A Year Wearing an Apple Watch

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the launch of the Apple Watch. It is a device that has had a profound impact on my life both personally and professionally. The Apple Watch I received on launch day is still firmly on my wrist each day (notably with barely a scratch).

I’m a bit of a numbers nut, so I had the idea to see just how much I’ve worn my watch over the last year. The result turned out to be rather striking.

I wrote a little app to dig through all the sensor data collected by the Apple Watch and work out when it was on my wrist and when it was not. I considered a “worn hour” to be any hour of the day during which a sensor sample was collected (so not necessarily worn 100% for that hour, but worn at some point during that hour).

Since receiving my watch 8,784 hours have past, during which I have worn my Apple Watch 7,277 hours. That works out to be around 83% of the time. I have worn it for at least one hour in all but just 8 days (with most of those being a week I intentionally ‘disconnected’ around Christmas).

The average hours I’ve worn it per day is 20.4. With the median a rather staggering 23.

Amusingly, you can clearly see when development of Sleep++ began in earnest in late August, when my wearing suddenly jumps to 24 hours a day.

I remember being rather skeptical of Apple’s original marketing of the Apple Watch as “our most personal device ever”, but a year later I must say that it would be a hard case to make that something that has been physically attached to me for 83% of my life is anything other than personal.

David Smith