power market will remain underserved even once today's young people age into that bracket.
Consumption != purchasing power. To say young people have outside portion consumption compared to their numbers isn't very controversial at all in retail. It is why advertising is geared toward young people, why NBC couldn't make money on Matlock and Golden Girls (they were very popular, but the ad dollars were not there), why you go broke aiming at a 60 yro demographic rather than a 20 yro one.
You are just claiming that the market is being inefficient, but they have been burned so many times before assuming that somehow the 40+ crowd is going to drive the market for new things.
I figure if I'm in that group, it can't be that small of a group. I'm a turbo normie and no thought I have is remotely unique or original. There are at least dozens of us out there using our watches as phones.
But seriously, probably millions of people would prefer to not carry a phone everywhere yet still have the essentials (texting and calling) handy if need be.
the Apple watch can be independent from the iPhone. Ask a family member or a friend with an iPhone to set it up, there is an apposite function for it. Just buy one with cellular.
I think for people that only use smartphones occasionally, it'd be ideal to have just a watch and a desktop/laptop.
It'd also be a great move by Apple towards reducing distractions of its users. Watches can be much less intrusive than phones.