Wow, while Apple may not be the revolutionary company of Steve Jobs, overall in the industry, they still lead the way on making things simpler. I used Apple Watch Series 1 initially and it was so confusing with this landscape of little tiles, but using WatchOS4 is so much more natural and the setup is incredibly easy.
Some notes on amazing things:
- It is so cool that they use Bluetooth LE to sense proximity to a configured device and then grab that configuration from the device. You don’t have to setup again anything from Wifi passwords to authentication.
- They did a great job on doing things without asking people questions like what do you want to call my watch (How about Rich’s Watch).
- They also did a really nice job going through all the applications already loaded on the phone and putting the watch versions on the phone.
- The new scroll back and forth seems much more natural and I wish the “list view” of apps was the default, the sea of tiny icons was always so confusing.
- It is amazing also that when you come up to your Mac, it will ask you if you want your Watch to unlock your Mac. Although when it doesn’t work, it is pretty impossible to debug.
The AirPods were perhaps the biggest surprise, they put incredible care into the initial setup. Just open the box near your iPhone and it pairs automatically and well it just works. Nice job. The sound is remarkably good.
Now the bad parts:
- Discoverability is hard. There is nothing to tell you how to control the AirPods. I was super surprised I didn’t get the voice of someone in the AirPods welcoming me and telling me what to do. That a double tap is what gets you to Siri. For instance how to configure the right and left double taps to do different things.
- Same with the Apple Watch, after the initial setup, you have to Google and query to figure out how to make things work, there is no walk through even though you obviously have a phone sitting right there, why couldn’t there be a guide?
Overall though compared with most experiences nice job!
