Other than time, there’s a few things I use my Apple Watch for every day. Added up, I’m very happy with the purchase. I’m not sure I’d get stainless steel again, but at the time I was worried about the glass screen. I wear it whenever I’m awake.

• Messages. I love just getting a tap on my wrist. There’s an entirely different feeling to receiving a message on the watch vs. my phone. Whereas my phone and its text tone says “look at me,” that little tap from my watch tells me “when you feel like it, I’ve got something for you.”
• Screening calls. I usually turn the ringer off on my phone. Instead, I get a tap on my wrist when a call comes in, and it tells me who it is. If I want to answer, I’ll pull out my phone and answer. I could absolutely do this with my phone, and I used to, but this is just easier. (I have used the speaker, and the microphone quality isn’t bad.)
• Apple Pay. To pay for most things, I tap the side button twice. It brings up my credit cards. But it’s actually more secure than a real credit card: Take the watch off my wrist, and it locks. I’m looking forward to more places accepting Apple Pay so I don’t need to carry my cards everywhere, but it’s already available enough to be used daily. (This is in Canada.)
• Sunrise/sunset. I know there’s a lot of ways to do this, but I find the Solar face unbelievably intuitive. It also nicely demonstrates the dark despair of living in the Vancouver area in winter. Give us Vancouverites a break, please, if we get bummed out this time of year. (When I showed the solar face to a coworker, his first question was “What’s the horizontal line?” “That’s the sun.” “Oh. I thought we had more than that.” Nope!)
• Movement reminders. My job is sitting at the computer. I could have my computer remind me every hour to stand up (in fact, I used to do this) but having the watch monitor me means I’m only reminded in hours I’ve been sitting.
• Unlocking my Mac. I can’t believe I forgot this in my first draft! I type my computer password in once per day now. The rest of the time the computer just sees the watch beside it and lets me in.

If I take it off the charger at 6am it’ll usually last until 6pm the next day. But if I forget to charge it overnight, charging it while I get ready in the morning will guarantee it makes it through the day.

Current Canadian starting price is $399 for the 42mm version of the Series 1.

I bought my wife an Apple Watch for her birthday, too. There’s a few differences in our experience:

• She got the 38mm Sport in pink. (This model has the glass screen, but that’s been fine. It’s even a little brighter than mine.)
• While her battery makes it through the day (at least since one of the earliest updates), I don’t think there’s any way she’d get 36 hours out of it.
• She doesn’t wear hers at home a lot of the time, but puts it on if she’s going out. At work she’s able to read messages throughout the day, which she wouldn’t be able to on her phone. If she’s out for fun, she uses it to screen notifications and calls as well since it requires less of her attention than fetching the phone.
• She doesn’t care about sunrise/sunset, and uses the Butterflies face instead.
• She also uses it for Apple Pay. But this is more critical for her, since she carries a lot less at work. Luckily she works at a restaurant, so if it fails for some reason I get to pay when I pick her up. This has happened only once or twice, and only in the early days or when we’ve got new credit cards.
• Her fluoroelastomer band discoloured after about 11 months. Mine was still fine. This might be the chemicals she works with, but it might just be that the lavender colour doesn’t hold up as well. We picked up a replacement nylon band.

To me, this quote from the article completely demonstrates why you might want a smartwatch:

So far, “there’s not a great use case for a smartwatch,” said Jitesh Ubrani, a senior research analyst with market intelligence firm IDC, who studies mobile technology. “A lot of what these devices can do, they’re essentially just mimicking the phone.”

This is both absolutely right and wrong, because it presents but ignores the use case: You can do it from your wrist without pulling out your phone.

If you don’t mind picking up your phone whenever it demands your attention, great. You can trim the notifications down a lot, after all. But if you want to put your phone in your pocket and keep it there most of the time, at your desk or while out… that’s a big part of what the watch is for. You can decide if it’s worth the money for you, but it was for me.

Aside from the stand notifications, I haven’t even started the fitness stuff. That’s still to come.

Walt Mossberg:

In the last couple of years, however, I’ve noticed a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps, on both the mobile iOS operating system and its Mac OS X platform. It’s almost as if the tech giant has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to these core software products, while it pursues big new dreams, like smartwatches and cars.

Jim Dalrymple:

It’s just not like Apple to release software that is so broken.

Although the headline is “apps,” both articles actually talk about a wide variety of Apple software including the core OS.

Look, I’m not here to argue that Apple’s software is perfect. I think it’s pretty good and it’s getting better, but that’s beside the point. What I find ridiculous is the assertion that “this used to be great.” Frankly, it’s setting the bar way too low.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look over some quotes about Apple’s software quality. See if you can guess for what Apple release it was written. Most of these are quotes from the time, but some are in retrospect.

Note: Although I’m presenting these as quotes, I’ve stripped the version number, keywords, old application names and technologies. Further, I’ve been bad and have not marked those edits in the text, so please check the original story for the real quote. This is all done to make the game more entertaining. I hope the original authors understand this comes from the very best place.

Our first quote is about a broken installer:

The release was pulled due to a mistake at Apple, in which some components were not included in the installer.

This was said about 1996’s System 7.5.4 (Source: Wikipedia’s System 7 article).

Next is about Wi-Fi problems introduced in an OS update:

The Mac OS X update installed fine but I lost networking including ability to talk to my Apple Airport Extreme.

This was said about 2003’s Jaguar 10.2.8 (Source: CNET’s Troubleshooting (pulled) Mac OS X 10.2.8)

Now let’s talk lack of polish:

But that’s not to say that this initial release is all sunshine and daisies. I ran across quite a few bugs and flaws in the software as I tested it, and while none are significant enough to recommend against upgrading, this strikes me as the least polished major iOS update in quite some time.

This was 2011’s release of iOS 5. (Source: iOS 5 Review: Ambitious update rings in the changes)

Next, we’ve got a quote about data corruption:

Just connecting a drive using this technology to a Mac running OS X can ruin the data on the drive. The problem does not occur with earlier versions of Mac OS X, however.

This was said about 2003’s Panther 10.3 (Source: Macintouch’s “Panther FireWire Bug”)

On inconsistent UI:

Such basic design flaws demonstrate a lack of unity among Apple’s development team and a lack of overall coordination and user design standards.

This was said about 2005’s Tiger 10.4 (Source: “Macintoch’s Tiger Review”)

On security problems:

Apple has significantly lowered the bar for malicious entities to install and execute damaging code in OS X.

This was said about 2005’s Tiger 10.4 (Source: blueprint for a widget of mass destruction)

On updates that don’t work:

Apple support drones are getting an earful from Mac users who are experiencing frozen Macs while trying to update to the latest and greatest version of OS X.

This was said about 2007’s Leopard 10.5 (Source: Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs)

On applications being broken:

Users are reporting a significant number of applications being affected by the issue, including Microsoft Office, older versions of Adobe Photoshop, and various other applications…

This was said about a 2012 security update to Snow Leopard (Source: Snow Leopard Security Update Kills PowerPC Apps Using Rosetta)

On sideways motion:

It has gotten mixed reviews from customers, so far (like other recent versions of Mac OS X, come to think of it). There are real technical and usability improvements, but these are obscured by interface changes and special effects.

This was said about the 2011 release of Lion (Source: Macintouch’s Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review)

It’s absolutely true Apple’s shipped some stinkers like discoveryd, but that’s nothing new. If we want better, the most important thing is to start from reality. A narrative shared by the blogosphere is different from fact.

So let’s start from reality: We don’t need a return to the “golden era” (which may not even have been any better). We need better.

Note: I reserve the right to add new examples if I feel like it. I’m not a reporter, and this isn’t a news story.

I’ve heard that this isn’t real GPS or that it’s somehow inferior to real GPS. AGPS is actually superior to “real” GPS. However, there are ways the iPhone is also inferior to a standalone navigational GPS like a Garmin or Tom Tom. I’m going to explain the differences between them.

Positioning

The iPhone includes a regular GPS receiver, just like your standalone GPS. The “assisted” part means the iPhone is able to get a quick lock based on other data sources, such as nearby cell phone towers or WiFi networks.

I’m not going to try to write an explanation of this. There’s a great article on this in Macworld by Glenn Fleishman, ”How the iPhone knows where you are,” which you should read. He’s a journalist who specializes in wireless technologies, and anything I could write on that subject would fail to measure up to his writing.

But I can summarize that article for you in one paragraph, if you didn’t bother to read it:

Because the iPhone has a GPS radio and these other data sources, it’s quicker at finding your location than a standalone navigational GPS.

Your iPhone does this without sacrificing final accuracy, but may give you several approximations along the way. (These are times a real GPS would still be trying to figure out where you are.) This is simplifying a little; the iPhone needs to conserve battery more than your standalone GPS. If you’re not actually using Maps or some other application that needs pinpoint accuracy, it probably powers down the GPS and uses whatever radios it has powered up to do approximate positioning rather than the most accurate positioning it’s capable of. But when you need accurate positioning, it’s there.

Maps

So why do people think the iPhone’s GPS isn’t a real GPS? It’s because of the one way the iPhone is weaker than your standalone GPS. As shipped by Apple, the iPhone is completely dependent on the Internet for map tile data.

That means that without a data signal, whether WiFi or 3G, the iPhone is unable to show you a map. You end up with a screen like this:

From this, you might conclude that without a data connection your iPhone isn’t very good as a navigational tool. You’d be right about that! But you might also conclude that the iPhone doesn’t know where you are. In fact, it knows where you are. It just isn’t able to put it on a map, because it doesn’t actually have a map of the area.

This is where standalone GPS devices are better. Because they don’t have the extra radios that the iPhone has, they can’t download map data from the Internet. Instead, a standalone GPS includes map data on the device. Storing an entire country’s (or even an entire continent’s) map data takes a lot of space, so it’s often rendered more crudely than the iPhone’s maps.

Imagine drawing a map for a friend to get to your house. You know which road they’ll be coming on, and you know where they’re trying to go. You can fill in the roads they need to pay attention to from memory, and mark turns and the destination. This is how a standalone GPS works, except that if it’s up-to-date it knows all the roads and can quickly draw everything quickly and to scale. It’s rendered using just its memory, without the aid of a 3G or WiFi network.

The iPhone’s maps, on the other hand, are from the cloud. The iPhone basically asks for a graphical map from the cloud, with the location and zoom it’s interested in. The image the cloud returns can be beautifully rendered and completely up-to-date, but without the cloud, the iPhone can’t get anything.

But what if your iPhone did have map data on device? Then it would be able to render maps without a data connection AND get a fix faster than a real standalone GPS. This is where the App Store comes in to play. Tom Tom and Garmin both sell apps that include map data. When running one of these apps, the iPhone is able to find its location faster than a standalone GPS. However, even without a connection to the Internet, the app is able to provide a map.

Turn-by-turn navigation

If you’ve reached this point, you’re probably wondering why the iPhone can’t do turn-by-turn navigation. It’s a fair question. The answer is complicated, but boils down simply: Apple does not provide the map data. Instead, Apple’s map display uses data provided by Google. And Google does not allow Apple to use that map data for turn-by-turn navigation. Apple, in turn, does not allow iPhone developers to submit turn-by-turn navigation apps that use the iPhone’s map system.

So why can some Android phones provide turn-by-turn navigation? Google allows it.

This is why any turn-by-turn navigation app is going to require its own map data, rather than working off the cloud when it’s available. There’s been a few hints that Apple may switch to their own data at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet. Being dependent on a competitor interested in keeping your device inferior isn’t a good position to be in, even if the reasoning has nothing to do with competition.

Update: The next version of iOS 6 will switch the data source to Apple’s. The iPhone will still download map data, but instead of downloading just a picture it will now download richer data that will allow it to display rotated maps more cleanly. And Apple is bringing turn-by-turn directions to the iPhone 4S. The iPhone will not get offline navigational data, however.

Conclusion

The iPhone’s GPS us very good. Without extra software, however, iPhone navigation is entirely dependent on the Internet. But you can see maps as long as the iPhone can reach the cloud. You can download software so you can see maps while away from the cloud. And any photo you take, even while away from the cloud, will still be tagged with the location of the iPhone.

The iPhone makes its connection to the cloud a strength, whereas standalone GPS units have made the lack of a radio their strength. It’s a complicated tradeoff. Saying the iPhone does not have “real” GPS or that AGPS is not “real”, though, is inaccurate.