Apple Watch SE

Once the setup phase passes, the heart rate and sleep tracking are what owners keep coming back to, with several describing genuinely useful alerts that flagged real health events. The everyday experience settles into a routine of charging often and working around battery limits that show up earlier than expected.

The app side is where the friction lives day to day. Owners describe interface changes that removed features they relied on, syncing issues with the Health app, and frustration when a familiar workflow, like food logging, gets reworked without warning.

The core hardware, the sensors that track heart rate and sleep, keeps doing its job well past the first year for most owners who mention it. What gives out first is the battery: several owners report needing to disable features or charge multiple times a day within a few years of normal use, and some describe full battery failure diagnoses on watches only a few years old.

The bigger reliability issue is software support, not hardware. Owners consistently describe watchOS updates stopping after three to four years, sometimes cutting off third-party app support (like a running app) even while the watch itself still works fine. This is described as happening earlier than owners expect, especially compared to how long their iPhones stay supported.