Apple Watch, Fitness+, and … My Wife (Premium)

I watched and wrote about yesterday’s Apple event in real-time, and then I watched it again. And then I asked my wife to watch it too.

Well, not all of it, I’m not a sadist. Just the Apple Watch and Apple Fitness+ parts.

Why would I do such a thing? Two reasons. I’ve been on the fence with regards to switching to Apple Watch for much of the past year, thanks to its health and fitness tracking prowess, and the new announcements only strengthen these advantages. And because my wife writes professionally about health, fitness, nutrition, and wellbeing, and she interviews doctors, researchers, and others literally every week. She’s no less well-educated on these topics than Michael Pollan or Gary Taubes, or any other author you care to mention, and I conveniently happen to live with her.

Her reactions to this event were interesting.

As Tim Cook started rhapsodizing about the Apple Watch, she asked, “I assume this old white guy is some uppity-up at Apple?”

I paused the remote. We were about 10 seconds in. Seriously?

Um, yeah, he’s the CEO of Apple. She laughed. “He still doesn’t seem like the right choice for this.”

Hm. OK, sure. Anyway, the presentation commences. There was a comment in the show about “closing the rings,” so she asked what that meant. She had never heard the phrase. I couldn’t remember exactly what all three rings were, so I looked it up on my phone and read it to her. I told her about a friend from 30 years ago who I’d lost touch with but had since reconnected on Facebook; he used the Apple Watch to lose over 100 pounds over the past year, I told her, and every day he posted something about closing those rings and what he was eating (low-carb; good man). She said the three rings system seemed excellent and was probably very motivational from a gamification perspective. She approves.

Moving on. The Apple Watch Series 6---a “pretentious name,” she said. “Why isn’t it just Apple Watch 6?”---has a Blood Oxygen sensor. This is an excellent feature, she said. But how much does the Apple Watch Series 6 cost, she asked? “It starts at $400,” I told her. “You can buy a pulse oximeter [which measures blood oxygen saturation] at Walgreens for $20,” she replied. Here we go. “But it’s nice that this is built-in, and it’s smart that it measures your blood oxygen when you sleep.” Ah, good.

She didn’t care about the new watch faces, but I explained why the new solo loop was such a good idea, and I told her about the incredible markets for personalizing Apple Watch with both faces and bands, and, whatever, she doesn’t care too much about that. She didn’t care about the S6 chipset, and she got kind of bored by what she described as “overt marketing.”

But overall, she got it, and agreed with my assessment that the biggest shame about the Apple Watch is that you need to own an iPhone to use one. She’s an Android user and couldn’t care less about Appl...