Big-brand smartwatches are overpriced, bloated, and invasive

Maybe I’m the odd one out, but I refuse to spend hundreds of dollars on a watch or smartwatch — that $400 Apple Watch can take a hike. I couldn’t care less about most so-called “smart” features:

I sleep perfectly fine without sleep tracking. I don’t care what my heart rate is during sports as long as I’m pulling off slick one-twos, assists, blocks, and goals in indoor soccer. If I really wanted to track my bike rides, I could do that on my phone anyway (so far, I don’t want to!). And every time I see people lifting their arms every three minutes to read the latest notification on their wrist, it creeps me out — please keep that away from me (I tried it and turned it off after just two days).

Call me old-fashioned, but aside from telling time, the only feature that truly matters to me is alarms: I never want to give up being gently woken by a light vibration on my wrist instead of some obnoxious alarm tone that ruins the morning. And in the best-case scenario, it doesn’t wake anyone else sharing the bed.

A long battery life is essential to me too — I don’t want to plug in my watch every three days. My last smartwatch, the plain old Amazfit Bip, lasted more than a month with how little I used it! Today’s feature-stuffed watches rarely come close.

That said, I was never a huge fan of the Bip’s square design. And to set alarms I always had to pull out my phone and use the app (technically the Mi app, though I replaced it with Gadgetbridge). After many years — surprisingly, the battery is still great — the watch is simply done: the glass cracked, came loose, had to be taped during a trip, the strap-pin holes are worn out, and overall it just looks beat.

But reasonably priced smartwatches (around 50 euros) that only offer alarms basically don’t exist. “Then look at fitness bands,” people say. But I don’t want a rectangular fitness tracker (I don’t care about fitness features anyway). I prefer a round design that looks more like a classic watch. “Then check out regular watches,” they say. Apparently some even have alarm functions — but they’re hard to find and, after losing market share to smartwatches, often pretty expensive as well.

Am I really the only one who doesn’t care about tons of smartwatch features but still wants good design, solid build quality, and long battery life at a fair price? Am I the only one who feels uneasy tying my personal activity, sleep, and health data to some app that ships all that information off to the manufacturer and third parties?

Maybe smartwatches with long battery life, minimal features, and optional phone connectivity just aren’t profitable (less data to harvest), but to me, almost all well-known smartwatches are overloaded, overpriced, and far too invasive!