1. Person buys or is gifted a Fitbit because it's inexpensive 2. Person retrains themselves to wear something on their wrist 3. Person is convinced that fitness tracking is beneficial 4. Person is fed up with the low quality of their Fitbit or it has out right fallen apart 5. Person buys an Apple Watch
Fitbit = good software, good product DNA, garbage manufacturing, in need of better distribution.
Timex = great manufacturing, can't make software to save their lives, used to competing in a high-volume, low-margin retail environment
I bet all the times you witnessed that phenomenon it was a Fitbit Charge HR. The 2016 and 2017 Fitbit trackers (Blaze, Alta, Charge 2, Flex 2, Alta HR) have way fewer issues with manufacturing quality.
This is a rant against how you imagine things work, instead of how they actually work. I put my watch on in the morning and it is automatically unlocked the next time I unlock my phone with touch id. From this point on, the pin is never required. Apple Pay is just a double click on the long button, no pin entry as you've imagined if the watch is unlocked, which is true unless you've only just put on the watch.
waiting for the face to light up however, is a legit complaint. It really sucks that there's not even an option for "always on" that you could use while working out, as it's a pain in the ass to be running and want to check your current pace and find that wrist-flick detection failed so you're staring at an off instead of getting the data you wanted and getting back to looking where you're going quickly again.
Instead, to support Canadian debit cards directly, Apple would seem to be using the Canadian banks' web payments infrastructure (Interac EasyWeb)—which is effectively a SAML auth flow using your card number + PIN as credentials.
Before this mechanism was introduced, Apple did first support Canadian "Visa debit" cards, though, so earlier Canadian users of the system—who have their phone pointed at a Visa debit card number they have, instead of their debit client-card number directly—might be confused by the assertion that Canadian debit card use on Apple Pay requires a PIN. It doesn't, for them.
The retailer doesn't know what account, but the bank DEFINITELY does know.
I think its the latter, because the experience (IMO) of "waiting for face to light up" is not at all how you describe.
A product doesn't have to beat the best to succeed; it just has to beat whatever the optimum was in the niche it targets. Which, for "check the time on my phone" people, isn't all that high a bar.
But it seems like a lot of people really want the bright colorful screen, even if it makes the device less effective as a watch.