A year with the Apple Watch: What works what doesnt and what lies ahead?

Enlarge / The Apple Watch is turning one. How has its first year treated it? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

About a year ago, Apple announced and released its first Apple Watch. The long-rumored product was Apple’s first all-new product category since the iPad and its first under CEO Tim Cook. To say that expectations were high would be an understatement.

To date, we don’t really know much about how the Apple Watch has sold—Apple folds it into the “Other products” category along with the iPod, the Apple TV, Beats headphones, Airport routers, iPhone and iPad cases and covers, and whatever other little odds and ends the company sells. While revenue for that category has increased year-over-year by a significant margin since the Watch was introduced, the only thing we can really infer from that fact is “someone somewhere must be buying Apple Watches.”

However well it's selling, Apple's strategy with new products is to release them and then iterate continuously, working until all of the biggest complaints about the first-generation model have been addressed (or until people have forgotten about them or moved on to something else). After a full year of wearing the Apple Watch every single day, it's time to revisit the hardware, software, and some things I looked at in our original review to see where the platform is and where I think it ought to go in the next year or two.

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