Tired of packing around my bulky iPhone in my pocket to track my runs, I started to look around at lighter alternatives. Inevitably, I narrowed down my search to watches. There are lots of different watches for athletes from companies like Garmin, Fitbit, and Whoop. These got some pretty good reviews, but they always felt very single purpose and my assumption that the app ecosystem wasn't very developed, so given enough time they would feel very limited. I noticed that Apple was also marketing their watches for fitness use. The reviews were ok, but there seemed to be a lot of momentum in the apps and a good connection to the Apple ecosystem. I already own an iPhone and use a MacBook, so I thought it would fit well with what I already had.

I had a tough decision to make between the Apple Watch SE and the Apple Watch Series 6. The SE seemed like all the watch I needed, since I wasn't particularly interested in measuring my blood oxygen levels. The Series 6 was supposedly faster, but I reasoned that I wouldn't need a lot of processing for just tracking my runs and listening to music. I might be wrong about that though.

So I got the SE. There are quite a few case and band colors, which meant that I could customize it to the way I liked it. I wasn't super excited about my final result, but I chalked that up to my lack of creativity rather than the options available.

I found it a little awkward using the watch at first. It felt like the first time I tried to do something non-trivial on a mobile phone. I wanted more screen to see what I was doing and the UI was severely limited compared to what I could do on the iPhone. I didn't even understand how to get my apps on my watch. I thought that they would automatically sync, but it turns out you have to sync them individually. I guess syncing them individually is to accommodate the smaller resources. I imagine if you have a lot of apps you could quickly fill up your watch.

Once I got the apps installed, I started using them. I had been using Runkeeper to track my runs previously, so I stuck with that. It was OK. The apps on the watch definitely feel a lot buggier than the iPhone counterparts. I also wanted to use Spotify to listen to music while I ran. The funny thing about Spotify is that they did not allow you to stream music through just the Apple Watch with a mobile connection. At the same time, they didn't allow you to download to the phone. So if you wanted to use Spotify, you had to have your iPhone nearby. This really negated the entire purpose of buying the watch, since it would require now having both a watch and an iPhone in my pocket. Ugh.

But, luckily, Spotify was working on streaming on the watch via cellular. I got to enable it and listen to some music. Unfortunately, it is extremely flakey. I'm not sure if it's the slow hardware on the phone, the bad network connectivity or buggy Spotify software.