Gear

Don’t redesign the Apple Watch, fix all this instead

We wouldn’t say no to a more refined Apple Watch Series 7 design but we’d rather its maker paid more attention to day-to-day frustrations 

The Apple Watch Series 7 is about to be announced, possibly this Tuesday evening alongside an iPhone 13, and leaked information published over the last couple of months tells us what is likely to make the biggest impact. 

This will be the first major redesign of the Apple Watch since the launch of the first six years ago in 2015. Some might say this is overdue. Apple icon Jony Ive, widely credited as the eyes and brains behind the designs of the iPod, original iPhone and Mac G3, is reportedly not even a fan of elements of the Apple Watch design. He was SVP of design in the years preceding the original Watch’s announcement. 

Ive wanted Apple’s smartwatch to lean into the “watch as fashion accessory” approach. That is contentious. Watches can be timeless. Smartwatches cannot. And the most glamorous Apple Watch Edition, a $17,000 gold watch, reportedly did not sell well, stock left languishing in warehouses. 

From what has been credibly reported so far, the Apple Watch Series 7 looks to be a consolidation of Apple’s wider design style. It is a slimmer watch with more angular corners and sides than the Apple Watch Series 6, closer to the style of the iPhone 12. 

Apple’s iPhone series went through a similar pupation long before the Apple Watch existed, the curvy line of the iPhone 3GS planed down to give us the sharp contours of 2010’s iPhone 4. Snappier lines, smaller screen borders and a thinner shell could make the Apple Watch Series 7 appear more functional, a more transparent vehicle for the tech inside to some eyes. But it’s not a hollow facelift. 

Apple is rumoured to use a new dual-sided circuit board design that leaves more room inside for a larger battery despite the thinner casing. And the Apple Watch Series 7 is expected to have a stereo-style speaker array, with drivers on each side rather than bunched up on just the one side. 

It is a result of major efficiency improvements in a design already optimised down to fractions of a millimetre. The Apple Watch Series 7 is already assured a future spot in a design museum, however it ends up being received.

The Apple Watch design was already a success before now. It has been copied in countless virtually nameless clones, and referred to in almost every more respectable ‘non-round’ smartwatch.

Patents and design concepts have pointed towards a potential circular Apple Watch, but such a dramatic change without an obvious reason for it is not really necessary. According to a Counterpoint Research report, Apple’s smartwatch demand grew by 50% in Q1 2021, year-on-year, outpacing the wider market growth. Apple owns 30% of the smartwatch space, despite offering some of the most high-cost products in it. 

Refining the design then is welcome enough then but we’re more interested in the ways Apple actually needs to improve how the Watch is to use, not just how it feels and looks on your wrist.

Let’s not deal in fantasies. Apple’s Watch Series 7 is not suddenly going to last days and days off a charge. The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Huawei Watch 3 have already proved this year that a fresh operating system with a renewed focus on battery life cannot make that change. 

However, Watch OS 8 could be used to change the Watch Series 7 dramatically in other ways. Number one is a rethinking of the Apple Watch’s app menu. Right now you have a choice of the default hexagonal honeycomb style or an ultra-simple list. These are polar opposites. 

The honeycomb hexagonal app screen ‘Grid View’ is the most ambitious piece of UI put into a smartwatch OS. Other systems use scrolls of icons. Grid View could use code lifted straight from the map of an open world video game like Grand Theft Auto V. Twist back on the crown long enough and your app collection becomes a mere handful of pixels, a helicopter’s eye view. There’s no natural arrangement here, unless you make it yourself, and it’s probably harder to get your head around than any phone interface. 

Why Apple fell in love with its own creation here is understandable. You can zoom about this map of apps like a holiday-starved lockdowner browsing Google Maps, and it lets you zoom right into apps with a final twist of the crown. It’s a supremely elegant piece of software design. But it’s not friendly or easy to use, particularly for those new to the Apple Watch. The alternative List arrangement has all the verve of an accessibility mode, without actually catering for anyone with an impairment. 

A couple of weeks spent with a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 would be enough to convince most it is perhaps time for a re-think. That watch uses an icon-based app library, but one that fits a good amount of them onto each screen, requiring no particular skills in dexterity or patience. 

Apple doesn’t need to get rid of Grid View, but our options shouldn’t boil down to the stylistic equivalent of an art installation versus the ingredients list on a pack of Shreddies. 

The current Watch OS approach is typical Apple, setting up ideas of how it thinks tech should be used, and not offering all that much for those who don’t particularly like it. You see the same effect in the Apple Watch approach to music sync. You can transfer music and podcasts to your Apple watch to stream without having your iPhone nearby, handy for runners who want to exercise without a phone. But this happens slowly, and transfers have a habit of getting snagged on a “waiting” status, without any error message to explain what is going wrong. This feature has not had the attention it deserves. The UX is all wrong. 

There are no proper music discovery features in the Apple Music watch app either. Both of these feel like relics of the days when an Apple Watch was tethered more tightly to your iPhone. This watch has its own Wi-Fi connection, a link to Apple Music servers and its own internal storage. There’s no reason it can’t handle these features better, without relying so heavily on Siri to find the music you’re after. 

Apple has announced Watch OS 8 will feature sharing of songs, playlists and albums with friends. But this feature seems more a way for Apple Watch owners to act as little micro salespeople for Apple Music, not a way to make the smartwatch app more enjoyable for those already paying for the service. 

Tech launches thrive on conspicuous forward motion, which is perhaps why most of watchOS 8’s already-announced features might be summed as “more”. More GIFs, more sleep metrics, more watch faces, smart home gadgets and always-on displays. 

We are up for all of them. These new features sound fun and smart, useful to at least a solid sub-section of Apple Watch owners. However, a largely additive approach starts to look conservative, unimaginative, when there are some issues with some of the most-often-used parts of the Apple Watch. 

It’s this year, more than others, that such an approach could hurt Apple too. The Series 7 arrives as Google launches Wear OS 3, a thoroughly reworked version of its long-stagnant smartwatch platform. It does so with two of the biggest names in non-Apple watches on side too, Samsung and the now Google-owned Fitbit. Wear OS 3 fixes fundamental problems with the platform in a way that, it would seem, the Apple Watch Series 7 and watchOS 8 may not. 

But let’s not overstate this. The Apple Watch is in a far better place than WearOS has ever been, but that is precisely why this series has had such a relatively easy ride over the last half-decade.

New hardware designs and trendy mindfulness features are great, but Apple should also perhaps consider changes to some of the basics — alterations that might seem either boring or scary depending on where they are made — to keep its spot as a number one recommended smartwatch, as well as the number one seller.    

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK