Don't buy a watch that makes you wait


Nilay Patel for The Verge:

But then I look at the Apple Watch and it's so obviously underpowered. We can sit around and argue about whether speeds and feeds matter, but the grand ambition of the Apple Watch is to be a full-fledged computer on your wrist, and right now it's a very slow computer. If Apple believes the Watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch's processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life.

No disagreement from me. I had hoped things would get noticeably better with WatchOS 2.0 and native apps, but not really. In fact, Apple's own apps can be annoyingly slow. I'm reminded of this every day when I launch the exercise mode. It's laggy and not very responsive to get going and close out. This is a major core feature and should perform better, in my opinion. Heck, even unlocking the watch first thing in the morning is a less than good user experience.

Still, it's a first generation device. With everything there are design tradeoffs with size and battery life that directly affect horsepower. Generally I think these tradeoffs get much better the second time around.