Neil Cybart of Above Avalon:
The majority of reviewers thought the Apple Watch was a great device and has potential to be a game changer in how they use technology. The problem is that unless you read every review, you wouldn’t have known that.
This is the primary reason why so many people thought the Apple Watch was panned by reviewers while in reality, most people enjoyed the product. Out of thousands of words written about Apple Watch, most will only remember a small fraction and even a smaller fraction will be included in these problematic “review summary” posts.
With the exception of Gruber’s, I passed on the majority of the written reviews, and watched the embedded videos instead. Nilay Patel’s for The Verge is good, and so is Joanna Sterns for the WSJ.
Even Cybart agrees this is the area where more product reviewers could focus their energies:
One of the more effective Apple Watch reviews came courtesy of Mashable. It wasn’t their couple thousand word review intertwined with various high-quality photos but their six-second Vine clip that didn’t include any words. I found the clip to be amusing and interesting because it: 1) showed Apple Watch packaging 2) briefly revealed watch bracelets being resized 3) revealed the mechanism of how the watch bracelet worked. I wasn’t able to get that information from any other Apple Watch review. Of course Apple could have had the same video on their website, but this is where the independent product review’s value shines: legitimacy. There is value in seeing someone not connected to Apple show off its technology in a real-world setting.
Video is an effective medium for much of this to take place because it’s 1) easily shareable 2) able to retain its message. One of the biggest’s problems facing text reviews is the ease in simply taking a few words out of context. But a six-second Vine? It would be pretty hard to shrink that down any further.
I suppose it was inevitable that there would be seemingly so-so reviews, after all, this is about as ‘Version 1.0’ an Apple product has ever been this close to release. Still, Cybart makes a great point: almost all of the praise for the device is buried in negative prose.