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Comment by tbatchelli | Hacker News Reader

I have one that I didn't pay for. I thought I wouldn't like it and at first I didn't think I had much use for it. After a week I changed my mind and I love it. It gets out of my way and it keeps my phone in my pocket. I have been leveraging its fitness tracking features quite a bit as I am somewhat sedentary, and the feedback has been quite helpful -- and motivating.

One thing I noticed today is that now when I consider any app for purchase, I check for wether it has support for the watch and wether this support makes sense (e.g. today I was looking for a pomodoro timer app).

None of what I write above I would have guessed from the product description and the advertisements. Whether it is useful to you or not will depend on the apps that exist and your lifestyle. It's hard to predict and expensive to test. YMMV

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I haven't tried it yet but this isn't surprising to me at all. Every recent Apple product has had a slow burn until mainstream adoption except for the iPad which exploded out of the gate. I think the Mac might have had the slowest burn of them all without really penetrating the mainstream until the early 2000s with the Intel switch and the iPod acting as a gateway drug.

Heck the Mac is still growing long after the PC market matured and even while it's declining. That is what the end game for iPhone will be in my opinion. When the global smartphone market finally becomes saturated, the iPhone can still grow at the expense of Android from switchers (that's when being the highly differentiated product will help the most).

>> that's when being the highly differentiated product will help the most

But the iPhone does seem to lose differentiation. Android apps have recently become well designed using material design, there's an app saturation, and 90% of the time people spend in phones is inside apps anyway,so it's harder to differentiate on the OS.

> 90% of the time people spend in phones is inside apps anyway,so it's harder to differentiate on the OS.

But the app does not run within isolation, the OS impacts a lot on the app experience. e.g. iOS Share Sheets/Android Intents. How a tweet is shared from the Twitter app is dictated by the OS

Even with that, Android itself is well designed.

Currently it seems that apple is taking the battle to curation. I'm not sure it has the advantage there - but than again, content quality is very subjective and hard to compare,and than it becomes a marketing game - and Apple is much stronger in marketing.

Macs were top sellers before their recent success in the personal computing market. Their share only dropped in the 90s, but if you are around earlier, they are clearly on a nice roller coaster ride. And who doesn't remember the Mac SE, the Mac II, the first PowerBook?

I feel the same way about my Pebble. It does a few things well and causes me to take my phone out of my pocket a lot less often. It's handy (no pun intended) and useful for what it is.

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