Quick impressions of the new stuff in the Apple Store today, which probably aren’t useful since everyone can just go see for themselves now
The Apple Watch Sport is perfectly fine. I don’t look at it and feel proud that I’m wearing it, but it seems like a good product, and it’s going to sell incredibly well.
The steel Watch is great. I was afraid it’d be too flashy and too heavy, but it’s neither. It makes me happy but doesn’t feel ostentatious.
The Sport band is comfortable at first but got too sweaty for me, and wasn’t very attractive. I also found it very annoying and cumbersome to attach — it seems designed for people with three hands. But if you’re getting a Sport combo to keep costs reasonable, it’ll be good enough, even if you can’t afford a third hand.
The Leather Loop, my original top pick, was disappointing. Due to the embedded magnets, it feels like hard plastic, not soft leather. I also found it annoying to attach and adjust because the links get caught on the loop-back ring.
The Milanese Loop, my preorder, is decent, but not quite what I expected. The mesh is much smaller in real life than it looks in the photos, so it ends up looking and feeling more like silver fabric than woven metal. It’s easier to attach and adjust than the Leather Loop because it doesn’t have discrete segments, but it still took me a few adjustments each time to get the right fit.
I’d been ruling out the leather Classic Buckle because it seemed so primitive and low-end compared to the other options, but it was the most comfortable band on me. It’s much softer than the magnet-infused Leather Loop, and while it won’t win any fashion awards, it doesn’t look bad — just neutral. Attachment is neither cumbersome nor convenient — it works exactly like every other watchband like it. It’s completely forgettable, in mostly good ways.
The Link Bracelet was surprisingly comfortable — definitely more comfortable than the rigid Leather Loop, possibly due to its smoother edges, and maybe even more comfortable than the Milanese. It has by far the fastest and easiest attachment and release, and has my highly desired feature of maintaining its set size between attachments. (Remember, you’re going to be taking the Apple Watch off and putting it on a lot.) I’m unsure of the appearance — I feel like I might be 20 years too young to wear it.
The black Link Bracelet and black steel Watch were almost really cool, but ultimately disappointingly colored. In the brightly-lit glass display table, they look almost tungsten-colored, but in the store’s normal lighting for the try-on, they just looked black. The color reminded me of the black iPhone 5 (not the lighter Space Gray on the 5S) — it reads as black, not dark gray. It’s so dark that it barely looks metallic anymore, losing most of its luster and looking flat and drab. If it was actually a tungsten-like color, it would have been my favorite overall by far, but it’s not.
And the new MacBook is absolutely amazing, revolutionary, and mind-blowing… until you need to use the keyboard for something.