What Do You Do with the Apple Watch?

What are we missing?

My dad’s turning 98 this weekend. He’s a lawyer in Cleveland. Couple years ago, he bought an Apple Watch. And you know what he does with it?

He checks the time.

That’s it. Never taps, never presses a button, never turns the crown. And that’s fine! He likes it. It’s bright and clear and always tells the time.

Then I met a dude who plays music while he’s running. From his watch. From a speaker the size of a hydrogen molecule. Never would have occurred to me.

Another woman uses the walkie-talkie app to check in with her husband, across the house or across the country. I’ve never used that feature in my life.

As it turns out, the Apple Watch has no killer app. Instead, it’s really a motley basket of featurettes. When it debuted in 2015, the universal critique was: “Why would I need one? My phone already does all the same things!”

But what people eventually figured out is that a lot of those functions are better when you don’t have to haul out your phone.

So today, I’m going to tell you how I use my Apple Watch. C’mon, it’ll be fun! It’ll be like snooping around someone else’s house.

My first hope is that a couple of these features will make you go, “Oh, cool! I should try that.”

My second hope is that you’ll visit the Comments to post how you use the watch. So that we can go, “Oh, cool! I should try that!”

The Pogue list

OK, so here’s what I use my watch for, roughly in order of frequency. (I’m not counting “checking the time.”)

• Sleep tracking. I find it fascinating to wake up and see how I did last night—how long I slept, how many interruptions, in what stages (like REM or light sleep)—and compare the measurements with how I feel.

• Weather check. When I wake up, I know how to dress.

• Standing reminders. Sitting all day is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes. Walking around once an hour erases much of the damage—and the watch can remind you each hour. I love that, because otherwise, I get into a state of flow and just sit there all morning, slowly turning into a pile of heart disease.

• Next-appointment glances (and reminders). I’ve set up the watch face to display whatever my next thing is: Zoom, call, flight, whatever. Super useful. And I rely on five-minute warnings for those things so I can get ready.

• Flashlight. The Apple Watch may be the most expensive flashlight ever made. But wow, is it handy; you always have it on you. The screen gets shockingly bright—enough to read something, or find the keyhole of a door, or look under the couch.

• Notifications from your phone. You can see what’s up with a quick glance, without dragging your phone out. (You can set up the watch to get only notifications from certain apps, so you’re not bombarded.)

  

• Text messages. I can check them without interrupting whatever I’m doing. In a pinch, I can even respond to them. You can dictate, type on a tiny keyboard, swipe letter shapes, or use canned prefab replies.

• Siri. If you hold in the digital crown, you can speak to Siri just as you would on the phone. I use that all the time—mostly to set a timer or alarm or adjust the thermostat, but sometimes to ask a question or do math.

• Start/stop playback of music or podcasts.

• Find my phone. There’s a dedicated Find Phone button on the Control Center, and many Apple Watch owners call this the single greatest feature of the watch. It makes your phone chime, wherever it’s sitting in your home, so you can find it. (Here’s how I’ve set up my Control Center.)

  

• Take a call at an inconvenient time. The Apple Watch can make and receive speakerphone calls. (It relies on your nearby iPhone for cell service, unless you bought the cellular version and pay for service.) You do look like a painful nerd when you talk to your wrist. Still, when a call comes in and I don’t have the phone on me, it’s handy to answer and say my hellos while I hunt for the phone. At that point, I transfer the call to the phone (tap the top center of the phone screen).

• Fitness tracking. I let the watch track my weightlifting and cardio workouts, including my heart rate, but I’m not really sure why; I almost never go look at the graphs later. It’s just nice to claim credit, I guess. (I do realize that for many people, recording workouts is a Key Feature.)

• Manage alarms. If I’m gonna take a quick nap, I tell Siri on the watch, “Wake me in 30 minutes” or whatever. (For some reason, alarms do not sync between your phone and your watch. The two devices maintain independent alarm lists, which can get you into trouble if you’re not careful.)

• Set timers for kitchen tasks.

• Map guidance. When you’re navigating somewhere (bike, drive, walk), Apple Maps or Google Maps can give little vibrations when it’s time to make a turn. The watch displays a graphic showing which way to turn. This way, you’re hands-free.

• Camera Remote. This is awesome. You set up your iPhone to take a group photo, and then you trigger the shutter (or start the video) from your watch. You get a three-second countdown, so that the photo doesn’t show you fiddling with your Apple Watch.

• Audio recording. I’m a memory hoarder. I like to document my life. I take a lot of photos for that reason, but I also record audio snippets with the watch: 30 seconds of a concert or a comedy club. Crazy bird calls. Coyotes across the street. Check it out!

• Vitals. Such a cool little feature. While you’re asleep, the watch monitors five critical health metrics: heart rate, breathing rate, skin temp, blood-oxygen level, and stage of sleep. If any two or more of those were out of whack during the night, the watch lets you know in the morning. It usually means that either (a) you’re getting sick, or (b) you were drunk last night.

• Health monitoring. This is my least-used feature, thank god—but maybe the most important. The watch continuously checks you for medical conditions like sleep apnea, hypertension, atrial fibrillation, sudden falls, and unusual heart rate. Kind of amazing, when you think about it: How does a device on your wrist know what’s happening in your brain, heart, and blood? In February, I slipped on ice and fell so hard, it knocked the wind out of me; I mean, I was out for a few seconds. The watch announced that it had detected a hard fall. After one minute, it started a loud 30-second countdown to calling 911 and notifying my wife. Fortunately, I got my bearings and canceled the countdown—but wow, I can see how this feature saves a lot of lives.

  

As I conducted this survey of features, I looked through the list of apps installed on my watch, and you know what? There are more features I don’t use than features I do. I’ve never used any of these on the watch:

Audiobooks, Calculator, Compass, Contacts, Cycle Tracking, Depth (swimmers), ECG, Home (smart devices), Mail, Maps, Memoji, Medications, Mindfulness, Music, Music Recognition, News, Notes, Photos, Podcasts, Remote (for the Apple TV), Stocks, Stopwatch, Tides, Translate, Walkie-Talkie, Wallet, World Clock.

I might be missing out on a couple of things. I use Apple Pay all the time, but I always use the phone for that—I should try using the watch. And I sheepishly admit that I didn’t even realize that the Notes app is on the watch.

Some people let the watch auto-unlock the Mac when they approach, too. I would love to be able to do that—but that feature requires that you have a password on your watch. You have to enter it every damn time you put it on (which is daily, since the battery lasts only a day), and that would drive me crazy. I’m not even quite sure why I need to password-protect a device that’s strapped onto me at all times. (Yeah, I know: “Someone could look at it while it’s charging!” That someone could only be my wife, and if I’m worried about what she will discover on my watch, I’ve got bigger problems.)

Set up the face

The Apple Watch has always suffered from interface overload. It’s got a touchscreen (tap, double-tap, swipe) and a big button on the side (press, double-press), and a little crown (turn, click, double-click). Which input mechanism should do what?

When I was researching Apple: The First 50 Years, I learned that Apple’s designers struggled with that question for a whole year.

The first concept, in fact, was that you’d use the little knob for navigating everything. You’d start with a bird’s-eye view, seeing your entire watch’s contents, tiny as pixels. Then you’d zoom closer and closer into an app, into its data.

The problem, software lead Kevin Lynch told me, was targeting. “Zooming out is easy, but zooming in— what are you zooming in on?” he says. “If you’re looking at a list of meetings and you want to zoom into one, then you have to swipe on the screen to center it and then zoom. And now you’ve got this interaction going where you’re panning and zooming. And it’s too cumbersome.”

They wound up redesigning the interface three times, trying to get it right. But even in the final version, it’s a little fussy to find what you need. Just turning on Do Not Disturb, for example, requires three steps: Press the side button to open the Control Center, tap the little moon button, and then choose one of the focus modes. Not Apple’s finest design moment.

So for me, the most important setup step is putting the functions you use most on the watch’s main face, so you don’t have to fumble them. I’ve set up this screen, which offers direct access to five functions.

Killer taps

After a slow start, the Apple Watch has become the bestselling watch in the world. You see them on wrists everywhere.

But here’s the crazy thing: It got that way without having a killer app.

The iPhone had one: Putting the internet in your pocket. But the watch isn’t an internet terminal.

Instead, almost all of its value stems from where it is: On your wrist. Always there, small, visible, always part of you.

OK, now you! What are you doing with the watch that the rest of us might be missing?