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Watches and wearables · Apple Watch

Apple Watch Series 0

6owners with an opinion
100%of verdicts positive
2/0positive/negative since 2024
3 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for ease of use and design; criticized for performance and software.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 3 years
This sounds like Apple strong-arming their staff to try and rally around a mediocre product. The Apple Watch comparisons don't make sense. Even the Apple Watch Series 0 was totally worth it. You could get notifications on your wrist, fitness tracking (totally replacing RunKeeper and similar apps at the time), pause music, locate your phone, etc. I happily used the Series 0 for 3 years.
Recommends itOwned 2 yearsStill going
the Series 0 (first gen) watch was my first watch ever (never felt the need for a watch until then) Been using it for over 2 years and I'm super happy with it. Watch OS 3 made a huge difference in terms of usability for the watch. The background updates and swiping to change watch faces means I have my most used watch Complications in the 3 watchfaces I use. Weather, podcast, music and timer apps (from complications) are so useful! I feel if you don't make use of multiple complications with watch faces, you are not using your watch to the fullest :) Haven't used it much for Siri nor have I tried testing its water resistance. And I'll probably for in for a series 3 or series 4 based on my needs. Watch sales up 50%: I think the Apple Watch and the AirPods are peripherals for the iPhone that are so well priced (is Apple making any profit on these sales?) that I doubt if they have a huge margin. Having the highest margin phone and low margin peripherals like Watch, AirPods (probably glasses soon?) means once you go iPhone you don't look back. In the years when an iPhone owner chooses not to upgrade iPhone, he/she may choose to upgrade one of the peripherals. Which means higher LTV customer for Apple!
Neutral
Having had an Apple Watch since the Series 0, I think Apple wants people to have a ~3-year upgrade cycle. They essentially update the internals one year, the next they come out with some interesting software features, then the next year they do some external design tweaks. Then they repeat. There is no reason to upgrade every year, or even every two. It is around the 3-year mark where there tends to be enough new features or your battery life is getting bad enough that there is reason to check out the new watches. Even then my mom uses a Series 6 and is very happy with it and actually uses it a fair bit.
Likes it
This is pretty awesome. I had a Pebble but the battery went out and was sad to see that you had to buy used / refurbished. Being epaper and lasting for so long the best part of it was that it just managed notifications with my phone. I moved on to the Apple Watch from my brother (series 0) and it took awhile for the Apple Watch to have its killer application which was a fitness tracker.
Likes it
Fitbit was a fitness tracker that later adopted more smartwatch features -- but things like Pebble (early 2013), Android Wear (now Wear OS) (spring 2014), Samsung's Galaxy Gear (fall 2013) all already existed. Now were any of them as good as Apple Watch -- aside from Pebble (which could never have the same level of integration as Apple could offer for iOS, but still did a very good job), I would say no -- but I would also argue Apple Watch was fairly medicore outside of its core notification features at first too. WatchOS until like fall 2016 really wasn't that great. The third-party apps were all garbage and we didn't even get "native" apps until six months after the device launched and that original Apple Watch (the Series 0) was woefully underpowered for what it needed to be. I bought one and don't regret spending $800 on the stainless steel variant with the modern buckle combo, but it also got like two years of software support, and even the support was limited compared to even the low-cost Series 1 released a year later.
Likes it
My series 0 worked great until the glue came off of the screen last week. Screen flapped open, caught on my backpack, and ripped the connector cables clean in half. No indication of problems until catastrophic failure, and I took great care of the thing. Bummed.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
It is actually very Apple, and perhaps even more so at post-Jobs Apple. The iPod wasn’t as good on paper as the Rio or Rune. Cost a LOT more too. The original iPhone wasn’t great, but it was good enough to capture the imagination. It certainly wasn’t cheap. The Series 0 Watch was also pretty ordinary, especially when compared to other smart watches. Expensive too. Same with Siri, the HomePod and Apple TV, but these haven’t quite hit the mark. Probably not failures (except maybe Siri), but not in the best of Apple category. All of these early products were for the bleeding edge. They provide the feedback and insight into how the product is going to be used. Apple’s special ability is to find the essence of what a good product needs to have, quickly. Sometimes they don’t nail it first time, but they excel at finding out and then iterating until it does.
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
> Apple hasn't launched a first-gen product this limited in use since the original iPhone - Apple Watch Series 0 was so underpowered it was borderline unusable. - OSX 1.0 was a buggy, slow, feature-less mess of an operating system. It definitely doesn't seem like Apple minds launching way too early.