Apple Smartwatches are Great, but are they Waterproof?

Part wristwatch, part smartphone sidekick, smartwatches are great for helping wearers lead a healthier lifestyle, and they also take many of the useful features inherent to a smartphone and put them on your wrist. They can be used to receive notifications, make and receive phone calls, access a wide range of apps, and are often equipped with fitness trackers.

And for the most cutting-edge smart watches, Apple’s new Apple Watch Series 8 and the Apple Watch SE are hard to beat. Some of the features on these watches are pretty mind boggling.

They have a sleep tracker, enabling wearers to see how much time they spend in different sleep stages like REM, core, or deep sleep, as well as when they wake up. They have emergency SOS, fall detection, and severe car crash detection, enabling wearers to get immediate help in case of an emergency.

The 8 series also has temperature sensing for women’s health monitoring, high and low heart rate notifications, and a blood oxygen app to tell you if you are getting the proper amount of oxygen in your blood. It even has ECG capacity, which, just days after it was released, had already been credited with saving the life of a woman when it detected atrial fibrillation and advised her to seek medical help immediately.

For them to be useful to pool service professionals, however, it is essential that they be water resistant, which these Apple watches claim to be. “Swimproof,” is how Apple puts it.

According to the Apple website, “Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch SE have a water resistance rating of 50 meters under ISO standard 22810:2010. This means that they may be used for shallowwater activities like swimming in a pool or ocean.”

Unfortunately, an August 25, 2022, class-action lawsuit against Apple says that Apple Watches aren’t as waterproof as the company advertises them to be. A lawsuit filed in a Northern California District Court on behalf of Laurie Braaten and others similarly situated alleges that Apple falsely advertises the water resistance of its smartwatch, and that it “routinely fails in brief encounters with water.”

In Laurie Braaten’s case, when one of her dogs fell into the shallow section of her swimming pool, she jumped into the pool to retrieve it while wearing her Apple Watch. Shortly after the January 2022 incident, the watch became unstable and began to glitch and malfunction.

The suit states, “Over time, a smart watch will come into contact with bodily oils, cosmetics, suntan lotions, and water, which all contain corrosive agents. This causes gradual corrosion and wearing out of parts, seals, conformal coatings, foams, and adhesives, causing the permeability of the device to degrade over time. Second, the product’s water protection barriers, such as coatings, glues, gaskets, meshes, and membranes are porous, and only “deter” water from entering.

These barriers degrade and fail, especially when the product is subjected to various temperatures, pressures, and mechanical force conditions.” Furthermore, Apple’s policy is to deny warranty repair and/or replacement when the water exposure indicator is activated, which the suit says is installed on the watch specifically so that they can deny warranty claims.

This means buyers are told one thing when they buy the product, based on the advertising, but something else when they need after-sales service or replacement.

The case looks to represent all United States residents who bought an Apple Watch SE for personal or household use at any time between August 25, 2018, and the time the lawsuit is resolved.

According to classaction.org, it isn’t necessary to do anything to have yourself included in the proposed class action if you own an Apple watch, at least not initially.

It is only if and when the suit settles (which will likely take time) that consumers covered by the suit will need to fill out a claim form.

Do you have a “swimproof” smart watch?Tellushowyoulikeitbysending a letter to serviceindustrynewscd@yahoo.com.

In reference to the picture posted: THEFT ALERT! You may be asking what Corporal Thomas is Simba-ing over here, and if you’re not a pool owner, you may not have a clue. But that fair citizens, is a pool cleaner.

Polaris. Tristar. Pentair. Dolphin. No those aren’t local kiddos names (YET), but they are brands of pool