THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH

Hi Friend,

I've been wearing an Apple Watch since 2015. The face problem hasn't changed.

That sounds like a complaint, and it is, but I want to be specific about it. The Apple Watch has changed enormously over ten years. The hardware is faster. The health features have saved lives. The battery on my Ultra runs for a couple of days. The watch is great. The faces are still a mess.

For years, I used the Explorer face. It shipped with the first cellular Apple Watch in 2017 and had a rugged, tool-watch look, with cellular signal strength shown as a pattern of dots in the middle of the dial. It was the only face that did that. Then watchOS 11 dropped and the Explorer face was gone. No replacement. No announcement. I had to pick a new face I didn't want. To this day, I don't know why they took it away.

That's the kind of thing that makes me wonder who is in charge of this part of the watch.

Then there are the hands. Some of my favorite faces use a transparent hand outline with the background color showing through. From a few feet away in normal light, I cannot tell what time it is. The first job of a watch is to show the time. There are faces that fail at the first job.

The California face, which I otherwise like, only has a few colors with contrasting hands. Most of them use that transparent nonsense. There's no second color and no way to fix the problem yourself. Apple ships these limitations and asks you to live with them.

The Hermes faces tell you the rest of the story. Some of the most attractive faces Apple has ever made are walled off behind a five-hundred-dollar band. Not a watch. A band.

Every year around WWDC, I used to tell anyone who would listen that this was the year Apple would announce a watch face store. Third-party designers, a curated marketplace, a way to install the face you actually want. Every year they didn't. I don't say it anymore. They've beaten me into submission on this.

The contradiction is hard to miss. The platform that gave us the App Store still hasn't built a face store for the watch. The argument against a face marketplace gets weaker every year. Health, fitness, sleep, payment, calls, AI on the wrist. The face hasn't kept up with the watch it sits on.

WWDC is a few weeks away. If Apple announces a watch face store this year, I'll eat my words happily. If they don't, I'll go back to my outlined hands and wait another year for the Explorer face to come home.

Your pal,
David
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​Read this post on macsparky.com​

This week's newsletter is sponsored by Yoink, from Eternal Storms Software.

I've been using Yoink for Mac for years. It's one of those utilities that solves a problem so well that you forget you ever had the problem.

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If you do a lot of dragging and dropping on your Mac (and you probably do more than you think), give Yoink a try. It's one of those apps that earns its place in your menu bar on day one.

My thanks to Eternal Storms Software for supporting MacSparky.