Yesterday saw the internet’s top technology reviewers drop arguably their most important piece of the year. A day or two before the Apple Watch is made available for pre-order, the lid has been lifted on the reviews that the likes of John Gruber, Nilay Patel and Joshua Topolsky have been working on. The three I just mentioned, and more besides them, have been wearing an Apple Watch for over a week and have all published their reviews. Most have videos to go with them. They all have word counts running into the thousands.
If you were on the fence about ordering an iPhone come Friday’s pre-order date, then the reviews will make for interesting reading. If you had already decided that the Apple Watch is not for you, they probably won’t. Given the overall theme of the reviews I have read though, I can’t help but wonder whether those who had already set their hearts on an Apple Watch may now have some thinking to do. That’s because none of the reviews I have read have been glowing. In fact, some have been downright negative.
If anyone had been expecting the Apple Watch reviews to go live with massive fanfare and popping of champagne corks in Cupertino, then they have no doubt been disappointed. It’s true that most reviews have some good things to say about the watch as a whole, some of its limitations are getting the flak that they may arguably deserve. Speed problems due to having to load data from an iPhone is one concern, as is whether the watch is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist for most. The nuances of the points raised by reviewers are best read first-hand, so I’m not going to go into details here but the point is this: the Apple Watch is not without its problems, and a home run it is not. At least, according to most people.
With so many reviews having gone live today I found myself wondering whether the relative negative press may have led to some people altering their pre-order plans. Normally I would ask whether anyone not ordering before today had decided to bite the bullet and buy an Apple Watch come April 24th, but I just don’t see many having gone that route. More likely, I suspect, is the prospect that those on the fence will have decided against buying at the end of April and even more worrying, those who were dead set to order may be thinking twice too.
So my question is a simple one: having read the Apple Watch reviews that arrived yesterday, did you change your decision to buy an Apple Watch either for better, or for worse?
Hit us up in the comments below.