Reconsidering the Apple Watch

For most of my life, I just wasn’t a watch person.

Sometime after college, when whatever cheap watch I had at the time broke, I just stopped bothering. The advent of smartphones—my first was the T-Mobile Sidekick, which deserves its own post at some point (people either forget or just never knew that the Sidekick had an on-device app store, visual voicemail, and one of the best pre-iPhone web browsers on it)—gave me a “watch” in my pocket. What else did I need, right?

Well, sometime around 2014 or 2015, I bought a mechanical watch on a whim. The brand is “88 Rue du Rhone,” and the watch does nothing but (gasp) tell time. But it was a good watch. I liked it. I still have it, although its battery died years ago.

When the Apple Watch came out, I wasn’t initially interested, but sometime in 2017 or 2018 I bought a Series 3. Once I got into the fitness aspects—haphazardly and half-assedly, but still—it was game over. You have to keep wearing the Apple Watch, man, or you’re not gonna close your rings. You have to close your goddamn rings, right?

As of right now, I have a Series 9 watch, one of the stainless steel ones. Ironically, its sapphire glass looks more beat up than I remember the glass on the two aluminum watches I owned getting; it’s not scratches as much as what look like permanent smudges in one corner, like a coating wore off. Its battery health is down to 84%. This would be a good time to consider a Series 12, maybe going back to aluminum.

And the Series 12 is, in a lot of ways, a great upgrade. The problem—if you’ve heard about the watch, you can guess what’s coming—is the “Audio Intelligence” features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap. As Apple describes these:

Live Rewind recalls what was just said in the last 15 seconds by showing a text snippet on your Apple Watch when you double-press the Digital Crown, so you can catch something you missed or are less familiar with. You can ask Siri about the content of the snippet or simply save it to the Siri app. Siri Recap ambiently takes notes on your conversations throughout your day and creates high-level Apple Intelligence–generated summaries that you can use later to jog your memory, so you can stay present in the moment. Your summaries auto-delete after 7 days if you choose not to save them.

Now, I trust Apple when they talk about how much their approach considers privacy. Everything has to be turned on (e.g., it’s not “this is always on and you have to remember to turn it off”). Live Rewind only activates when you double-press the watch’s crown, they never actually record audio (“there is no recording to share, forward, or produce if requested by any party, because no recording exists”), the data that is produced is end-to-end encrypted and even Apple can’t access it, it doesn’t identify speakers in conversations, tries to omit “potentially harmful content” (everything from credit card numbers to hate speech), so on and so forth. Yet I still doubt “we’re not recording everyone without their explicit permission, we’re just transcribing and/or summarizing everyone without explicit permission” will get the collective “oh, well, that’s fine, then” reaction Apple seems to be expecting. As Glenn Fleishman writes,

These features feel like they were designed in a lab and passed through to production without enough people wondering, “Will this provoke a tremendous backlash because of the gaps in privacy that are relatively obvious?”

Look, I get the logic here: if “AI wearables” will ever actually be a thing, turning what millions of people are already wearing into one makes sense. And maybe, because there are millions of Apple Watches out there, people won’t dump a beer over your head for wearing a Series 12 the way they would if they saw you wearing Meta Pervert Glasses or a Plaud NotePin. But this still feels like a tremendous failure to read the room—and at the worst, a misstep big enough that it could get the general public to turn against Apple Watches.

I’ll be honest: I’d already been looking over at the Rue du Rhone watch over the last few months, hoping that just changing the battery will get it going again, wondering if perhaps I’d enjoy going back. But the fitness is such a pull, right?

Yeah, but there’s the $99 Fitbit Air. That’s—let me do the calculations—one-quarter the starting price of the $399 Apple Watch. It has no display and its battery lasts for a week on one charge. While it has an optional subscription to get the Gemini-powered “health coach” working with it, if I don’t pay for the subscription, I don’t have to deal with Gemini. Win-win! And, as of just last month (August 2026), the Google Health app now syncs with the Apple Health app.

It has one big downside: it’s Google, and I’ve been trying to de-Googlefy over the last year or so. But the trade-offs might well be worth it. I can get a Fitbit Air and another whole watch for well under the cost of the Apple Watch.

I’m not committed to this, yet. But I’m bringing that Rue du Rhone watch to Batteries Plus in the next few days.