This watch buys you time

Can you buy time? Many would argue you can’t, but I think you can.

Money can free up your time but can’t give you more of it.

Money can buy you better health care but can’t give you good health.

Money can buy you expensive watches but it can’t buy you time… or can it?

What does it really mean to buy time? The harsh reality is, no sum of money can change the fact that all of our lives are finite, but maybe the purchases and choices we make with that money can keep you healthier, fitter or monitor your health, in a sense buying you time in the hope of staving off illness.

Enter stage, the Apple Watch… A watch that buys you time.

This is a personal story of the impact an Apple Watch made on my family and how I came to be a daily Apple Watch user (even though initially I was very sceptical of strapping a mini-phone to my wrist).

The story starts in 2015 with what could now be considered a historic moment for Apple when they first announced the OG Apple Watch, a humble version of what we know it to be today. I am a self-confessed tech geek, mainly thanks to my dad, who was a day one adopter of the Apple Watch Series 0. It wasn’t the lack of cash as a poor art student that stopped me from buying the first Apple Watch, but scepticism of its purpose and I stand by that choice today, the original Apple Watch merely gave you phone notifications on your wrist, not a very compelling use case then or now. But, I wasn’t going to get off that easily, what followed my dads’ adoption of the Apple Watch was his continued attempts to pitch it to me at every opportunity, trying to convince me to purchase one as well.

I won’t dwell on the many versions that have followed since Apple first announced their watch, at times we’ve seen many small iterative changes. That was until September 2018, when Apple announced the Series 4 model of the Apple Watch with the new ECG (Electrocardiogram) feature. An update that gave the Apple Watch the ability to check for unusually high or low heart rates in the background, which can be signs of a serious underlying condition. As with all Apple functionality, it just worked, in the background, with little thought from the user, another feature that…