Timothy Pate

Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica has you covered. He’s spent a year wearing the device, and he breaks down its successes, its failures and its potential in layman’s terms (i.e. he talks about battery life, the fitness components and wristband design instead of trying to wow the reader with his technical knowledge of the product).

I agree with virtually all of his praise and criticism. I’ve had an Apple Watch for about six months now. As I’ve repeatedly told people who ask, I won it and probably wouldn’t pay the retail price for one otherwise.

Cunningham’s final assessment:

The Apple Watch is doing fine. It’s certainly not the abject failure that some people have already tried to declare it. But if Apple wants to keep people’s interest and, more importantly, attract new interest, it needs to keep improving the watch and expanding the number of things people can use it for.

The iPod and iPhone weren’t overnight successes. They took a few years to ramp up into mass-market moneymakers, and Apple spent those years iterating on the hardware and software, revising constantly until all the rough first-generation edges were smoothed away. The Apple Watch as it exists is still rough and limited in a lot of ways, but hopefully another year or two of improvements will help it realize its full potential.