Here and gone, Jittery

The mystery left hip pain that was borderline severe which rolled in inexplicably on Sunday evening has just as suddenly disappeared last night.  I felt no pain laying in bed last night and I was able to balance on the leg to put on my socks this morning.  Yesterday that same action shot such intense pain into the hip I almost fell.  As is now customary, the episode just gets another shoulder shrug and is thrown into the bucket with all of the odd old age joys I get to experience nowadays.

So one of the things I got for Cindy for Xmas was a new Apple Watch.  I bought her the Apple Watch 2 a couple years ago and she has loved it.  However for the last few months it developed an issue where screens that utilized the digital crown to scroll content would bounce up and down.  Cindy also used the watch to play music for her classes and the behavior would also change the volume randomly, making it unusable in that situation.  She tried lots of suggestions on the internet to try to address the problem but nothing worked.

My purchase of the new watch for her, with an extended warranty this time, was both an act of giving and of greed.  My thought was I would assume ownership of her old watch and that I may be able to fix the issue.  Last night was the first time we tried setting it up on my phone.  The process went smoothly but the shaky digital crown behavior remained.

So I really didn’t get involved in the watch trouble shooting prior to this but once I searched on Google there was an onslaught of me too information.  Apparently just like so many Apple products, the durability of the Apple Watch is poor.  Tons of people have had the same issue.  So one option is to buy the parts and fix the crown yourself.  However after watching a video on the process combined with the hassle I faced replacing the battery on my old iPhone, I wrote that option off immediately. It looks incredibly tedious with many spots where you could break the watch entirely.

Of course Apple is happy to “repair” your watch for you which I am almost positive means just send you another one.  The flat rate repair for this model is $229, less than a new one but pretty damn steep.  I will likely get the repair done because I think I might actually enjoy some of the functions of the watch, something I didn’t really anticipate.  Cindy is excited about the prospect of using the “walkie talkie” functionality of the watches to allow Nextel-like direct conversations from watch to watch.  I am more interested in the health related aspects with it’s activity tracker and built in heart rate monitor.