For about two months, I haven’t been using my Apple Watch anymore, at least only sporadically. Previously, I wore one of my Apple Watches daily for almost ten years (9 years, 9 months, and 2 days). My longest streak for closing the activity rings was two years (735 days), and overall, I closed all the rings over 2,750 times in the 3,563 days that I owned an Apple Watch. I could hardly imagine life without an Apple Watch on my wrist. I once bought a new watch because the battery of my old one had lost its performance, and I didn’t want to be without a watch for two or three days during the repair. In the end, I even started wearing it at night for sleep tracking.

My general dissatisfaction, especially with the tech industry and particularly with the ever-declining software quality and Apple’s behavior, led me to the decision to break free from these constraints. It really challenged me mentally. But if I’m honest with myself, closing the rings, the incoming notifications (which I had already significantly minimized), sleep tracking, and all the other functions I used the watch for often stressed me more than they might have helped. Is it really better for my health to put pressure on myself every day to close some rings instead of relaxing and taking it easy in the here and now? I’m really not sure.

The underlying fear of a dead battery, meaning the watch’s battery life, also weighed on me. The first setback came with a COVID infection that occurred over a year ago. At that time, I broke my streak and afterwards simply stopped paying attention to closing my rings. That was a relief. As mentioned earlier, I then decided some time ago to just put the Apple Watch aside and not to wear it anymore.

I initially bought a very simple Casio watch for 30 EUR (Casio A168WEM) and have since supplemented it with a “slightly” better model (GW-5000U), which charges itself using solar energy and automatically sets itself correctly via a radio signal. This watch I can simply wear. If I want to know the time, I look at it; otherwise, I don’t. I certainly won’t become a watch collector (😇), but I enjoy considering whether I want to wear one watch or another, or none at all, on special occasions. I am confident that I will continue to pay attention to my heart health and other things, even if I haven’t closed three rings at the end of the day (🤞).

What do I miss the most? Apple Pay on my wrist. I used it a lot, even though sometimes it’s easier to do it via phone, as you don’t have to contort yourself at the sometimes awkwardly placed terminals. I also genuinely miss setting the timer with voice commands, as it was my most-used function on the watch. But that’s okay too.

In the meantime, I thought about buying a fitness ring to continue collecting vital data. However, maybe I’ll just avoid being informed about atrial fibrillation or other things that hopefully won’t happen to me, and save myself a subscription, avoid uploading my data to American servers, and spare myself the frustration of another piece of technology that looks great in marketing materials and works wonderfully but often disappoints in reality.

Let’s see…