Through her The Monday Peeve prompt, Paula Light invites us to vent on Mondays, to let off some stream, to get something off our chests. I don’t alway have something to peeve about on Mondays, but today I do. And it’s about automatic updates to electronic devices. This is when the developer of the program or the app installs the latest update to our devices whether we want it or not. In this particular case, my peeve is with Apple and its latest auto update to the Apple Watch.
I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch since 2015, when my wife bought me one for my birthday. That was the original version of the Apple Watch, or what they now call Series 1. A few months ago my five year old Apple Watch bought the farm, so I bought a new Series 5 Apple Watch.
FYI, Apple just announced a few weeks ago the Series 6 Apple Watch. At around the same time as the new series was announced, Apple launched WatchOS 7, and, unbeknownst to me, I woke up one morning with a message on my iPhone telling me that the latest update to the WatchOS had been automatically installed overnight on my Apple Watch.
Okay, no biggie, I thought. I don’t use half the features of the Apple Watch, so I figured everything would be as it was before. But I was wrong.
My watch face is what the Apple Watch app calls “Simple.” It’s basically an analog watch face, but it displayed the current temperature, the day/date, the remaining battery life, and a small graphic showing activity (like steps and exercise).
But when I woke up that morning and looked at my watch, it didn’t display the day/date in the upper right corner as it had up until that morning. Here’s my previous watch face.Notice the day/date in the upper right. But when I woke up after the overnight automatic update, here’s what I saw:
Do you see what’s missing?
I contacted Apple support and, while texting with tech support, I wrote, “Was the day/date indicator for the watch face deliberately removed in this update? Most watches, both analog and digital, can display day/date on the watch face.”
Here’s the response I got:In other words, just like the WordPress happiness engineer said when I complained about not being able to use the classic editor anymore, the Apple tech support rep essentially said about my watch face no longer displaying the day/date, “Too bad, so sad.”
Everybody and everything sucks these days.