Apple makes some good products… I’m not so sure the Apple watch can be counted as one of them. Reasons: the battery life isn’t stellar, and, most importantly, it is an utter pain to set one up for family member.
The setup problem is because apple requires an iphone to set up the apple watch and, to travel the royal path, said iphone should be on a plan that supports the apple watch. Since I am cheap, I am not on one of those plans.
After much pain and wasted time I found the one true way to connect the watch to cellular while keeping a cheap plan on your phone. The process is superficially easy, but unnecessarily painful. Roughly it goes like this:
- Call verizon. Yes. Call. In the year 2023 – you MUST call them.
- You must connect to their “inside sales” departemnt
- Tell the sales associate you want to connect an apple watch to cellular in standalone mode
- Given them the watch IMEI
- Ask them to activate the watch. Then activate the watch using your iphone. Do this with them on the phone
- If they don’t activate now, you will try endlessly to get it to work in vain. You will call them the next day and have to pick right up where you left off.