Apple Watch Coming Apart at the Seams: Part 2

Here is a follow-up on my Apple Watch Coming Apart at the Seams saga…

I made an appointment at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Tysons Corner, Virginia. A very helpful guy named Dave (imagine that) met me, took a look at the watch, and said since it’s out of warranty it would have to go in for service at the standard rate of $199/incident. The likely outcome was that the watch would be replaced with a new Apple Watch Series 1.

I was hoping for something more generous, like massive apologies and handing me a new watch, but I knew that was a dream. A new unit at a $70 discount isn’t the worst outcome, but I’m still pretty unhappy that the thing came apart in the first place.

Anyway, I declined the service and took the watch home. Before shelling out two-hundred bucks, I figured I’d try to fix it myself. I bought an adhesive kit and loosely followed the instructions on iFixit for replacing the adhesive. However, since the Force Touch sensor had completely detached and I only secured one face of that fragile part, the repair was incomplete. The screen started coming apart again after one day. So this morning I took it apart once more and put adhesive on both sides of the sensor, following a different set of instructions on iFixit for replacing the Force Touch sensor.

The watch now seems to mostly work and is staying together so far. I have definitely broken the Force Touch sensor, though. It is not responding at all, but that’s a small price to pay to hopefully keep the thing running for a while longer. Since I mostly use my Apple Watch for fitness tracking, notifications, remote photos, checking the weather, and other pretty mundane but useful stuff I’ve come to rely on, the lack of Force Touch and the fact that these kinds of gestures seem to be less necessary for accessing various features in watchOS 3 means I should be getting by pretty well for a while.

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