I now have mixed feelings about Apple Watches. I had an Apple Watch 6 for almost four years and loved it: great for tracking swim laps and times, cycling routes, heart rate for exercise, etc. I also enjoy the Apple Fitness+ exercise videos: I believe those are free for a few months, and then cost money, but I’m not sure where they’re available (I get them because I use a Canadian credit card for my Apple stuff). Until July this year, only great experiences.
Then, since the battery was getting unhealthy, back in July I paid for a “refurbishment” - i.e. a new Apple Watch 6 with a healthy battery (this seemed an affordable way to get a couple more years of use on a device that doesn’t have any updates I consider that significant). And the new one’s been glitchy: it started crashing and not responding a few hours after a swim (even though I’d swum with it a bunch of times before). It spent a few days in a bag of rice and got back to mostly normal, but I haven’t dared swim with it since. Occasional weird glitches since, like last week suddenly telling me the time was five minutes later than it actually was (which was a weird non-ending to class: “Oh, sorry, we’re overtime! Wait … we’re not?! Huh?!”). Today’s bike ride has two weird GPS glitches where I apparently warped back to an earlier point for a few seconds, so that added an unexplained 6km to the ride, something I don’t believe ever happened with the previous watch.
I have read on Reddit that the AW6 can be a bit glitchy compared to other models, especially with regard to water-proofing - but still, this is getting annoying. Like I said, great experiences with my first one for almost four years. I do intend to buy a new one, but I’m not sure when, since I’ve currently got what seems to be a bit of a lemon. At some point I’m going to see what my options are for getting my replacement replaced, but I’m not optimistic about that, especially since the errors aren’t replicable.
See a few other threads …