Watch Out ⭐

Last night, we left the hotel here in Berlin, Germany to a heavier than expected rainfall that made the two-block walk to dinner more ordeal than enjoyable. And especially for me, as I didn't bring or jacket here or have an umbrella. But as we made our way from cover to cover--an overhang here, a tree there--and my shirt started soaking through, I was confronted with another all-too-familiar familiar annoyance. The haptics in my Apple Watch would burble occasionally, as happens, and each time I lifted my arm to view its face and see what the heck was so important, there was nothing on-screen to indicate why it had alerted me.

"Just kidding," it seemed to be mocking me as I blinked at the thing with water in my eyes. And not for the first time.

I wish that was the worst of its crimes, but Apple Watch is a classically over-engineered product, the type of thing only Apple could or would make. As a result, the annoyance level is high, or very high if you're easily annoyed by pointless distractions, as I am. This particularly pointless burble happened three times during that short walk, and by the second or third time, I had made up my mind about two things. First, that the faux notification it constantly triggers is indeed the most annoying of its many annoying issues, impressive given how many there are. And second, that I was done with this fricking thing. We're getting a divorce.

I've been slowly talking myself into this separation for months, with each annoyance being another point deduction in the value equation I've been silently compiling since I started using this thing. Were there an obvious solution to this problem, I would have taken flight long ago, but each time I bother to research the available options, I run into whatever roadblocks, lose interest, and skulk back to the safety and simplicity of doing nothing rather than taking action. Like a coward.

I don't want or need a smart watch. I'm not even 100 percent sure what the definition of a smart watch is these days, but most of the "smart" features in this thing are superfluous to me at best. What I do want is something that actively tracks all my fitness and health data in the background and then does absolutely nothing with that information unless something is wrong. That is, I obviously would like to hear about it if this or whatever other device detects something potentially dangerous. But I would just as obviously never like to hear from this thing otherwise. And boy, does Apple Watch want to engage.

Given my preferences, a "headless" smart tracker like a smart ring or a Fitbit Air/Whoop or whatever smart band might make more sense. Or, it would were it not for the fact that I also find myself looking at the time a lot. This was an issue I ran into when I started hiding the Taskbar in Windows 11 too, and in that case I had to find some (out-of-date) software utility that would keep a time display overlay on-screen all the time before I finally gave up on that...