Congrats on getting a new Apple Watch. In this video, I'm going to walk through everything step by step to help you make the most of your new device. From the setup process to navigating watch faces and apps, how to use the many health features of your new Apple Watch, special features like gestures, the Smart Stack, some of the best built-in apps and some third-party ones you can download, some key settings you should change, and a ton more.

Now, I've been using Apple Watch for over 10 years. I actually got the very first Apple Watch the day it came out. So even if this is your first to Apple Watch or you've been using one for years like me, I think you'll find something new. I have chapters down here at the bottom of the video so you can skip forward if you've already set up your Apple Watch or just want to learn more about the Control Center, the Smart Stack, and other features. And when we get to features that are only on one Apple Watch model versus another, like an Apple Watch SE or Series 11 versus Ultra, I'll let you know which applies to your watch.

All right, let's unbox our Apple Watch. This is a Series 11 Apple Watch, but the setup process and most of the features are the same across all the models. When you open the Apple Watch box, you'll see you actually have two in one. This is the actual watch and this is the watch band that was bought with this model. Now, one of the great things about Apple Watch is the bands will actually fit your size watch and there are two sizes, a smaller and a larger. There's been different numbers throughout the years but you can use old bands with a new watch and vice versa and they're all still compatible.

Just lift the little tab here on the watch band box and you can pull it out. This is the sport band, kind of feels like a rubbery texture. Once we start getting the Apple Watch set up, I'll talk a little bit more about this because I have a few. Then for the actual Apple Watch, just pull the familiar green tabs and let's open it up. This is the actual watch here on the left-hand side and on this side you'll actually get the Apple Watch charger. Now, the Apple Watch charger is unique. The Apple Watch needs this special puck which kind of has an indent on it and that attaches to the back of the watch. There's no power brick in the box so you'll have to connect this USB-C port to the end of another power brick. Also, now that you have an iPhone and an Apple Watch, you might also have some AirPods. There's some great 3-in-1 chargers allowing you to charge all three devices at the same time and I'll link some of my favorites down in the video description.

Now for the actual Apple Watch, let's slide it out of this little cover and so you know this is the larger 46 millimeter watch that I'll be using throughout this video. Now to attach the Apple Watch band, if you take a close look, either Apple's first party Apple Watch bands or ones you might find elsewhere, if you look at the ends of the bands you'll see this little metal tab on one side. It's more pronounced when you have a lighter titanium color but you'll see the metal tab there. No metal tab on this side. The middle tab needs to face down when you attach it to the watch. Now if you have one of these sports bands, you actually attach the short end on the top and all you do is slide it into the groove here in the top of the Apple Watch. So I'll place it in the groove, slide it, and you'll feel a little click once it's in place. And once you hear that click, you won't be able to move it in or out. To release that band, you'll actually press this button here on the bottom of the watch. I'll slide in the bottom band, hear the little click, and now your watch band is secure. You can give a little tug to make sure it's not coming out. If you ever want to switch watch bands or take this off, you'll need to press this button underneath the Apple Watch. You'll have to use your fingernail to kind of press that in, and once it's pressed, then you can slide out the watch band. One more time, I'll slide it in, you feel the click, then to take it out, press that button and slide the Apple Watch band out. Again, we'll talk more about watch bands in a second, but the Apple Watch is ready to get set up. I'm actually going to plug it into charge during the setup process. This way, once it's done, it'll be ready to use and fully charged. You don't have to plug anything into the Apple Watch. Once the other side of this puck cable is plugged into a power brick, you just magnetically attach the puck on the back and you'll see a little symbol on screen, a green circle, to let you know that it's started charging.

And now that our Apple Watch is on, again, if you don't see this screen, just hold this side button or the digital crown, which we'll talk more about the buttons in a second, to turn it on. And this little symbol on screen tells you it's ready for pairing and just bring your iPhone nearby. Now, let's bring our iPhone next to the watch. I'll unlock the iPhone and you'll see this screen appear. And now you can set up the watch for yourself or for a family member. That second option means you can set up the watch for a child or other family member that may not have an iPhone. That's called family setup, and it's a little different than setting up a watch for yourself. I won't cover the details of that in this video, but let me know in the comments if you're interested in that. And I also have an entire playlist of screen time controls. Those videos are almost five years old. They're the very first ones I uploaded to this channel, but I'll link the playlist here because all the settings and setup still apply. But we're going to choose to set up the watch for myself. So when I tap that and now the camera will open and you'll be prompted to scan this kind of glowing orb with the iPhone camera. Just place the watch in that rounded rectangle. It'll turn green. Just hold it for a second and it will confirm that your Apple Watch is now paired to the phone. Now if you are upgrading from another Apple Watch you already had, you could restore it from backup, but we're going to set this up as a new Apple Watch. It'll ask your wrist preference whether you wear it on your left or right wrist. Tap continue and it'll take a few moments to connect to your Apple Watch activating it. Conditions. Set a passcode. By default, it's a four-digit passcode. You can choose to set a longer passcode or don't add a passcode at all. We'll create one and then you'll be prompted to actually set it on the Apple Watch. And for the sake of this video, I'll do all zeros. I would not recommend you do all zeros, do something a little more complex, but I'll probably have to put it in several times in this video. So all zeros for us.

Now if you look at the text size of the Apple Watch in this next step, you can choose to make that text size larger or smaller. You can actually see how it changes live as you drag the slider on your phone, you can see that text on the Apple Watch. You can also choose to bold the text if you'd like it a little more legible. Once you find a comfortable reading size, tap continue. This screen is letting you know that your settings for locations, Find My, and other things that you've already set on your phone get shared with the watch. Next, it's gonna ask you to put in your date of birth, sex, height, and weight. This information is important because as we set up the other health features, heart rate, and other things, your Apple Watch and the Apple Health app on your phone will take these into account. So try to enter as accurate data as possible, and then tap continue.

Now, there's a number of notifications, and we'll get into more detail once the Apple Watch is set up, but one is loud noise environments. If you were at a concert, or sometimes, like me, your kids get a little loud, your Apple Watch can warn you that you're in a loud environment, and hearing damage may occur if you're exposed for a long period of time. I keep this setting on, you can toggle it off if you'd like. There's also a number of safety features. These are pretty much invisible most of the time as you're using your watch, but it's nice to know that your watch also has fall detection. Meaning if you're working out and your watch senses that you've taken a hard fall, it can contact emergency services and someone close to you in your contacts. The same is true that if it detects you get into a car accident. There's also a number of gestures you can use to control Apple Watch, like flicking the wrist and double tapping with your thumb and forefinger, like to reply to a message or pause and play music. Again, once we get our Apple Watch set up, I'll show you that in more detail. Also, if you have a newer Apple Watch, there is a depth gauge, meaning if you jump in a pool or you're swimming in the ocean, it will actually-- It will automatically open the depth gauge and let you know how far in the water you are. You can choose to have that open every time your Apple Watch is submerged or you can choose not to open that automatically. I have it open when submerged.

Next, one of the most convenient ways to use Apple Pay or tap to pay on many different terminals and stores is Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. If you've already set up Apple Pay on your phone, you can tap continue and add any and all cards that might be on your phone to your Apple Watch. I typically add more of my cards, but I'll just add my Apple Card for now, authenticate with Face ID, and then I'll show you how to use Apple Pay later. Now, right now, the Apple Watch is syncing information. This is gonna take a few minutes. Make yourself a coffee, maybe a hot chocolate, and you can discover some of the other features during the setup process. But while the Apple Watch finishes up, let's talk about some watch bands.

Now, like I said, I've been using Apple Watch for over 10 years and so I've amassed a bit of a collection. My personal Apple Watch is an Apple Watch Ultra 2, and this is my favorite band that I wear every day. These are Apple's Solo Loop bands. I find it to be a very comfortable material, and as you can see, there's no clasp. And that's different than the normal sport, which has this little metal clasp. The Solo Loops have none. They just kind of stretch out. So that means you do need to size these correctly. Just for reference, I use the size 7 Solo Loops and I like to have it pretty snug on my wrist, especially for things like heart tracking and things like that. Now, if you like those Solo Loop style bands, Apple also has braided Solo Loops. These come in really fun colors. I wear these if I'm dressing it up a little bit, maybe going to a concert. And again, no clasp. These are a little stretchy. And I typically switch between these depending on season and event. I like Apple's Milanese Loop Strap. I had the original Milanese Loop with a stainless steel watch. This is the titanium version that matches the Apple Watch. And that looks nice if you're trying to dress it up as well. And there are some great third-party Apple Watch bands as well. This is from Sandmarc. It's a link bracelet. Has one of these kinds of clasps. And you can adjust it by taking out or adding links. There's also great leather watch bands. This is from Ryan London. And I like this gray kind of tweed material sometimes if I'm dressing it up. This is from Vario. I'll link these watch bands down in the video description.

After a few minutes, our Apple Watch is now set up and it's ready for us to start using. Now, on your iPhone, there's actually an Apple Watch app. If you don't see it on a home screen, just swipe down here on the home screen and then search for watch. You'll see the app right here. Tap it. And now you can manage many of the settings in your Apple Watch. Now, if you have multiple Apple Watches connected to a single iPhone, you'll see right now my Ultra 2 is selected. And if you have auto switch toggled on, it will detect what watch is on your wrist and use that by default for things like activity tracks. I'm going to turn that off for now because I want to make sure that the new Apple Watch Series 11 that we're setting up is the one connected to my phone. Now, customizing the Apple Watch from the app on your phone is a little easier to manage. You can see more of the screen, you can search the settings, but I'm actually going to run through a lot of the settings directly on the Apple Watch.

Picking up the Apple Watch, you'll see it's prompting for the passcode. Once you put it on your wrist, it's not going to keep prompting you. You just have to put it in the first time, and as long as it stays on your wrist, it will stay unlocked. Let's tap start. You see a little hello symbol. Have the option to take a tour, but let's skip that for now because I'm gonna walk you through it all anyway. So here we are on the main Apple watch face. Now you'll already notice there's a red dot here at the top. That's signifying that you have a notification. There's a bunch of settings we're going to adjust later, but you don't have to have that red dot always showing. This is showing me some notifications about my Apple Card being added to Apple Wallet, telling me I can raise to speak to the voice assistant, and we'll get into all that a little later. I'm gonna tap clear all at the top, and let's first get into customizing your watch face. Lots of watch faces added over the years, and to add more faces, tap and hold on the Apple Watch, push down a little bit, and you'll go into the edit mode. Right now we're on the Flow Apple Watch face, but if I tap and hold, you can swipe over and add a new face. And as you can see, we only have one Apple Watch face set up right now. Tap new, and there are many Apple Watch faces to choose from. Now you can also manage your Apple Watch faces from the watch app on your iPhone, and honestly, it's a little easier to do it from there, but I want you to see what they actually look like on the watch.

Now to scroll on the Apple Watch, and this works in any and all apps, you can actually just swipe up and down on the screen, or you can use the digital crown. That's the knob here on the side. I can actually turn that knob up and down, and use that to scroll. This way you can actually see what's on screen and not obscure it while you're going up and down. Now you'll see there's a lot of watch faces dedicated to health and fitness. I'll show you that as we talk about workout and fitness. Photos watch faces are really fun. You can rotate between people you know, like like your kids and your partner. Clean Watch Facebook. I use some of those when it's time to dress up. Also, data-rich, which allows you to add multiple complications. Think of them as widgets that are on the watch face. We'll get into that in a moment as well. There's a pride collection, a dressy watch section, tool-based, and lots of other styles here. We won't go through every single watch face, but you'll see there's lots to choose from, and you can add as many as you would like and easily switch between them. For instance, let's jump into the astronomy watch faces, and here I can add the view of the Earth. There's the lunar watch face that... It shows you faces of the moon, solar analog which is a pretty nice one, solar grid. But let's add this original astronomy. This was on the very first Apple Watch too.

Now most watch faces will have customization options. For instance, when it comes to the font, I can actually scroll the digital crown up and down and you'll see I have font options for the clock. I'll stick with that middle option and if I swipe right to left, you'll see there's an option for numerals. Here you have different kinds of numerals you can scroll through. Over and you can choose, do you want the zoomed in view? Do you want to see the actual solar system, kind of earth and moon phase, all three? And you can scroll up and down to see them all again. I'll go with the solar system there. There's also style options for this watch face. I can set up the solar system or have it go off to one side. And here you'll see the complications. This means you can change whatever is highlighted in these boxes. Meaning if I want to change instead of the date, I can put something like the lunar date or the schedule, like your upcoming event. Or rather than have any kind of calendar event, I can tap this back arrow and choose from some of the other options, like battery percentage, find devices and items, put my heart rate right there on my watch face and more. Let's go with battery for right now. I'll choose the battery percentage. And now that will be on my watch face whenever I look down. You can also customize that bottom complication. And when we're done customizing our watch face, I'm gonna press the digital crown in. This is actually a button that clicks. And now we've saved that watch face and I can zoom it in. And this is what we'll see every time we look at our wrist. Now, if I wanted to go back to that original watch face, I can tap and hold. Swipe over and then tap into that.

Now I do want to show you one setting real quick and we'll jump into more settings later. But if we click the digital crown, we'll actually see our grid of apps. Now you can change this from a grid view to a list view, but I want to go over to the settings app right here. You'll see there's lots of options here. I can scroll with my finger or the digital crown, but I'm going to go down to clock right here. And this toggle right here, I would actually recommend turning on. I really like having the swipe to switch watch face feature enabled. When I add multiple watch faces, I can literally swipe from the right corner to the left and move to another watch face that I've set up. And I can swipe left to right and swipe to that watch face. Now you can have multiple watch faces that you easily switch between. Later in the video, I'm even going to show you shortcuts that can automate different watch faces to appear at certain times of day, when you start a workout, and more.

Let's add one other watch face that has more complications. This way you could see the options available. I'm going to go down to the data rich section. These are actually the watch faces I use most of the time, but let's actually add this modular option. This is a great watch face to show you lots of data and also have little complications that gives you great at a glance information. So now that we have our modular watch face, there's several options for customizing it here on the background section. I'm going to roll the digital crown downwards, and you can see we can have an entire color, fill the frame, or you can have the background off. I'm going to turn this on just for a second, because then when we scroll to the right, there's different numerals you can change the style there, but now we have a color option for this watch face and when you have that background fill enabled, you can now adjust and choose different colors. There's a nice blue option and you can see there are many color options available. You can scroll through the digital crown, see what they all look like and if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll actually see a little plus icon here. You can tap to add more colors. You'll see all the colors from fall 2025 are enabled, but Apple actually has seasonal colors that you can go back all the and add some other colors to that scrolling list. Let's choose this blue right here, maybe this tan. Tap the check and now we have even more colors to choose from. Let's go with this blue for right now and remember we can go back over, change our numeral style, we'll keep that one for now, but from color, swipe over and this complications view is where things can get really powerful. Everything outlined here from the activity rings, which we'll talk about in a second, to this large widget in the middle, all these complications can be changed to show the the information that you want. These are also great to launch applications directly from the Apple Watch face. You can even download third-party apps and use the complications from there. For instance, this large center complication. I'll tap into that. You'll see right now it's the UV index complication. Well, I can scroll up and I see lots of different weather options. I'm gonna scroll all the way up to the top because this is actually an hourly forecast and it's the one that I use by default on my Apple Watch. You can see it there on my Apple Watch Ultra. I'm gonna tap into the hourly forecast. Now, anytime I look down at my Apple Watch, I can see the conditions for the next few hours, high and low temperatures for the day, and the current temperature at my current location. For the date, we can choose to turn that off or keep it visible. And then here in the activity rings, this is something new. If you're new to Apple Watch, you'll get all into the rings probably pretty quickly. This shows you your stand, active, and exercise minutes for the day. But if I tap into those activity rings, I can choose to make that something different, like quickly start a workout, battery percentage, jump to my messages, or scroll down and see lots of other options here. We'll talk more about some of the apps available on your Apple Watch, but whatever data is most important to you, you can put that data quickly accessible on your home screen. I'm going to leave that one as activity for now, but let's actually change some of these lower complications. This one is Apple Music, which you can actually listen to Apple Music even through your AirPods without your phone. We'll get into that a little later. Remember, chapters down below. This left one is actually setting a timer, which is actually pretty useful. I think I'm going to leave that as a timer. But this one right here is actually the weather. It's the current temperature with the high and low for the day. Since we already have a large weather widget, let's change this to something else. And now you'll see all the options for these circular widgets. You can change it to humidity. I'm going to tap the back left arrow. In addition to weather, we can have widgets from Watchsmith. That's a great third-party app for watch. We'll get into that in a moment. Your wallet, if you want to quickly pay, record a voice memo from your Apple Watch. You can do that. Astronomy like moon phases, jump to your audio. Jump to the calculator or calendar. You can use your Apple Watch as a camera remote for your iPhone, which is really cool. You can run shortcuts directly on the Apple Watch. And I'm gonna show you a few useful shortcuts a little later. You can use your Apple Watch as an Apple TV remote. You can order and pay for Starbucks and a ton more. Complications is probably where you'll spend the most time actually customizing it. I'm actually gonna choose voice memos for right now because if you wanna be able to capture ideas quickly, you can just have that right on your Apple Watch.

Now that we've set the complications, let's click the digital crown, jump into the Apple Watch face, and now this is what it looks like. Let's add one more watch face just to show you how quickly you can jump between them. This time, let's add a clean watch face. You can have a solid color, you can choose the contour, which has the numbers around the edge of the watch face. If you just want to show the time large, you could do that. But one of my other favorites is reflections. I think that's probably in the dressy section. Let's go to the dress watch. California is a great watch face. There's reflections. Let's add that. Simple analog face with a nice color behind it. You can go over to color and customize that. Let's go with that nice purple. No complications on this watch face. But I'll click the digital crown. Now we have a dressier watch face. If I swipe from the left edge, I can go to our modular watch face. Lots of information available to us there. Swipe over, we have our solar. Swipe again, we have the default liquid glass watch face. Let's go back over to the modular. And I'm going to talk more about individual apps in a bit. But with these complications, you can now launch any of these apps. So like the voice memos app. I can tap into voice memos. And now I can start recording a voice memo right from my Apple watch. And the great thing is, this voice memo is going to sync to my iPhone so I can access it there later. When I'm done, just hit stop and I have access to my full voice memo library here in my Apple watch as well. And in a few moments, it'll be synced to my phone and I'll even get a transcript of that voice memo on my phone as well. Pretty cool. In the same way, if I wanted to launch the timers, I can launch that complication and here I can set a three or five minute timer and even add different times that are custom to me. You can even do things like edit. So tap the edit button, remove the timers that might not apply to you, and pin the most useful ones to the top.

Next, let's talk about notifications. Right now there's no red dot, so no notifications have come in. But any time you get a notification, you actually feel a tap on your wrist. It's actually a haptic feedback or vibration under the watch, and you'll feel that against your skin. It's a nice discreet way to feel a notification without seeing something ding. Now, if it's a text message like this, you'll see it pop up on your Apple Watch face. In watchOS 26, which is the latest software, as I req... you can get to see the nice text message background that you have for conversation. Now, you can reply to text messages and deal with a lot of notifications right from the watch. Now, let's say that text message went away and we didn't deal with it. You'll see that red dot. It's still up there. I can swipe down from the top of the watch. I see the text message right there. And if I tap into it, I'll go back into that conversation. Now, if it's a simple message and maybe you just need to say yes or no, you can actually scroll down with the digital crown or your finger and you'll see suggestions. I can just send the word "yes" or "no" or "OK" with a single tap. I'll tap "OK" and that's going to send "OK." And I even get delivered and read notifications right here on my watch. Now, if I want to reply with a longer message, I can tap into the message field, and I can literally type using a full keyboard on the Apple Watch. Not all Apple Watch models have this full keyboard, but if you have a modern or newer version, you should have this. You'll see there's auto-suggestions here at the top. I can send emojis using this symbol here. And tab delete up here, but it might even be faster to dictate or write the letters with your finger. So I'm going to tap the keyboard down here in the bottom right, and now I have several options. I can use the swipe to write option, and I can do things like H, E, Y, and it got the word hey. If it's difficult to hit those little individual letters, try the swiping to actually write something, or tap this bottom symbol again, and just dictate a message. Hey, I'll be right there, just give me 10 minutes. Tap send. And a lot of times that's going to be the fastest and easiest way to run.

Now let me actually put the watch on my wrist to kind of show you how notifications will work day to day. Now the screen turned off for a second and now that it's on my wrist, you'll see it's going to ask for that passcode again. I'll put in the four zeros and now I can lower my wrist and then look at it and it's not going to ask for that password again. You'll also see as my wrist is lowered, the screen actually dims. If you have a modern Apple watch, a watch SE, Series 11 or Ultra, it actually has an I'll show you in the settings where you can change this, but that means you can always glance down at the time, even as the screen is dimmed. You don't have to raise your wrist just to look at the time. But when I move my wrist and look at it, you'll see the screen comes to life and I see even more data and it brightens up. So lower your wrist, it'll dim, but you can still see the time and some key information. Raise your wrist and it will turn on. Now let me show you what it looks like when a notification comes in. When I get a text message, I'll feel a tap on my wrist and you'll actually see that the watch has texted you and it'll show up large on the watch face. And when you raise your wrist, you'll see that message actually show up in the conversation. Now if you see that full message on your watch face and you would prefer that not to happen, let's go back to the settings right here because we actually have a few options for that. Here in the settings, let's go to notifications. Here we can actually turn off that notification indicator. If I turn that off, that means that red dot won't appear anymore on the watch face. This is actually how I use my Apple watch. I don't care to see that red dot, but I can always just swipe down and see notifications.

One tip, if you want to get back to the last used app quickly, double click the digital crown and you'll actually see a card view, kind of like the multitasking view on your phone and your latest used app will be right there. If I double click again, I can then scroll through my previously used apps like voice memos is there, my timers are there, and then the settings are there as well. So double click the crown and then you get your multitasking view. Don't worry about swiping apps closed, you don't have to do that on your phone either. To learn more about that, I have a video right here if you want to see it. So now that my notification indicator is off, I'm going to scroll here. You can adjust whether you want your notification summary to appear when it's locked. And this right here is the toggle you'll want. Tap to show full notification. With that toggled on, it will not show the contents of a message until I tap that message on screen. So we'll keep that on for now. And you'll also see this option, show notification on when wrist is down. If we go into this setting, we can choose to not show notifications when our wrist is is faced away from us or down. You can even customize this per app. You don't want messages to show at all when your wrist is down, scroll down to messages and then you can toggle that off. For right now, I'm going to leave this setting as is and just show you what it looks like when we have tap to show full notification toggled on. I'll go back to my home screen. My wrist is down. Now when a text message comes in, you actually see nothing happened on screen. And if I've raised my wrist, the notification will then come up. I can then tap into it and go to the message. Remember to access all your past notifications. I can tap to expand and see all the text messages and you can always clear all your notifications by tapping clear all.

We'll talk about gestures in different apps as we go. But one of the nice gestures is a double tap with your pointer and thumb. If I go back to settings and then go down to gestures, you'll see they're turned on right now. Double tap is on and wrist flick. Another helpful gesture is cover to mute, meaning if someone calls you, you can mute it just by holding your hand on the Apple watch. And that also works for alarms. Real quick, I'll show you a use case for the flick and double tap gesture. A wrist flick means you can dismiss whatever's on screen and get back to your watch face quickly. A double tap allows you to do things like quickly reply to a message. So I'm actually going to flick my wrist real quick and you'll actually go directly back to the watch face. This way, if you're deep in the settings or you're in another app and you just want to get back to the watch face, just flick your wrist and you're back to the home screen. Flick again and you're back on the watch face. It's basically the same as clicking the digital crown. If I click the digital crown when I'm looking at my apps, I go to the watch face. And go back to my apps at the same time. Or I can flick my wrist and I can switch back and forth. And to show you the double tap gesture when you get a text message. The text message came in. I lifted my wrist. I can actually double tap, pointer and thumb. And it'll go right to replying to the message. Then I'm already dictating the message. And if I double tap again, it'll actually just send it. So I was able to completely reply to the message by double tapping to go into compose, double tap again to send. So without even touching the watch, you can reply to messages. This is also going to work to do things like pause a workout and others.

I'm going to take off the watch again and let's go into the control center and the smart stack. Now we've already talked about the digital crown and how when you press that in, you go to your app screen. Press it again and you go back to the watch face. But there's actually a second button here on the side. This side button actually goes to the control center. So anywhere in your watch, whether you're in an app or your watch face, click that side button and that launches control center. This is going to look similar to the one I just did, the control center on things like your iPhone or your iPad. Here you have Wi-Fi and airplane mode, which Wi-Fi is great because even if your phone is not around your watch, you can connect to Wi-Fi networks directly from here, still get and send text messages, access internet, and more. You have your battery percentage here, and this control right here might be one of the best features of Apple Watch. If your phone is lost, maybe you just don't know where it is in the house, you dropped it in a sofa cushion, tapping this icon here, if you're in range of your Apple Watch and iPhone, you'll actually ping your iPhone to make a sound. And if your phone is farther away, you'll actually get a distance of how close or far away your phone is from the watch. One other pro tip, if you tap and hold on this symbol, it will flash the LED light on the back or the flashlight to help you find it like in the sofa. Pretty wild. That one feature might be worth the price of an Apple Watch.

Now flashlight, often used feature on the iPhone, it's also here on the Apple Watch. Tap the flashlight and it will make the screen crank all the way to the most bright setting and I actually use this pretty often. It's a nice light especially in the middle of the night if you have to get up and go to the bathroom or something and you can swipe over and get an orange or red light and even a strobing light. Flashlight actually pretty useful on Apple Watch. Oh, just got a notification that AirTag is low. Do you have to change that? Let's dismiss. Oh, and you can also use your Apple Watch to unlock home key enabled locks. I have an entire video on the best home key locks. I'll link it above and some of my recent favorites like the Thorbolts. Actually, you should watch my whole smart home tour where I show multiple smart locks and unlocking it with Apple watch. It's pretty cool feature. I'll dismiss that. Let's go back into the control center. So you have the flashlight, pinging your iPhone. You can also set do not disturb. And the nice thing is focus modes, things like do not disturb actually syncs across all your Apple devices. So for instance, I have my iPhone down here. If I were to enable do not disturb mode and I have multiple focus modes here, but I'll tap do not disturb. We'll say on for one hour. That's actually going to sync across. You'll see my iPhone just went into Do Not Disturb mode here. And if I go out of Do Not Disturb mode, it'll also match. It turned off Do Not Disturb. Focus modes are a great feature across all your Apple devices. I have an entire video doing that as well. I'll link it above.

Another good feature here in Control Center is called Theater Mode. If you're at the movies, maybe at a play, or you just want to make sure the screen never turns on in the middle of the night. When you have an always-on display, that can be a little distracting. Tap Theater Mode and it will keep the screen off until you tap it. Raising your wrist will not turn the screen on. That's pretty useful. If you went swimming with your Apple Watch, which you can totally do, it is water-resistant up to different depths depending on your model. This actually plays a sound to eject water from the speaker. And it usually does that automatically after you get out of a pool. It's not something I typically do manually. Now, if you need to silence your Apple Watch, that's that bell icon right there. I can tap and now my Apple Watch is silenced. You can quickly change the font size right here from Control Center. You can raise or lower the media volume right here. Different apps as music and podcasts are playing with the digital crown. We'll get to that in a bit. If you want to play something on headphones, you can actually connect a device right here from the AirPlay symbol on your watch. You can connect to Bluetooth devices, any Bluetooth headphones, or any AirPods that you might have connected to your Apple devices already. Those will appear in this menu as well. So that will change the audio playback destination. Also, if you remember Nextel back in the day, there is a walkie-talkie feature across watches. You can enable this and actually allow friends and family members to send walkie-talkie messages back and forth, and you can also lock your watch screen real quickly using that symbol.

At the very bottom of the Control Center, there's actually an edit option. So if there's any controls you don't need to see on there, like the walkie-talkie or the lock, you can remove those and clean up the Control Center. You can also tap the plus icon here in the top left and add controls that might be useful. Camera remote, a really cool feature. Create a new event. You can even run shortcuts directly on the Apple Watch. Again, you can skip to that chapter down below if you want to see some of my shortcuts for certain settings. School time is a great option for watches set up for kids. Again, if you want a whole video specifically on that family setup, let me know down in the comments. And you'll see there's even third-party options to add things to the Control Center. Really powerful since the watchOS 26 update. Let's actually add two controls and I can show you those features while we do it. Let me add the camera remote. That'll be down here in the Control Center. I'll tap the plus icon one more time. And we can even control our smart home scenes. Another reason to watch my smart home tour and add a new event or to do. Let's do new to do, by the way, just like on the iPhone. If you're ever scrolling a long list of something like your mail or messages and want to jump to the top of the list, you can still tap the top of the watch face and it will scroll to the very top of whatever screen you're looking at.

Now that we added those two controls, let's try out that camera remote. This is a great feature, especially if you're trying to take a family photo, maybe around the holidays, whatever phone is connected to your Apple watch, I can tap into the camera remote. I'll actually see a preview of what the phone is seeing right here on the watch. So if I lift my phone, point it around my studio, I get a live view of whatever the camera is seeing, even me, hello. Now there's a three second timer that's on by default, but I can tap the three dots right here and I can turn that off if I wanna take a photo immediately. I can even change what side or what camera I'm using. So if I wanna look at the front facing camera of the phone, I can change it from my watch. Now that's the front facing camera. Let's go back to the rear camera for a second. I'll scroll down even further. I can choose whether or not flash is on, off, or auto. Live photo, on or off. And when I'm done, I'll just tap the three-second button. It gives me that three-second countdown. The LED is flashing, and it took a picture. Now, if you want it to go to video mode, tap and hold on the shutter button, and now I'm recording a video. So I was able to start a video recording from the watch just by tapping and holding that shutter button. I can pause the video recording, stop it, or even take a photo while the video is recording. And when I'm done recording, just tap the record button there. Using the Apple Watch as a camera remote for your iPhone is really useful, especially if you make content, wanna record yourself, or again, take that family photo. Pretty cool. And one last action here in the control center. I'm gonna go to the new reminder option here. But now from the control center, I can tap this symbol and quickly add a reminder to my list. And remember, this syncs across all your devices. It automatically goes into dictation mode. I'll just tap done. And that quickly, I can create a task in reminders that syncs everywhere. So that's the control center by clicking the side button.

Now, there's another hidden pane. If I swipe up from the bottom of the watch, when I swipe up, this is called the Smart Stack. This has various widgets that you can actually scroll through and you can edit these as well. This way you can have useful information. Right now you have my activity that's there. I have a weather widget. I can enable music detection if I want to know what song is playing in a restaurant or store, I can do that and here's some quick access to some apps. If I tap the edit button here at the bottom, I can choose what widgets I actually want and I can also choose to remove some. Let me tap the plus icon here and here you'll both stock widgets like weather, also from third party apps and you can scroll down to see all the different options for widgets including things like sending a check-in, which is great to let a friend or family member know you're on your way home and they can see your location temporarily. Flighty, great widget if you're traveling a lot. Focus and food knobs, love both of those third party apps. You can quickly access your heart rate, home, medications, and more. And I can even add shortcuts here for the

stack. I'll choose to run a shortcut. I'll tap this shortcut here and I'll choose one that's already on my watch. Run. I'll use the Home ETA and I'll explain more about this shortcut later, but now running that shortcut is just a swipe away. I'll swipe down. There's my Home ETA shortcut, and if I tap it, it gets my current location, travel time to home, and then sends that in a text message. There's my travel time. I can hard-code that shortcut to automatically choose a contact, and then I can send the message. Surprising number of shortcuts actually work on Apple Watch, and again, we'll get into that later.

Now, sometimes you'll see the screen automatically appear, especially when you're playing media, for instance, a podcast. This is my tech podcast, by the way, Primary Technology. You can listen above. That link's down in the description as well. If I start playing the latest episode, even if I'm listening through AirPods from my phone, I can actually control that media from my Apple Watch. When you have audio playing like a podcast or music, and you swipe up from the bottom, you'll actually see a new card appear. This is the currently playing audio. You can quickly pause it and resume it right here from the widget, and then tap in and go to that podcast or song.

Now, when audio is playing, things like Live Activities, maybe Instacart or Flighty, this screen will actually appear by default rather than your watch face. If you don't prefer that behavior, you can actually change it. To do that, I'm going to go to the settings here on the Apple Watch. So I'll tap the crown, go to settings, and then go to Smart Stack. It's the second option right here. You'll see Live Activities as an option here. You can choose to disable Live Activities completely. I would say keep them on because I do think there are some really useful ones, but the auto-launch Live Acti... you can choose to toggle that off. This way it will stay on your watch face. You can choose whether or not you want Live Activities to show on your wrist down. And here you'll see the media app section. Here you can choose if you want to allow Live Activities from things like podcasts and music, and whether or not you want to auto-launch them. By default, it goes to the Smart Stack, like I just showed you, or you can even have it go directly to the app when you raise your wrist. And another side note, if there's an app with media playing, like podcasts or music, you'll see a little symbol here at the very top of the Apple Watch screen. If you tap that symbol, it will actually jump you directly into the app so you can play and pause it. And one other tip when it comes to media, let's look at that tap gesture again. So let's say I wanted to pause the podcast or music, I can just double tap with my pointer and thumb, and now that audio is paused. Double tap again, and it will resume the audio. And remember, to get back to the watch face, I can just flick my wrist back, but because I have audio playing, you'll see it actually went to the Smart Stack. Also, while you're here on the Smart Stack, that double tap with a pinch and thumb actually scrolls through the different widgets. But I'll pause the media, and now if I flick my wrist, I'll be back on the watch face. You'll also see Live Activities for things like sports games if you have the Apple Sports app and you're following teams. And the same is true for Apple Music. Now that music is playing, I'll see it in the widget here, and I can tap the widget to jump into the app and double pinch if you wanted to pause it. By the way, newer Apple Watches can actually play audio directly out of the speaker. So whether you're listening to a podcast or music, I can turn the digital crown upwards, and that will raise the volume. Newer Apple Watches, it can get to a listenable volume. Apple Watch Ultra can get even louder.

Now we've been doing a lot of tapping and swiping on the watch, but honestly, when it comes to the voice assistant, you know who, the Apple Watch is actually one of the best places to do that. This is how I control my smart home, like opening my garage, playing music, texting someone, and you can do all of it without even touching the watch. You can either say the magic words or just lift your wrist and start talking, and it will actually activate the voice assistant. You can adjust this setting by going to the Settings app. And let's scroll down to the assistant here. You can toggle on "Raise to Speak," and of course, you can press and hold the digital crown. So, for instance, let's say our wrist is down, the screen is off. All you have to do is raise your wrist. And again, you do have to get closer to it. "Text Dad, I'm coming home." And you'll see the voice assistant is activated. It heard what I said and actually send just on a timer. I don't have to touch anything. And there it goes. So the "Raise to Speak" to the voice assistant is actually pretty convenient, or you can also just tap and hold the digital crown. And say, "Text Dad, I'm headed over." And you'll see it dictated the text. If you just wait for this timer to run down, it will send the text, or you can cancel with the X or tap the blue arrow to send it immediately. You can do things like control your smart home, ask it about the weather. You can even ask it to ping your iPhone. So here, "Ping my iPhone." And my iPhone was pinged. So if you ever forget that that control is in the Control Center, you can do with the voice assistant. You can ask it to call people, which yes, you can actually call from the watch as well. Setting a timer, probably one of the most useful things. "Set a timer for five minutes." The timer is going, and we'll let that go. And I'll show you actually what happens when the timer goes off. And like when music is playing, you actually see the little timer icon here at the top of the watch face. You can tap it to jump directly into the timer. And if you have a timer complication, like I showed you earlier, you'll actually see the elapsed time or time remaining here in the complication in real time. Pretty cool. So voice assistant on Apple Watch, pretty good. You can even ask it like, "Is it going to rain later today?" And it'll show me the weather right here on my watch.

Before we get into some of these specific apps, like the workout, music, and others, let's talk about the health features. Like I mentioned before, activity rings are going to be something you see all the time. I'll tap into it here on the Apple Watch, but you can actually get to this by going to the Activity app. So if you were on your watch face, click the digital crown to see all your apps here. The activity looks like the rings. Of these three rings, the red one represents activity. You might also think of calories used in the day. The green ring is your exercise minutes. If your heart rate is, if you're being very active, you'll get more minutes there. And then the blue ring is the stand goal. Your Apple Watch wants you to stand at least 12 times a day. And it's not just stand, it's kind of like move around a little bit. Now, if I scroll down using the digital crown, you'll see calories burned and move minutes. Actually, I've been burning some as I've been recording this video. So you'll see your day at a glance there. Scroll down again, you'll see exercise minutes again, and how many times you stood throughout the day. I'm not getting all my stand hours because my watch is not on my wrist. You can also see how many steps down here in the app. And if you do any workouts, those will be recorded here. Now, when you set up your Apple Watch and you put in your height and weight, it will suggest those goals for you. I already had this set up because I've used Apple Watches before. You can also go into your weekly summary and see your week at a glance. You can see trends using this icon here. If you're sharing activity with people, you can see their activity down here with the person icon. And then tap the bottom right, and you'll see any awards, things like perfect move week, perfect stand week, meaning you filled your ring every day that week. Even after you set up your Apple Watch, just go to the Settings app right here and go down to Activity. If you don't like those stand reminders, which if you haven't stood in an hour, you'll see that reminder at the 10 minutes to the next hour, you can turn those off here. There's also daily coaching suggestions. You can toggle on or off. You can get a notification when you've completed a goal, like your full stand hours or move goals, special challenge notifications, and activity sharing. If one of your friends and family that you're connected to reaches a goal, you'll see that. Oh, and our timer just went off on the Apple Watch. You'll see this is what the screen looks like when a timer is going off. You can tap the arrow here to reset it, do another five minutes or whatever your timer was for, or tap the X to dismiss it. Also, another gesture, like when you're getting a phone call or an alarm is going off, you can silence it just by holding your palm to the Apple Watch face, and it will silence that alert, whether it's an alarm or a call. And then X out of it here, and we're back on our watch face. Also, to adjust those goals, like for activity and exercise, you can tap the Fitness app on your iPhone. Here you'll also see your rings and your calories and goals, and then you can tap to change your daily goal. Maybe you're on vacation and you want to adjust things, or you can change the goal that would be ongoing. So whatever your calories per day is, you can change the goal here, and the rings will be based on that goal. Here you can see my goal is 700 calories a day, 30 minutes of exercise, 12 hours standing.

Now, one of the key features of Apple Watch, and one that Apple has many stories where people have been alerted of conditions with their heart, on the heart rate tracking and data. So here on the Apple Watch, if I'm on the app screen, you'll see this heart symbol. Here you can actually see your active heart rate. It's not going to measure it right now because it's not on my wrist. And it will also periodically measure your heart rate throughout the day. You don't have to do anything for it to measure your heart rate. It just does it automatically. And then you may receive notifications of a low or elevated heart rate if it detects there's something abnormal going on. Now, every model Apple Watch measures your heart rate. There are some other features just available to Series and Ultra watches, which we'll get to in a second. But you can adjust some of those heart settings here in the Settings app as well. In settings, we can go to Heart, and there's different notifications you may get, like cardio fitness. It will tell you whether you're doing well or if you should increase that fitness level. You can also take an electrocardiogram directly on the Apple Watch. If you have an elevated heart rate for a prolonged period of time, it can notify you of that or a low heart rate. You can also change that threshold here or turn it off completely. The health and fitness features of the Apple Watch, I think are some of the most compelling reasons to have one and wear it every day. And as that data is collected over time, you'll get to see some pretty compelling information in the Health app on your phone. Just for reference, this is the Health app. You can search for it just by looking for Health. You can see things like resting heart rate and how that's trended over time. Then you can see things like your resting heart rate over the last few months, over the last six months or year. And you can even choose to share data with friends and family members. So if you have a relative who maybe-- monitoring their heart for different conditions or you would like to be notified of things, you can actually connect with them here in the Health app on your iPhone by going to this sharing menu. Again, many of the heart features on the Apple Watch don't require any action on your part. It just happens in the background, takes your heart rate periodically. And if you ever see a glowing green or red light coming out of the back of the Apple Watch, it's because it's measuring either your heart rate or your blood oxygen in that moment.

Now, one feature that's only available to Series Watches and Apple Watch Ultra. You do not have this on the Apple Watch SE. Is the electrocardiogram. You'll see that symbol right here. It's a white circle with a red heart rate on it. And here you can actually take an ECG directly on your watch. You will hold your pointer finger on the digital crown. It will take a couple minutes. It will actually take a certified electrocardiogram that then saves to your Health app and you can share with your doctor. If you ever get a notification about AFib or low or elevated heart rate, then maybe take an ECG to capture that data that you can share with your medical professional. A couple other health features of the Apple Watch. Medications. This is something built into the Health app on your iPhone, but you can also log medications right here from the watch. That's the Medications app. You can also add that as a complication on the watch face. Blood oxygen is available on all Apple Watches. You do have to check the blood oxygen data on your phone, but you can measure it here from the watch. Of all the data the Apple Watch captures, blood oxygen I think is the least accurate, but it can still give you a pretty good idea. If you find the blood oxygen number is a little low, take a few deep breaths and then maybe try again. Cycle tracking. Again, a great piece of data that you can keep track of on the watch and then see it on your phone. I know my wife uses that all the time. There is a new Vitals app to kind of show you overall at a glance how your heart and breathing is. The latest Apple Watches can even alert you of sleep apnea. You'll see Series 11 and Ultra also provide hypertension notifications. Apple Watch SE will not do that. And it's not that you can take your blood pressure with the Apple Watch, but it will alert you of irregularities if it's elevated or if it's low. Also, Apple Watch SE does not have that blood oxygen app. That's just the Series and Ultra models. You can track sleep apnea with any of the newer Apple Watches here. You also get a sleep score, which I'll show you in a moment. You'll see temperature sensing for cycle tracking. And like I mentioned before, they all have fall and crash detection. So if the person wearing it falls, it can contact emergency services automatically.

So in addition to heart, hypertension, and sleep apnea, which you can set up in the Health app on your iPhone, sleep tracking is another great use of Apple Watch. I wear my Apple Watch to sleep every night. When do I charge it? I charge it about an hour before I go to sleep, and then maybe throw it on the charger in the morning while I'm getting ready. With watchOS 26, you now get a sleep score. This will let you know how well you slept the night before. It will take interruptions, REM, and deep sleep into account. You can also scroll on this sleep app and you'll see how long you had deep sleep, core, REM, and how many times you were awake or interruptions. You can also swipe down, see the full hours in bed, if you have the time there, and it will also give you some trends whether or not you've been sleeping less or more compared to past days. Also, you'll see the schedule that you can set here. Set your bedtime and wake time. This way your watch not only knows when to track your sleep, but alarms on the Apple Watch is also a great feature. Now, you can also snooze an alarm from the Apple Watch, which may or may not be great, but this is a great way to have an alarm set that won't wake up your partner or someone else in bed, but hopefully it will still wake you up. So go ahead and set that sleep schedule. You can change it right here. You can also adjust that in the Clock app on your iPhone.

One of the best features on any Apple Watch is the Workout app. Now you can start a workout just by asking the voice assistant. So, for instance, I could say, "Start an outdoor walk." And you'll see in a moment it jumps directly into the Workout app, which I'll show you in a moment. You get a countdown, which you can bypass if you just double tap on the face. And now it's actually doing a workout. During a workout, it's going to measure your heart rate more often. This way it provides more accurate data to calories burned and exercise minutes, and you can also swipe over and start playing your media like music or a podcast. And if you swipe this way, you can pause the workout segment, like a run. You can do a check-in, which will send your location and your battery and cellular connectivity to a friend or family member until you actually arrive home. And of course, you can end the workout here. Now, not only can you do it from the voice assistant, but you can also add a complication on the home screen that jumps directly to the workout face. So I'm going to tap the music symbol down here. And rather than music, let's go down to workout. I'm going to add the Workout app as a complication, and now I can jump directly to starting a workout right here from my watch face. If you have an Apple Watch Ultra, that's a great option for the Action Button, where you can set it to jump to that workout app and start one automatically. Now, when I tap the workout symbol from the watch face, you can jump into a workout. Apple has a series called "Time to Run," which is kind of like listening to a podcast, and you can listen to that while you walk. But if I swipe down, you'll see many different workout options like outdoor walk, traditional strength training, elliptical, rowing. There are many, many different Apple Watch work. There's even some workouts that don't exist, but would be kind of fun if they did. You can also add a workout that you might not see in that initial list here. Scroll down and you'll see many, many options. There's even swimming workouts, which again, totally safe to swim with your Apple Watch. And once you see a workout that you want to start, you can choose what media you want to play during that workout here. And you can choose autoplay mode, which will automatically start playing either music or a podcast. When you start this workout, you can choose whether or not to enable Workout Buddy. This requires Apple Intelligence on an iPhone. You will need the phone with you, but it can tell you things about your heart rate, your time, your splits, and also encourage you along the way. You can also tap the timer icon there in the top right, set some goals, and over in the top left, you can choose what view your Apple Watch will show you when a workout is active. It shows you like the elapsed time and heart rate, splits, things like that. If you're doing something like a hiking workout, you can choose to show different data like elevation, and you can toggle to include that or not here. You can also have different heart rate zones actually target. doing running or really keeping an eye on that toggle on to include, and you can also have it suggest different data to display while you're working out. It's a nice little elevation graph there, so if you're going on a hike, maybe include that, and you can include whether or not you want the activity rings on screen to see how much you're filling it up while you're working out. Then to start a workout, you can just tap the play icon here, tap it again, and you've started the workout. Again, swipe over for media, and you can also swipe downward to see your rings as well. So you can include them here on the main screen or just swipe down to see them with the default working. If you're pausing to take a break, again, you can pause the workout there or just end it.

So that's a lot of the health and fitness features of the Apple Watch, which is a great use case and gives you nice data over time. But let's take a look at some of the other apps we might be using. I'm actually going to adjust this view, by the way. I'm going to go back into the Settings app. This time I'm going to go down to App View and let's go to the List View. Now we actually have an alphabetical list. I find that a little easier to find the apps that I want to find. So now when we click the digital crown, we get an alphabetical list view. Again, there's some third-party apps. You can use even apps like 1Password. Here there's the alarms. You have the wake-up time from your sleep schedule, but you can also add more alarms there. Or just ask the voice assistant. Another great way to do it quickly. I'll talk more about some third-party apps I really like on the watch, like Anylist. But you can also download and shop for apps in the App Store right here on the Apple Watch. This will show you some suggestions, and now you don't need your phone to actually download those apps. Again, a lot of fitness apps like Strava available on the watch itself. Gentler Streak, other workout apps, things like that. Of course, you have the calculator on the Apple Watch. You have your calendar events, which syncs from your phone. You can also use Find Devices, Find Items, and Find People. So what is the Find My app on your iPhone? You have those features, but there are actually three different apps here on the watch. So if you did want to find devices or find items, like an AirTag, you can see your items here, even the battery level of different items. And when you tap into it, it will show it to you on a map with the address, and you still have the option to make that AirTag or other Find My device play a sound right here from the watch. You have the Notify When Found locations, Left Behind, and more. You can also see your mail on Apple Watch. I'll be honest, I don't typically manage mail here on this small of a screen, but in a pinch, you could see it here, delete, and even reply to email. Maps, another great use case. You can literally ask for directions directly on the watch. And a nice thing is, whether you start directions on your phone or your Apple Watch, not only will you see the next direction here on the watch face, but it will tap you whether you need to turn left or right while you're driving. So, for instance, I could say, "Get directions to the stress center in Tampa." So I can literally look up locations just right here on the watch, call them. I can see the directions at a glance, and I'll get a live view with the next turn that I need to make here on my watch. And again, it will tap me. And when you need to turn right while driving, it will actually tap you 12 times in a row. If it's a left turn, it will tap you three times in pairs of taps. So tap, tap, pause, tap, tap. Oh, look, I even got an activity notification from a friend that they completed a workout. So directions on watch, another great use case. If you go to the Messages app on Apple Watch, it'll actually match your pinned conversations from your phone. So you have your conversations there, and then all your text message conversations underneath that. You can interact with all of those like you would on your phone. And one app you'll probably use often is the Music app. So yes, you can play music directly here from your Apple Watch out of the Apple Watch speaker or connect headphones. Now you can also download music to save for later. Now, I would suggest managing this from the Watch app on the iPhone. So here on your iPhone in the Watch app, go to Music, and here you can choose what playlist you want to download locally to the watch. So you can play without internet or without your phone nearby. You can add recent music and pins, but you can choose a playlist. Like, let's say my AirPods 4 playlist. I'll add that, tap the add all right there. I'm gonna have it download now. And then that playlist will be saved to my Apple Watch, even to listen offline. The same is true for podcasts. Now, there's the stock podcast app, which actually works pretty well. It's automatically gonna save your up next, and you can choose what shows you actually want saved locally. So I'll add a show. I would highly recommend again, Primary Technology. That's my tech podcast. And it'll basically download the latest episode of the podcast you choose here directly to the Apple Watch when it's charging. After you listen to an episode, it will be removed from the Apple Watch automatically. Now, there's even better implementation of podcasts on watch with third-party apps like Pocket Casts. Of all the podcast apps on Apple Watch, I think it's one of the best. Overcast is also really good on the watch. With Pocket Casts, you can go to things like settings, Apple Watch, and then automatically download your up next queue to the watch, how many episodes, and if you want to delete outside the limit. I actually think Pocket Casts is probably the best Apple Watch app, but try a few and see what you prefer. You can even see Apple News headlines here on the watch. You can measure decibels of noise. So you can go to that Noise app. It'll actually tell you how loud the environment is. Apparently, I speak around 75 decibels. Recently added in watchOS 26, you can access your Apple Notes. ones synced across all your devices. You can create a new note, access them right here from the watch, and some more third-party apps. You do have Photos here on the Apple Watch where it will save your favorites and specific albums that you choose in the Watch app on your phone. Also having Photos as a watch face is a great option. Just to show you my personal watch, this is my Apple Watch Ultra. I have a bunch of watch faces here, including a Photos face that just goes through some of my favorites every time I lift my wrist. Real quick, if you wanted to add that Photos face, tap and hold on your Apple Watch face and scroll all the way to the right. Let's scroll down to Photos, and here there's some design options for the Photos app. Keep in mind, photos do have to sync to your Apple Watch before you can choose a photo watch face. So maybe leave it charging for a couple hours, and it'll move some photos over. Then you can choose from your favorites, from people, adjust the clock design. Again, nice way to see some of those old photos. There's Pocket Casts, like I was mentioning before, the stock podcast app, Reminders, and a cool feature here is the Apple TV remote. So if you have an Apple TV, you can go into the TV remote. He will actually see any and all Apple TVs on your network. It'll show you the one nearby right here. And you can tap and literally use your Apple TV directly from the watch. You can go back, you can go to the home screen, and you can literally swipe up and down and left and right on the watch face to just navigate your Apple TV. You can even tap the little three dots here, go back to a different Apple TV, play and pause right here, or tap the three dots. And you have some options for things like captions, power to turn off the Apple TV. Pretty cool you can do that from your watch. You can also see Stocks, that's a built-in app. Of course, you have Wallet, so you can add cards or even scan loyalty cards for things like Starbucks or Chick-fil-A. WhatsApp is also on the Apple Watch and more.

Now, speaking of Wallet, when you want to Apple Pay on your Apple Watch, you can just tap your watch to any of those screens where you see the little NFC symbol. And to do that, double-click the side button, not the crown, just double-click the side button. And that's it. Hold your Apple Watch near that symbol and you'll use that card to pay. I actually like doing it from my watch even more than my phone. It's super fast. I don't have to scan anything. I just scan when it's on your wrist. So you don't have to put in another passcode or anything else. Also, if you're trying to take some more time for mindfulness and breathing, there's a Mindfulness app right here on the watch that can walk you through one, three, five minute different reflections and breathing. And if you ever want to change the amount of time, just tap the three dots and you can change the duration right here. Maximum five minutes. Oh, and one of the settings you might want to adjust as you wear your Apple Watch, if you start washing your hands, you might see a 20-second countdown. Your Apple Watch does try to remind you to wash. That's a great practice, but seeing that notification all the time might be kind of annoying. To turn that off, just go to the settings on your Apple Watch, go down to Hand Washing, and then you can disable that hand washing timer. So you don't see it every time you start washing your hands. Well, maybe for kids, but leave it on.

Now, before I talk about third-party apps and shortcuts, let me go through a couple of other key settings. Here in the Settings app on the watch, you can tap your name at the top, and you see things like Sign In. Probably not a place you'll spend a lot of time. Notifications. Just a little recommendation. I recommend turning off as many notifications as you don't need. Now, to manage what apps are sending notifications to your watch, you actually will need to go to the Watch app on your phone. Again, overall, it's probably easiest to manage most of these settings from the phone rather than the Apple Watch's small screen. And for things like notifications, you will have to go there. So here under the notifications, you can scroll down and actually choose what apps and what kinds of notifications are sent. Again, for many third-party apps, especially aggressive apps, things like DoorDash or-- I would toggle as many of those off as possible. If you find yourself being annoyed by notifications on the watch, just turn them off. Again, if you have an Apple Watch Ultra, you have the Action Button here, which you can adjust it to different things like running a shortcut, I'll show you a few in a second, going directly to flashlight, starting a workout, Translate, which is a great feature on the Apple Watch, and more. We already talked about the notification indicator, that red dot, and the Smart Stack. Also the Control Center settings, we've talked about that as well. You can reset the Control Center if you want to get it back to the stock. Under General, there's going to be a bunch of little settings that you might want to adjust. Things like Orientation. You can choose what wrist you wear it on, or what direction the digital crown is on. Some people like to wear their watch with the digital crown facing this way. Maybe if you do a lot of push-ups or other activities where your hand is pushing the Apple Watch, sometimes it inadvertently clicks the crown. Well, you can change how you wear that watch and the orientation there in the orientation settings. You can also choose whether or not certain apps auto-launch from those Live Activities, which we've talked a little bit about in the Smart Stack. You'll also see this Return to Clock action. Here, if you're in an app, you can choose whether or not to return to the clock or the watch face after two minutes, every time you lower your wrist and raise it back up, or after an hour. So if you prefer to see the last app that you were looking at, like when I'm grocery shopping, I like seeing Anylist when I raise my wrist, you might want to choose one hour. Or if you always want to make sure to see your watch face no matter how long you were in an app, then you can tap Always. minutes by default. Nightstand mode is on by default, and when you put your Apple Watch on its charger and put it on its side, you actually see the time, battery status automatically show up. It's kind of a nice feature. I keep that toggled on. You have your AirDrop setting, and one of the cool things you can do is actually share your contact info when you bring your watch nearby another watch or even a phone. For instance, if I hold the top of an iPhone near an Apple Watch, you'll see it actually initiates NameDrop, and then you can share your contact info or AirDrop something from watch... to phone, or even watch to watch. Handoff is a great feature that if you've started something on the Apple Watch, like reading a news article and want to continue it on your phone, you can do that. Screenshots. You can choose whether or not to be able to take screenshots. I find myself inadvertently tapping the crown and side button pretty often. That is how you take a screenshot on the watch. You just click those two buttons at the same time, and you took a screenshot. And those get saved to your photo library. I end up with a lot of inadvertent screenshots, so I toggle that off. VPN profiles and other settings are down here under General. You have your Focus mode settings. You can enable those here. Airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. You can connect devices, forget or join Wi-Fi networks. Display and Brightness. You can also adjust your Apple Watch display. The dimmer it is, the better your battery life. But you can also adjust your text size, bold. And if you don't like the always-on display, meaning it's dim and still showing the time when your wrist is down, you can turn that off here. And by default, your Apple Watch screen will turn on when you raise your wrist. Well, if you don't want it to do that and you have to tap the face in order to turn it on, you can toggle this off. You can also choose how long you want the screen to be on after you wake it up. You can do 15 seconds, up to 70, after you tap the screen to wake it up. App View, we already changed that to List View. Again, we have our double tap and wrist flick gestures there. We already enabled Siri. There are some accessibility options for the Apple Watch. Things like VoiceOver, Zoom, Reduced Transparency, and even additional gestures like a fist clench that you can map to a specific action. Sounds and Haptics you can choose whether it's on silent mode, the volume level, and things like that. You can change your passcode, SOS. And one quick word about battery. Any modern Apple Watch will help you go through the day. The initial day or two when you're setting up your watch, you're using it a lot, and it's also downloading your photos, podcasts, and music, your battery's going to drain pretty fast. But after the first couple of days, you'll start seeing the normal battery life, and you'll make it through a day. If you have the Apple Watch Ultra, you might even make it through a couple of days. But you can still enable Low Power Mode here, which will turn off features like background heart rate, always-on display, and more. But again, if it's a newer Apple Watch, your battery should be fine. Just wait till you get past that first few days of setup. That's some privacy and security. And then there are some settings that are for specific apps. We've already gone through some of these things like adjusting music, whether you want it to use listening history, same thing for podcast. You want the next five, the next 10 episodes. And we already went into the Clock setting, which enabled the swipe to switch watch face. But you can also even have chimes where certain sounds will play on the hour. You can have it speak the time. Boy speak or only when you're not silenced, Taptic Time, which will actually tap the hour on your wrist, and more. A lot of little settings here. To be honest, I leave most of these just on the default aside from changing that swipe to watch face and choosing what music and podcasts I want to have downloaded.

Now, one other setting that's not on this watch, but you will find on Apple Watch Ultra or if you bought an Apple Watch with cellular connectivity, you will see cellular a couple places. When you go to the Control Center on the Apple Watch, there is a cellular radio here that you can enable or disable. You do have to pay an additional cellular plan and connected to your carrier. It would walk you through that setup process when you're first setting up your Apple Watch. On Apple Watch Ultra, I find cellular connectivity to be really good and useful depending on your coverage area and how often you are without your phone. Cellular connectivity may or may not be useful. If you're getting an Apple Watch for a child who doesn't have an iPhone, would highly recommend getting cellular for them. This way they could text you even if they're not in a Wi-Fi range or have another device with them. And if you have cellular on your Apple Watch, you'll see a dedicated Settings pane for that as well. And like I mentioned before, if you have an Apple Watch Ultra, which I have here, this is the Ultra 2, the digital crown and side button function the same way, but you also have the Action Button here on the side, which you can map to a shortcut, workout, and other things.

All right, a couple of third-party app recommendations, a few shortcuts, and then we're done. When it comes to third-party apps, one of my favorites that I use all the time is Anylist. Now, it's syncing over my grocery list right now, but I use Anylist on my phone. It can sync between multiple people, so me and my spouse use it. But we have grocery lists here, and I can see this grocery list on my watch and even check items off. I've shown in past videos how I use Anylist. I'll link one of those videos above and in the description, but I find it to be one of the most useful apps on the Apple Watch. It's also cross-platform, so you can get it on Android and even use it on the web. My note-taking app of choice, Bear, actually works great on the Apple Watch. You can create notes, read your notes, all of that right here. If you want a quick way to jot down notes, social media posts, Drafts is a great app to have on the Apple Watch. You can use it with the voice assistant, just write something real quick, capture that idea. Also syncs with Drafts. Dreamy, my robot vacuum. I can start it from my watch. Ecobee Thermostat also here. Fantastical is my default calendar app of choice. Highly recommend. If you travel by air, Flighty is the app to have. Does an amazing job of tracking your flights and notifying you. Also has a great Live Activity. Food Noms. Honestly, I use Food Noms all the time on my phone and I actually didn't realize it had an Apple Watch app. So I'm gonna get into that soon. So get subscribed. I might have to run down some of my favorite Apple Watch apps in depth. So that video will be coming soon. The whole map. Not a third-party app, but you can control all your HomeKit devices here from your watch, which I do a lot. And if you do have smart home devices, especially HomeKit, HomePass is a great way to save the QR codes for your smart home devices. This way, if you ever need to repair them, you maybe need to factory reset something, you can actually get the HomeKit code from the HomePass Apple Watch app. Also works great on the phone. HomePass is great. HomeCam is also by the same developer and lets you actually see your HomeKit cameras directly on the Apple Watch. As you can see, there's lots of other third-party apps. I don't use these as often. Mind Llama, if you're into mindfulness, or Water Llama, also great Apple Watch apps. Overcast, if you want to try that podcast app. Pedometer++. Teleprompter, a great app to have on your watch and also like on an iPad, you can control the teleprompter from your watch. You can also control a Keynote presentation from your watch if you have Keynote here and on an iPad or iPhone. Oh, real quick. This is a built-in app, not a third-party, but Translate actually works really good on the Apple Watch. So I could translate something from English to Spanish and say, "Where is the library?" And then you can quickly swap Spanish to English, listen again, and you can have a full conversation translating it right here on the watch. It's pretty cool. Tripit and Tripsy, also great travel apps here on the watch. And if you ever want to try different widgets on your watch face or different complications, Watchsmith is the app to go with. You can design complications in Watchsmith on your phone, even static photos. You can do weather, events, astronomy, and then you can add those Watchsmith widgets right here. So I go to edit a watch face. I'll tap the large complication. I can go to Watchsmith. I can choose Infograph Large, and I can have multiple widgets programmed here. Things like calendars, photos. Watchsmith is the one third-party app to get if you want to customize your watch face.

All right, and finally, a couple of shortcuts. If you're new to the channel, I love shortcuts. I do videos on them all the time. I'll actually put one of my playlists above, and there's actually shortcuts that run really well on the Apple Watch that you can then put in the Control Center. You can put it in the Smart Stack, or just run it from here in the. One shortcut I just created recently, if you want to append something to an Apple Note, maybe you have an ongoing brainstorming note and you want to be able to dictate it with your watch, this shortcut will start recording what you're talking about. So right now it's going to be dictating what I'm saying. And when you're done, you just tap Done, and it's going to append that text to an Apple Note that you chose. Obviously, build the shortcut on your iPhone first, but I'll put a link to download this shortcut in the video description, as well as some other shortcuts that run great on Apple Watch. and then you can quickly append dictated text to a note. Now, this is not something you should have to do very often, but if you ever need to force quit an app on the Apple Watch, I already said not to do it, but my shortcut is getting stuck. So I'm going to double-click the crown button. That brings you into the multitasking view, and then you can go to an app, swipe right to left, and X out of it, and it will force quit that app. Don't do that all the time. You do not need to quit your apps on your watch or your iPhone. I did an entire video explaining why you don't need to do that, but that option is there if you need to. Another great shortcut is like a. that you can run and it will say your next upcoming events, your to-do's for the day, birthdays. I'll put a link to that shortcut below, but of course, my favorite, which I showed you, is the Home ETA. If you commute a lot or just like telling your partner how long it is till you get home, this gets that travel time. You choose a contact and text your ETA automatically. Creating a reminder or using shortcuts for HomeKit scenes, that works great as well. And if you want to quickly log your weight or other health activities, you can create that shortcut on iPhone and then run it here on Apple Watch from a complication, Control Center, or that Smart Stack.

Well, if you've made it through all of that, you should feel pretty good about using your Apple Watch, using the health and fitness features, adjusting some of the settings, and more. If you want some tips on Apple Watch that I didn't have time to share in this video, check out my video right here. And there I share some secret tips and features that I couldn't share in this video. But if you have any questions about how to use your Apple Watch, maybe you want a follow-up video going more in-depth into something, let me know down in the comments. Also, hit that like button and subscribe to the channel. I do lots of tutorials and how-to videos here, tips. And whenever there's a new software update, I talk about that right here on the channel as well. And if you want to learn more about shortcuts, especially ones that run on Apple Watch, I did an entire video on shortcuts for the watch, you can check out that video right here. And if you want a refresher, or maybe you also got a new iPhone, I have an hour-long walkthrough all about using your iPhone. It's a couple years old, but still all applies, even though it looks a little different with liquid glass. I'll be doing an updated version soon-ish. But that's also on the channel. It's my most viewed video ever. So just go to most popular, you'll see that video there. Enjoy your new Apple Watch, you find great use of it. Again, I've been wearing mine every day for the past 10 plus years. And as you work it into your daily life, especially notifications, those health features, and some shortcuts, I think it's going to be valuable to you. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you again soon.

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Getting Started with Apple Watch - Complete Guide for Beginners

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