Verizon is About to Break our Watches

Cell phone enabled watches are a pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks on top of a system pretending to be a telephone switch board from the 1940s. It’s surprising any of it works.

▲

derefr 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In what way are watches with SIMs (or eSIMs) not just tiny cell phones? Or is you meaning that the modern smartphone is itself a “pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks”?

	▲	sulam 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The main way is that literally zero of these watches actually meet the standards that the cell networks require of a cell phone. Every single one of them has a carrier exemption or a lower standard to adhere to, because it turns out that putting a cell phone's RF package into a watch is super hard, both because of size and the various negative effects of the human body on radio signals. This affects cell phones too of course, but less so (remember the iPhone 4 and how we were "holding it wrong"?). Another way is that watch chipsets are distinct from cell phone chipsets in that they make a variety of compromises unique to wearable requirements. Apple may be an exception here, you can't get a spec sheet for their chip, but for the other providers their wearable chipsets are generations behind anything they sell for a cell phone and are compromised in terms of power. Interestingly even watches (Apple, Samsung soon) that support 5G are running a dumbed down version of 5G that was created specifically to support the wearables and IoT market.

▲

acdha an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I just went through this yesterday. My wife and I both have Apple Watches with LTE and I was rolling them over: both phones and my watch ported easily but the second watch wouldn’t show up on the account at all with no explanation. The first support person couldn’t see a problem with the details they were able to see, the second level one could see a fraud hold for non-specific reasons and forwarded us to a fraud team who verified my identity and back to a third person who solved the problem by deleting and recreating the line on our account. Every one of the people I talked to was clearly trying to help but their billing system sounds like it’s someone’s old house primarily consisting of duct tape and stucco.

This is a disappointing contrast to their actual network which is clearly run by people who take running a reliable network seriously with good coverage and latency.

▲

motbus3 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Since beginning of 2025 big corps turned to be each time more anti consumer. They feel quite comfortable. I wonder what happened for them to feel like that.

▲

bee_rider an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder what the warranty period on this sort of device is. It’s broken without access to the hub, right? And it’s only 2 years old.

▲

Hizonner 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hey, that scorpion stung me!

▲

fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Choosing a carrier device without being on that carrier for the rest of your devices would seem to be the first mistake. Treating the carrier as anything other than dumb pipe seems like the issue here. Going with the Pixel Watch LTE and then doing same custom app development might make more sense for the described use case, but I haven't explored the author's use case thoroughly.

	▲	ghostly_s 23 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Good point, consumers should all simply develop their own apps instead of buying a product.
	▲	NetMageSCW an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How would the custom app disable the native Watch services?

▲

lowbloodsugar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Is part of US phone cartel. What you expect?