When you give tech gifts, also give the gift of installation
‘Tis the season to be harried. There’s a work thing, a friend thing, some poor sucker has a birthday in December, shopping for food, shopping for presents, donations, shopping for food again because you forgot something… The list of things to do is endless. So when you do get a gift lined up for a loved one, and it’s something from a premium electronics brand like Apple, you might feel like you’ve done your job. The recipient will be so excited to open that new Apple Watch for the holidays, but remember that they may not really be prepared for a multi-part setup process.
I’ll share a slightly cautionary tale of giving myself an Apple Watch Series 11 as a combination Christmas and “It’s too bad my birthday is close to Christmas” gift.
The battery on my Apple Watch Series 7 was no longer lasting the day, and that is the primary reason to upgrade an Apple Watch these days. Whomever you’re gifting an Apple device to is probably in a similar situation, where it’s mostly the battery or physical damage, so it seems like a straightforward gift.
First of all, the new Watch paired with my iPhone just fine, but it needed to download and install watchOS 26.1. That took forever, and it lacked an accurate estimate of when user intervention would be needed again.
Sure, there are several spans of time that are mentioned, but it might as well be a random number generator. I just kept checking my iPhone over and over by unlocking it, and waiting for the interface to refresh to tell me what cryptic step it was on.
That’s a really crummy experience, since the iPhone and the Watch need to be near each other, and the Watch needs to be on a charger. Keep in mind that a charging cable is included with the Watch, but there’s no power adapter. You might want to have a charging block on hand, and potentially the means to keep their iPhone charged, too, if you don’t want to have to keep leaving your holiday celebrations to check on the installation, pairing, and restore process.1
Don’t merely hand a boxed Apple Watch to your loved one before you walk out the door, or they hop on a plane. Part of your gift is this annoying setup.
Second of all, after watchOS 26.1 was installed, the pairing process froze. I needed to back out of it on my iPhone, complete with a dire warning that my Watch would be reset to factory settings. There was little choice, so I resigned myself to it. This got the iPhone in a state where the Watch app said it was unpairing with my Watch for about 10 minutes. Once that was finished, the iPhone and Watch were able to start the pairing process again, but did not have to redownload and install the latest watchOS. In total, this was an hour and a half of my time.
Third, even though it’s supposed to migrate your data and settings from your old Watch, it doesn’t do that in its entirety.
Reauthorizing credit cards for Apple Pay means taking out each credit card and entering the security code information. Also, as it turns out, you need to make sure the default credit card for Apple Pay doesn’t get changed, and confirm that express transit is set to the correct card. Neither was correct for me when I upgraded from Series 7 to Series 11. I spent a couple of days using another card that was the same color as my default card before I realized it was wrong.
There’s no way to skip some of the helpful onboarding dialogs, even if the person is migrating from a recent Apple Watch. My old watch was running watchOS 26.1, but I still got the whole walkthrough about how the Digital Crown works, and the Workouts app still wanted to explain the “new” Workouts app I had already been using. These are minor annoyances that require no guidance from you, but rest assured that Apple just doesn’t care if someone has already gone through these steps.
I have the Tips app set to never, ever, ever give me tips about anything, and yet that was reverted to helpful pings about how Apple Watches work. If the person you’re gifting an Apple Watch to finds these useful, then that’s fine, but if they don’t, they will really appreciate it if you dig into the Watch app’s notifications tab for them.
After the watch was allegedly ready to go, my Modular watch face was missing all of my complications, and there didn’t seem to be any way to force it to reload them. They did appear when I checked again an hour later, but nothing is reassuring about it. If you notice something is missing, then preemptively tell the person that you’ll leave it on the charger for a little bit and wait for it to finish doing some background tasks. Again, adding to that hour and a half to two hours you might have already spent.
The final thing that will spring up on their new Apple Watch are permissions authorizations. Those are not restored from the old watch, and they don’t happen during the setup process. They reveal themselves only if something is invoked that requires those permissions.
For example, when I got into the car and used Siri to pull up directions in CarPlay, my wrist buzzed that Maps wanted access to my location information. It was not safe for me to fiddle with my wrist watch while I was driving on the freeway, so I didn’t get any of the helpful little wrist buzzes for turns. It’s not a huge deal, but maybe just pop Maps open for them before they go out into the world.
Remember that as a technology enthusiast, your gift giving is not the money you spend on the gift, or physically wrapping and handing them a box, but in supporting them to actually enjoy their present instead of being frustrated by some of the technical hiccups. If you’re not ready to go through with helping them set up Apple products, maybe get them some pears from Harry & David instead?
- Or maybe you do want an excuse to leave your holiday celebrations. Your secret’s safe with me. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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