I'll assuage some of your biggest fears right now: No, you do not need to buy all new watch bands for these news sizes.

Yeah that was a genuine fear, mutherfuckers!

The moment you push that flush side button and the abyss-like screen flashes on, you'll find yourself in watchOS 5

I love how something you couldn't shove a superball through if it were a hole is somehow "abyss-like."

Things like flight information, calendar details, and even extended weather reports are particularly well-suited to the additional real estate.

That display is up to 44mm across. An inch and a half diagonal. That's a driver's license photo. You need extended weather reports on an interface the size of a large stamp?

...I like to think that I know the Apple Watch pretty well. But putting a new model on for the first time always requires a bit of an adjustment period.

...whereas with an actual watch, you... find out what time it is.

For the first day or two, as I'd raise my wrist and the display would flick on, I would almost want to jump back, confronted by the sheer volume of information staring back at me.

Okay. There it is. There's the crux of the matter.

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For reasons too stupid to get into, I bought a smartwatch last week. I now have a Huawei Watch 2 that I bought at steep discount because I bought my wife a Huawei Watch 1 so that she could answer texts with her chin while she was elbows deep in a bathtub full of pregnancy and blood. I use my phone like a widget factory - it displays random bits of info when I want them, sort of a HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy whose battery now lasts about 7 hours. My wife, on the other hand, gets between 30 and 50 calls a day and has no less than 5 different communication channels and 7 calendars to synchronize.

And we're now what? 5 years into smart watches? You'd think we'd have made things a little more streamlined by now. Granted, Apple is on WatchOS 5 while Android is all the way to Wear 2.0 but Wear 2.0 is a worse dumpster fire than Android Auto and that's saying something.

But the problem with wearables isn't that Wear is shittier than Watch OS. The problem with wearables is it's an accessory screen your phone can nag you through. Which, hey, is why I bought the stupid little fucker. But as jewelry, as a timepiece, as an accessory it's a total fucking failure.

1) It always tells me what I least want to know. "You're playing music." "You're still riding a bike." "You're listening to an audiobook." If i want to know the time I look at it, wait a minute, get used to whatever random display it's showing me, get mad at it, fumble at it, get it back to the watch face I picked out and know what time it is but in my 90 degree eyeline right now I've got four different displays telling me the time. I'm looking at my watch because that's where I'm most expecting to see it and it's not there.

2) Nobody who designs "watch faces" has the first fucking clue about ergonomics or UI. They're all terrible. There's a ridiculous amount of skuomorphism but even the skuomorphism is wrong. I've found a half-dozen 24-hour dials that are using 12-hour engines. None of them have second hands unless you hold the watch up and stare at it for a three count. And "complication" means "bury you in information so densely and stupidly packed that it takes you several seconds to figure out what you're looking for."

3) That which distinguishes mechanical, physical wristwatches - what they look like, what they're made out of - is a null concept in smart watches. I've got two different watchface-making apps on my computer and for $10 I have access to 50,000 watch faces (most of which suck). That Arnold & Son do moon phase differently than Audemars Piguet doesn't matter if they're both interchangeable rip-offs badly crafted by some bored design student in Korea. And yeah - Arnold & Son can't tell you your heart rate. But let's be honest. Before you bought a damn smart watch you didn't care about your fucking heart rate.

There's this overpowering idea that smart watches are the logical descendent of this:

They're not. They're the logical descendent of this:

I had a CFX-400. It had contacts in it. It had a calculator. It did all sorts of fancy shit. And it did all of it worse than a purpose-built device but having all that shit on your wrist beat the crap out of not having it at all.

There's nothing your smart watch can do that your phone can't do better. The rise of wearables indicates nothing more than the failure of UX by phone manufacturers.