I say this as someone who’s been using the Apple Watch for a few years and like what it offers. Apple is not committed to making the average person exercise. It

I say this as someone who’s been using the Apple Watch for a few years and like what it offers. Apple is not committed to making the average person exercise. It’s committed to pushing people to a world where everyone measures their self worth by the number of exercise minutes or the number of calories burned everyday. > The Health app is merely feeling that I appear to be taking strides. It can't tell I'm on a bike. Of course it can’t tell the difference. It’s the same with the watch too. Do some cooking or wash the dishes and it’ll happily count that as exercise...or to put it in its term “workout”. But this is to be expected of these devices. > Yet the insidious nature of apps is such that you can't help but go back to them. Again and again. That’s where people get stuck, especially after they get a wearable (like the watch) that’s always with them. And Apple isn’t making it any easier although it could do it. It took Apple five years to make the stand hour targets and exercise minutes targets configurable (this has been possible only in the recent watchOS 7). People have been asking for break days in the week, but Apple is just plain lazy to implement it and pushes you (“motivates”, in its parlance) to close your rings every single day and praise you for doing it without a break. > I'm beginning to worry it's made me an even worse, more neurotic person. > You see, it would, at any instance, tell me I was walking less than I did the day before. Or the week before. Even if it was a 0.1 miles difference, the scolding was painful. This whole design is downright stupid, IMO. Apple shouldn’t treat all users the same. There are people who like to push the limits and keep going beyond. There are people who just want a little bit of push but not a constant push to become the next world class athlete. If there’s one thing that sows doubt in my mind that machines can learn, it’s that Apple Watch and Health can never learn that I just want a constant target week after week, month after month and year after year. But it will always try pushing me to do more every week. When I realized that it’s designed to kill me through exercise, I stopped accepting its suggestions for the Move Goal and bring it down to what I want. It just doesn’t listen and learn though. Tell the machine what to do, and avoid having the machine tell you what to do. These machines aren’t smart enough.