Why I Traded My Apple Watch for a Casio

After several years with an Apple Watch faithfully strapped to my wrist, I did something that might seem surprising for someone who makes a living as a digital product consultant: I ordered a $25 Casio watch.

The irony isn't lost on me. I spend my days helping companies build better digital experiences, yet here I am, deliberately stepping away from one of the most sophisticated personal health technologies ever created. The decision didn't come lightly, nor was it born from some neo-Luddite impulse. Instead, it emerged from months of growing discomfort with my relationship to health tracking—and the anxiety that had slowly taken root alongside it.

The Promise and the Pressure

My journey with the Apple Watch began with the 3rd generation. Like many users, I was captivated by the promise: a device that would help me understand my body better, move more intentionally, and take control of my health through data. For a while, it delivered exactly that.

The gentle nudge to stand after prolonged sitting. The satisfying completion of activity rings. The detailed sleep metrics. All of these features genuinely helped me build awareness of habits I wanted to improve.

But something shifted over time. What began as gentle nudges transformed into persistent pressure. Those activity rings—designed to motivate—gradually became taskmasters. I found myself staring at them throughout the day, feeling a creeping sense of failure when they remained incomplete. The psychological weight of unfilled rings became disproportionate to their actual health significance.

"Close your rings" shifted from encouragement to obligation. Movement, which should be joyful and intuitive, became another task to complete—another metric to hit. I was no longer moving because my body wanted to; I was moving because my wrist demanded it.

The Research Reality

This personal struggle reflects broader tensions well-documented in research on health tracking. Studies consistently show two seemingly contradictory truths.

On one hand, tracking can significantly improve health behaviors. A 2019 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that wearable activity trackers increase physical activity by an average of 1,850 steps per day. These devices can create valuable awareness, establish helpful routines, and provide motivation when it's lacking.

On the other hand, research in behavioral psychology highlights concerning downsides. A study from the Journal of Health Psychology found that fitness tracking can reduce intrinsic enjoyment of physical activity while increasing body anxiety. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen found that for some users, health tracking evolved from a tool into an obligation, sometimes triggering obsessive behaviors. Additional research published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that while measurement increases activity, it can simultaneously reduce enjoyment and decrease the likelihood of continued engagement.

The science tells us what many users intuitively feel: these tools occupy an ambiguous space between helpful and harmful, often determined less by the technology itself than by our relationship with it.

The Business Behind the Behavior

This ambiguity isn't accidental. It reflects a fundamental tension within the health technology business model.

The companies creating these products—Apple, Fitbit (Google), Garmin, Oura and others—are full of well-intentioned people genuinely committed to improving health outcomes. I believe most product managers, designers, and engineers in this space sincerely want to help users live healthier lives.

Yet these companies simultaneously face pressure to create "sticky" products with high engagement metrics. User retention, daily active users, and feature usage directly impact business performance. The very metrics that signal business success might sometimes undermine genuine wellbeing.

This creates an inherent paradox: the most effective health technology might sometimes be the one that knows when to disappear. But disappearing technology doesn't drive consistent engagement metrics or create hardware upgrade cycles.

Recent market data suggests this tension might be reaching an inflection point. According to Counterpoint Research, global smartwatch shipments declined by 7% in 2024—the first market contraction since the original Apple Watch debuted in 2014. Apple itself saw a striking 19% drop in watch shipments. While several factors contributed to this decline—including patent disputes and lack of groundbreaking new features—it raises an intriguing question: are consumers reassessing the value proposition of these devices?

Interestingly, budget-friendly alternatives like Xiaomi (which saw a 135% increase in smartwatch sales) are growing rapidly. This shift might indicate that consumers are becoming more selective about which tracking features truly matter to them, rather than automatically embracing the most feature-rich options. My personal experiment with a $25 Casio might be part of a broader recalibration in how we value these technologies.

The Early Days of My Experiment

In just the first few days without my Apple Watch, I've already noticed revealing patterns. Multiple times, I've caught myself looking at my wrist to start tracking a walk, only to remember that I don't need to quantify every movement anymore.

More significantly, I've found myself paying greater attention to how my body actually feels rather than what an app tells me I should be doing. There's a rediscovery happening—a reconnection with internal cues that had been partially outsourced to algorithms.

I'm not categorically rejecting health tracking technology. I may well return to an Apple Watch or another tracking device in the future. But I'm convinced I needed to reset my relationship with these tools. I want to be more aware of my body's natural signals and feel less judgment when I don't meet externally imposed goals.

Interestingly, I've even caught myself feeling anxious about the "gap" in my health data that will exist because of this break. This reaction alone reveals how deeply tracking systems can embed themselves in our thinking—creating the perception that untracked activities somehow don't fully count.

Building Healthier Health Technology

As a digital product strategist, this experiment has profound implications for how I think about the products I help create. It raises essential questions about how we might design technology that truly serves human wellbeing rather than subtly reshaping human behavior to serve technology.

What might more balanced health technology look like?

1. Technology that knows when to disappear: Health tools that recognize when constant engagement isn't serving the user's best interests.
2. Emphasis on qualitative alongside quantitative: Systems that value subjective wellbeing and enjoyment as much as numerical metrics.
3. Adaptivity to individual psychology: Products that recognize different personality types may need different approaches to motivation and feedback.
4. Recovery as achievement: Interfaces that celebrate appropriate rest with the same enthusiasm they celebrate activity.
5. Periodization of tracking itself: Systems designed with intentional breaks from tracking built into their models.

The most promising approaches may come from companies willing to occasionally sacrifice engagement metrics in service of genuine health outcomes—recognizing that sometimes the healthiest relationship with technology involves using it less.

A Matter of Privilege and Perspective

A conversation with my wife revealed an important dimension to this story: her Apple Watch makes her feel safer as a teacher who can't always have her phone with her. This sentiment echoes what I've heard from many others, particularly those with chronic health conditions who rely on these devices for emergency detection, fall alerts, or heart rate monitoring.

For many users, these devices aren't optional lifestyle accessories—they're essential safety tools that provide peace of mind and potentially life-saving functionality. Parents of teenagers, individuals with epilepsy, heart conditions, or diabetes, and elderly users living independently often view these devices through an entirely different lens than I've described.

This highlights an important aspect of my experiment: it comes from a place of privilege. I have the luxury of viewing health tracking as elective rather than essential. My health conditions don't require constant monitoring, and my lifestyle doesn't present situations where emergency detection features might be critical.

Beyond Fitness Tracking

The questions raised by my modest experiment extend beyond fitness tracking to our broader relationship with digital technology, while recognizing these tools serve vastly different purposes for different users.

Across domains—productivity, communication, entertainment, education—we face similar tensions between digital benefits and potential overreliance. Yet the calculus of these tradeoffs varies dramatically based on individual needs and circumstances.

Human-centered design isn't creating one-size-fits-all technology, but experiences that adapt to different relationships with technology—from essential health monitoring to periodic disconnection, from safety-critical applications to enhancement of natural capacities.

As I glance down at my decidedly dumb Casio—showing nothing but the time and date—I'm reminded that my choice represents just one point on a spectrum of valid technology relationships. For me, right now, less functionality creates more space for reconnection with internal cues. For others, those additional functions serve essential purposes that shouldn't be minimized.

I'm not sure where this experiment will ultimately lead. But I'm grateful for the questions it's asking of me—both as an individual navigating my own health journey and as a professional helping shape digital experiences that must serve diverse human needs.

In the meantime, I'll be paying attention to how it feels to move through the world without external metrics—while remembering that for many users, those external metrics provide crucial information that internal wisdom alone can't supply.