Lots of praise for the Apple Watch here. Here's my take as a first-time Apple Watch Series 6 user who really tried to make it work, but just couldn't. I returne

Lots of praise for the Apple Watch here. Here's my take as a first-time Apple Watch Series 6 user who really tried to make it work, but just couldn't. I returned the watch today as the 14-day return window came to a close. For a smart watch, it's remarkably dumb. To me it felt like you have to tell it everything you do, when you plan to go to sleep, when you start exercising, etc. You can enable the "automatic workout detection feature", but it's automatic in name only. Instead, it will literally pop-up a dialog for you to pick an activity from a list as you're working out. Same thing when you stop, another manual confirmation required. The heartrate function isn't continuous at all, something I was unware of. It samples at a 10 minute internal, except if your arm is moving (what). The sleep tracking has zero details. All of these are things that a $150 Fitbit nailed 5 years ago (I haven't worn one of those either for years): automatic workouts, continuous heart rate, automatic rem stage tracking etc. The audio handling is bizarre, press play in Spotify or Overcast and my iPhone 50 feet away starts playing, despite having Airpods in and paired. Why would you ever want to do that? Audio routing and making the watch have a silent vibrate-only with no alarm on the iPhone is two things I never did figure out in the two weeks I had the watch. But worst of all, as someone else said, it's a massive notification factory. I mean, constant, continuous, incessant pinging, buzzing, vibrating, unread red dots etc. Out of the box, it probably pinged me 25 times an hour, a lot of it emails sure, Slack, but also remembering to breath and stand and wash my hands and everything in-between, all of the latter ones I ended up disabling within the first week as too annoying. Yes, you can (must) configure notifications in detail (depending on how many apps you use, literally hundreds of toggles), but what a terrible experience. Ultimately I decided that I want something that makes my life simpler, not another gadget that I have to babysit (and charge every day), with anxiety inducing notifications. That's without going into the bugs... in the 14 days I had to unlink and re-pair the watch twice as it permanently lost the connection to my iPhone 11 Pro despite power cycling both devices multiple times. From reading Reddit this seems to have been a persistent issue over the years with the watch and nothing unusual. Except when you do, you have to literally start from scratch in creating your watch faces, configuring your zillion notifications, etc. After returning the device, I just felt relieved.