Apple Watch review: best functions are fitness, texting, paying, and airport check-ins, a good product with a chance to be great
A Month With the Apple Watch: Does It Pass the Test of Time? — While there have been many reviews of the Apple Watch since it officially emerged in April …
Context & Ripple Effects
Re/code's one-month verdict lands mid-way through the 2015 first-generation review cycle: The Verge had already called the nicest smartwatch with performance issues in April, and AnandTech followed in July saying it was the best wearable yet hard to recommend. Re/code threads the same needle — praising fitness, texting, paying, and airport check-ins while framing greatness as a future version problem.
The review matters because its 'chance to be great' framing became the template for a decade of coverage: the apps ecosystem appeared stalled within 220 days, Series 4 fixed battery and added health tracking but kept an unreliable Siri and no always-on screen (The Verge's Series 4 review), and Series 5 finally shipped the always-on display.
First-order effects
- Early buyers get a device whose reliable value is confined to four functions — fitness tracking, texting, Apple Pay, and airport check-ins — while third-party app performance remains a known weak spot from launch reviews.
- Rival smartwatches compete primarily on price, since reviewers concede the hardware niceness while flagging the Watch's premium cost against alternatives.
Second-order effects
- Apple's dependence on the iPhone for watch functionality suppresses third-party developer investment, a stall Quartz documented by late 2015 — meaning the app-store flywheel that powered iPhone does not transfer automatically.
- Each generation's fix list (always-on screen in Series 5, better batteries and sensors in Series 4) forces competitors to chase Apple's annual cadence rather than differentiate on their own timelines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Watch evolves from phone accessory into a health platform — but the corpus shows limits: clinicians use it experimentally without FDA approval for diagnostic uses, experts say it has not changed patient management, and regulatory rulings can strip features like blood oxygen from U.S. units.
- The decade-long arc — a $100-billion product built through iterative refinement rather than a great first release — argues that wearable categories are won by sustained generational improvement, with first-version reviews poor predictors of category outcomes.
The trend: Smartwatches mature from tethered phone companions into health platforms through annual generational fixes, with Apple's cadence setting the industry's clock.