Why I Stopped Wearing My Apple Watch (2026). 9 minutes.
I have owned an Apple Watch since 2014, and nothing else. That ended this year, not because a better smartwatch turned up, but because the one I was wearing came with an expiry date I did not know about when I paid for it.
A £700 watch with a software end date
I bought the Apple Watch Ultra when it launched, at around £700, and at the time I thought it was worth every penny. I worked at Apple when the first iPhone came out in 2007, so I am about as far inside that ecosystem as a person can get. Twelve years, one brand, no other watches.
Then I was in Dublin during WWDC in June, watching the announcements with colleagues, and worked out that my Ultra was reaching the end of its software life. Four or five years, for £700.
That was the moment, and it was not emotional. It was arithmetic. I am not spending that kind of money again on something whose useful life gets decided somewhere else.
A Daytona, at exactly the wrong moment
It happened that one of the colleagues I was travelling with had a Rolex Daytona on, and spent a few minutes showing it to me. I had never really looked at a mechanical watch properly before. That single conversation sent me down a horology rabbit hole I have not come out of, and a genuinely embarrassing number of hours of YouTube since.
What got me was not the money or the status. It was that these things run on nothing. No battery, no charger, no software support window. A mechanical watch is powered by a spring and a set of moving parts, and it will outlast the person wearing it. As someone who spends all day in technology, that struck me as the more impressive engineering, not the less.
The first one had to mean something
My daughter Luna was born on 19 January this year, and I wanted a watch that marked it rather than a watch that was simply good. Her name did most of the work for me. If you are looking for a moon watch there is only one real answer, the Omega Speedmaster Professional, the watch Neil Armstrong and the rest of them actually wore.
I spent a long time on it, joined a few Facebook groups, and spoke to some genuinely generous people who talked me through the versions. I ended up with a 2022 sapphire sandwich, sapphire at the front and sapphire at the back, so you can sit and watch the movement working. It was not a cheap decision and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is the first proper watch I have ever bought, and it exists because Luna does.
What actually changed on my wrist
Two things I did not expect to care about. The notifications stopped, which I assumed I would miss, and did not miss for a single day. And I stopped hunting for a charger every night, which I had not registered as a daily chore until it stopped being one.
There are six watches now, each bought for a different reason, and one more already put aside for when I hit a weight and fitness target I set myself. The Ultra is in a drawer. I am keeping it, because it is the watch I was wearing when Luna was born, so it carries that. I just do not think she will be able to switch it on by the time she is old enough to want to. The Speedmaster she will.
If you are weighing up the same move
The objection I got most in the comments was the fitness tracking, and it is a fair one. Giving up a smartwatch does not have to mean giving up the data. I moved mine onto a Whoop, a Renpho scale and Lose It, and that setup tracked the 24 kilos I lost between February and the summer more usefully than the Ultra ever did. I wrote that up properly in how I track my fitness without a smartwatch.
If it is the watch side you are curious about and you do not want to spend Speedmaster money to find out whether you enjoy this, start at the other end. I wrote about the £15 Casio F-91W, which is the one almost every collector I have spoken to still owns.
Building something related. Every watch here lives in Pulso, a collection tracker I am building that researches a watch’s reference, photo and live price from the name alone, then keeps it current. Have a look at Pulso.
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Full transcript
Lightly edited from the auto captions for readability.
Hey YouTube, it has been a minute since we last got a chance to catch up, so I am setting myself a goal here. I want to start creating content on a more frequent basis, and I am going to try and film and upload pretty much raw and see how that goes. I have got some pretty big updates. I want to repurpose this channel a little bit so it is more about what I am interested in, and I have definitely become more interested in something quite recently that I want to share with you.
I have been wearing an Apple Watch since the Apple Watch first came out around 2014. For those of you that might know me, I worked at Apple when the very first iPhone came out in 2007, and since then, pretty much all in, hooked within the Apple ecosystem. So since 2014 I have owned only an Apple Watch.
Then this year I was in Dublin around WWDC. Two things. Number one, the Apple Watch Ultra I bought when it first came out, and at the time it was around a £700 watch, and I thought, absolutely worth it. And way back, I have had the Apple Watch, so the best part of twelve years, all I have done is own Apple Watch, no other watches. But at WWDC this year they announced they would no longer support the Apple Watch Ultra. It has only been around for about four or five years, and I spent £700 on this thing.
I watched this whilst with some colleagues at work when we happened to be travelling in Dublin at the time, and one of the things I realised was, I am not buying another Apple Watch. That is it, I am done. I cannot have something for that much money that software wise is not supported for that long.
And it just so happened that I was with a group of people, and one of my colleagues happened to have a beautiful Rolex Daytona with him, and he was showing me this beautiful watch. It took me down this incredible path of learning about horology, and I have been watching copious amounts of YouTube content since then.
My daughter Luna was born this year, January 19th, and I thought this is a perfect time to really think about buying the perfect watch to represent the birth of her and her life entering into mine. After a lot of consideration and a lot of research, I joined some Facebook groups and spoke to really great people, and I decided what I thought would be the absolute perfect watch for this, to retire the Apple Watch Ultra and begin a watch journey.
She is obviously the very first child that I have ever had, so I wanted to buy a watch that represented that. I wanted something special that would last many, many years, and with her name being Luna, I naturally went down the route of understanding more about moon style watches. For those of you that know, you will know there is only one moon watch, the original watch, the very first that went to the moon, worn by Neil Armstrong and those very famous astronauts. The name of that watch is the Omega Speedmaster.
This is an absolutely beautiful watch. I got one in what they call sapphire sandwich, where at the back of the watch you can see the individual moving pieces, and at the front is also sapphire. It comes in different versions, one with Hesalite, one without, but I wanted to begin that journey and I wanted to get a watch that I could have for the rest of my life. So I got this watch because it represents Luna coming into my life, and it is a sacrifice that I made to get this watch, because they are not cheap.
The Omega Speedmaster Professional, this one is from 2022. It really represents to me what watches really are. As someone who is incredibly passionate about technology, they are original technology, they have movements, these incredible mechanisms that move around, and that is what makes it work. You do not need electricity to run them, and they are going to outlast and outlive their owners. One day, Luna, I hope you are watching this video and you understand the journey I went through.
I have a Whoop 5, which I am considering replacing for a Google Fitbit Air when my subscription comes to an end. I thought I would share this with you because I do not think the world of smartwatches is the right one. I got tired of all the notifications, constant notifications, but also the fact that I had to keep charging, I had to find a charger every single night to try and charge this thing.
I also went for a hike and did the Yorkshire Three Peaks. You will notice in my last video versus this video that I have lost about 23 kilos. Since Luna came into my life I have gone down a journey of trying to get into the best shape possible. We are going on holiday for the first time in twelve years, taking her to Spain, and I want to get into my best physique possible. I have already bought a watch that I am going to wear when I hit my objectives and my goals with my weight, and I will wear it for every single holiday we go on for the rest of our lives.
I have also bought another watch which I think is probably the best watch and I love wearing it. In fact I have got six watches that I have purchased, all with different meanings, and of course my Apple Watch Ultra, which I will not be wearing, or wearing very infrequently. All this to say that if you are somebody who values things and you want these things to have meaning, I have discovered that watches are that thing, whereas an Apple Watch just becomes defunct. For the health features I would recommend the Whoop 5 or Google Fitbit Air if you want to keep with your health, and then have your watch on your other side.
So I am going to take off my Apple Watch Ultra. I am going to keep it, to remember this is the watch that I did wear when she was born, so it has memories associated to her. I just do not think that when she is old enough she will be able to turn it on and use it, whereas the other watches I am buying now, she will.
I want to share with you this journey about technology, about watches, and just about things I am generally interested in. If that sounds interesting to you, great, subscribe, leave questions in the comments. If you are an existing subscriber and this is going in a very different direction and you would like to unsubscribe, I totally understand. This channel will be as much for me sharing what I find interesting as it will be a small time capsule for Luna and any future children that want to go back and watch dad when he was a bit younger with more hair and in better health.
I am not going to script these videos. I am going to freestyle and see how they go. It is very possible this watch video, my very first one, may not get that many views. It might even get 100, and that is okay. I am just sat in front of my double doors where light is coming in naturally. I have got no fancy lights. I am using my current camera, my Sony a7 IV that I bought a few years ago and want to make the most of, and this microphone, and it will be just about the information and the stories I wish to share. So I am not going to edit this, it is going to be imperfect, you are going to see exactly as it is shot.
That is the new YouTube channel and that is what I am going to be talking about. If you find that interesting, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments and let us take it from there. First video in quite some time. Checking out. Ciao.
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