Worst onboarding experience in the world

Hi lobsterghost1

The message was by no means directed to the community and I know that Apple engineers sometimes happen to read these messages.

After 6 hours, several restarts and an iPhone 13 Pro update to 16.3 from 16.2, I got the Apple Watch Series 7 to work. My WiFi connection on the iPhone measures download speeds of 10 MB/s but maybe the reception quality of the Apple Watch is a lot weaker than that of the iPhone. I had to leave my phone and watch next to the router just to have more hopes it would complete the process. I don’t know if the update of the iPhone worked or if it was the distance to the router (I never have problems with the phone and laptop from that room) and even next to the router it took about an hour to complete with big delays even after it was downloaded to the Watch.

I bought my sister a Series 8 for Christmas and while it didn’t take her 6 hours to get it to update, it was also a very poor and slow experience from what I have come to expect from Apple over the past 15+ years.

There are so many videos and blog posts on the internet about how to deal with problematic updates which indicates that my case has not been a rare occurrence.

The Watch worked which means it’s not faulty which means that the work done by Apple on handling the activation and update processes has been subpar.

I am in Greece and Apple doesn’t have a direct presence here so we do not get the support you are used to in the US and really I don’t know what anyone could have done over the phone. If it was a problem with the update then the setup process should have asked for a phone update first which just adds more delay since the iPhone update, while it downloaded fast enough, took quite some time to install. If the problem was WiFi reception, it could have provided a clear indication that the Watch has a bad WiFi connection.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the replies and for the link, I will send them feedback there. Sorry for all the frustration.