Friday, March 29, 2024

Apple Watch Series 5: Is It Worth Getting?

September 21, 2019 by  
Filed under Opinion, Tech/Internet, Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) The Apple Watch Series 5 was recently announced at the big Apple Special Event earlier this month. As a result, the company will be discontinuing the Series 4 while offering the Series 3 for a lower price. Good news for those who wanted to get an Apple Watch but wanted to hold off for a price drop. But will the Apple Watch Series 5 be worth getting at launch? Should be go ahead and wait? Or should you pass this one up entirely?

Does The Apple Watch Series 5 Bring Anything New

Going into the Special Event, the main focus was on the arrival of the iPhone 11 trio with the Mac Book and Apple Watch holding an upper undercard position. The event itself was pretty standard fare and nothing was truly “Wow”-worthy. If you’ve seen one Apple Special Event you’ve seen them all.

So, when Apple went into the Apple Watch Series 5, you knew what to expect. One thing that is heavily promoted with the S5 is the appearance. As a matter of fact, there’s a part of the S5’s site dedicated to just design. This isn’t usual at all, really. Any time a new mobile device—whether it’s a tablet or a smartphone—drops, a part of the site will go into the design of the body and display of the phone.

It’s like clockwork every year. That isn’t to say this isn’t a well-crafted, extremely useful device to pair with whatever you have in the iPhone X or iPhone 11 lines. However, as the years go on and Apple continues to release the Apple Watch it gets to the point of “What else do you have for me?” or “Give me something new.”

The Main Event: Always-On Display

One of the major features for the S5 is the always-on display. I’m going to say, this is pretty big for the Apple Watch line. First, always having to touch a device so that the display wakes up is old hat. It’s not annoying, tedious, exhausting or anything that extreme. It’s just that by this time in the century, you shouldn’t need to raise or tap a piece of technology strapped to your body to get it to activate or wake up. It should always be ready.

The Cupertino company is actually running with this for the Apple Watch Series 5. You can just glance at the watch and the always-on retina display and whatever you need to see is there. The battery this device must have to achieve that throughout the day intrigues me as well.

Months ago, when the rumors of what to expect with the S5 were bouncing around, Apple should’ve popped up and announced they were working on this for the smartwatch. Everyone loves an ambitious project or feature that seems like it would be hard to implement. Forget the number of bands you can get for your S5 or what the watch itself is made of, the always-on display is the main event for the S5’s part of the Special Event.

Is It Worth Picking Up

Before answering whether this is worth picking up, it should be noted that the other feature that Apple focused on was the international emergency calling and a built-in compass. Most of the other things were improvements on what is already there and these two were like “Yay?” while I followed it.

So, is the Apple Watch Series 5 worth the $400 or $500 purchase. Yes, there are two different versions: GPS and the GPS plus cellular. For the Apple diehard, you’d think the answer would be “Yes” but there isn’t enough there for me to say “Of course! Go and buy it day one!” However, for others what Apple is offering here is just enough or more than they were expecting.

For me personally, I’d wait a while. The always-on display got my attention but that’s it, really. For those on the fence or who have never had an Apple Watch, I’d say run with the S3 for now as it just got a price drop to $199.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.


Comments

One Response to “Apple Watch Series 5: Is It Worth Getting?”
  1. John McQueen says:

    Thank you for the honest assessment. I have the Apple 3 and I hardly use it now but the feature that allowed me to leave my iPhone home intrigued me.

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