Last week, I dropped my 1st generation stainless steel Apple Watch while in the locker room at my gym. It did not survive:
Thankfully, I purchased AppleCare Plus on it, so I made a Genius Bar appointment and took it in. The stores don’t repair these things; they are replaced. Three days later, I got an email to come pick up my replacement. $80 later, I was back in business:
This service replacement is identical to my previous watch, but minus all the broken sapphire. Frustratingly, I had to set it up as a new device, as it was running watchOS 2 out of the box. The whole process took a while last night, but I’m back in action today.
All in all, the process wasn’t too bad. It would have been nice if my store had a replacement in stock, but three days was faster than I was expecting. In those few days, I did find myself missing my Watch, despite it me using it as basically a fitness tracker with iMessage notifications these days. I was little surprised about that feeling, and I’m glad it’s back.