So I did the dumb thing. I stood in line — well, not really a line, more like three guys and a stroller — at the Apple Store on the 22nd and walked out with a Series 3 Apple Watch, the cellular one, the $399 one that doesn't even come in the red color I actually wanted. Nike+ version, GPS+LTE, the whole thing. And for about four days it has been mostly great and occasionally completely useless, and I think that's worth writing down before I forget how annoyed I was.
Here's the actual bug, in case you haven't been following it: some Series 3 LTE units just won't hop onto the cellular network once they've been near certain wifi setups, particularly ones with those captive-portal login screens like hotel or coffee shop wifi. You leave the house, your phone's not in range, and the watch just... sits there. No calls, no texts, no little green dot telling you it found LTE. Mine did it twice this week, once walking to get coffee two blocks from my apartment where I definitely was not near any hotel wifi, so I have no idea what triggered it in my case specifically. Apple's acknowledged the issue is real and said a fix is coming, but as of today, the 29th, I haven't seen it land. iOS got a small 11.0.1 update a couple days ago that patched some other stuff (there was an annoying bug where certain corporate Exchange email accounts couldn't send mail, which is its own kind of infuriating if you use your phone for work), but the watch cellular thing is apparently a separate fix on a separate timeline.
I want to be clear I'm not writing a "big tech company screws up again" post here, because honestly the watch itself, the actual hardware and the LTE concept, is the first Apple Watch feature that's made me genuinely reconsider how I use the thing day to day. Left my phone at my desk and went for a run around the block and got a text from my sister and just answered it on my wrist like I was in a weird future movie. That part works, when it works. It's the "when it works" that's the problem, and it's a very Apple kind of problem: ship something ambitious a little before it's fully baked, patch it in public over the following weeks. I've been buying first-generation Apple hardware since the original iPad and you'd think I'd have learned by now. I haven't.
Small tangent, not really related except that it happened the same week: Equifax's CEO, Richard Smith, "retired" on Tuesday, which is a very generous word for what I assume actually happened behind closed doors after the breach that exposed something like 143 million people's Social Security numbers back in early September. I bring it up mostly because the timing is funny to me in a bleak way: one company ships a watch that occasionally can't find a cell tower and everyone (myself included) is mildly annoyed about it, and another company loses basically every American adult's identity information and the fallout, three weeks later, is a guy stepping down with what I'd bet is a fairly comfortable exit package. Different scale of screwup entirely. I filed my credit freeze the week the breach broke and I still haven't gotten around to unfreezing it for the one time I actually needed a hard credit pull, which is its own minor saga I won't get into.
Back to the watch, because that's really what's been eating my week. I think the LTE bug is going to get fixed and in six months nobody will remember it happened, the same way nobody talks about the antenna thing on the iPhone 4 anymore unless they're being nostalgic about it. But right now, today, it's genuinely a little embarrassing for a feature Apple marketed pretty hard as the whole point of the Series 3. The ads showed a guy swimming with it, streaming music with no phone anywhere nearby. My version of that this week was standing outside a Peet's watching the cellular icon just not show up.
I'm keeping it. I like it too much to return it over this, and I say that as someone who did return the Series 0 back in 2015 after a month because the battery situation felt insulting. This one's staying on my wrist. I'm just going to keep checking for that software update like it owes me money.