Question for the audience: If I'm not a hypochondriac, why would I want an apple watch?

For me its:

- Apple Pay (I don't have to take out my phone to pay for things). One really cool feature is that the apple watch maintains your credentials as long as you don't take it off your wrist, so you don't need to unlock anything to pay for something.

- Apple Car/Home Key (I don't have to take out my phone to unlock my front door)

- notifications on my wrist when my washer machine is done

- notifications on my wrist when an unhoused neighbor door checks my car in the middle of the night.

- Apple Health: metrics on my daily workout.

- Screen time: grant kid 15 minutes of Roblox without taking my phone out of my pocket

- Edit: I'm embarrassed to admit that I also use the "find my phone" feature a lot when at home.

I don't really need an ultra for any of that, and I don't see a reason to upgrade my 2-3 year old Apple Watch now.

Data can show a lot about your health. Anecdotally I find the sleep disturbances (apnea) monitoring to work for me. The trends are a pretty nice, will track general changes in health on the data it monitors. They now can capture high BP to some degree of accuracy. It’s not for everyone but for me it’s one of the more useful devices in my life.

Depends where you are at in life but I found as I have gotten older that some of the data points are helpful to track to see how my body is aging and when/what to adjust.

If you’re really into fitness and/or min-maxing your own stats. Honestly, it can create a bit of an obsessive loop once you get deep into it.

I'm not hypochondriac and don't use any of the health monitoring features. What I use it for:

* Notifications (imessages mainly, but anything that sends a push notification to your phone can also notify you on your watch)

* Quickly responding (thumbs up/down) to messages

* Apple Pay

* HomeKey (I can unlock all the doors in my house with my watch)

* Some apps (like AllTrails) have nice watchOS apps which give you the important info by glancing at your wrist.

I ask the same question. I see people around me who own these spiral into obsessive tracking of arbitrary health related metrics without any purpose other than to make themselves worried sick (pun intended) about the reported numbers.

If you're a serious runner/swimmer/cyclist/surfer who likes to track workouts and already invested in the Apple ecosystem for messaging/music/etc and like the idea of leaving your phone at home.

In my family, we use them for payments, front door & car keys, and surprisingly often to find phones lost in the house.

Accountability for your fitness.

Did you actually get 7-8 hours? Did you actually get good quality sleep? Did you actually move some target amount every day?

Apple is not-bad at proactively notifying you about potential health problems it discovered, instead of you spending time and effort looking at the numbers it records.

The watch will tell you if it thinks you have sleep apnea, heart rate irregularities, drops in fitness, out of baseline sleep, dramatic trends in any health statistics, and high blood pressure.

I bought one for my grandma for fall detection. She lives alone.

I use it mostly because Apple Pay is so convenient, no need to carry a wallet

For my aging eyes, Apple Watch Ultra is the only watch where I can have time and date and read it comfortably. I used to have a cheap casio that would do the same job, but the digits are getting too small for my eyes.

TBH I only use the Apple Watch as a dumb watch. I have disabled all notifications and smart features. Just time and heart-rate when I exercise.

The biggest perk of the apple watch for me is to be able to keep my phone in my purse or on my desk and not ever miss calls. Important call from a doc I work with? Easy to see it with haptic and a glance at my wrist and I can step out and take it.

I once thought I wouldn't need a mobile phone and that landlines were sufficient.

Did you ever watch Dick Tracy growing up?

The vast majority of people wearing them are doing so because they think they look cool.