I replaced a £600 Apple Watch with a $26 Pine64 and I am fine

The Apple Watch Ultra is genuinely impressive. It has an altimeter. A siren that can be heard from 600 feet. Dive modes. A titanium case. Battery th

The Apple Watch Ultra is genuinely impressive.

It has an altimeter. A siren that can be heard from 600 feet. Dive modes. A titanium case. Battery that lasts two days if you're not doing continuous GPS tracking across a mountain range.

I am not doing continuous GPS tracking across a mountain range.

I got the Ultra during a period when I was trying to use quantified-self data to understand my POTS better. Heart rate variability. Resting heart rate. Blood oxygen. The data was interesting for a while.

Then I noticed something: I was spending as much time managing the watch as I was getting value from it.

Charging it every day. Updating it. Being careful with it because £600 is £600. Checking the complications. Getting slightly stressed when notifications piled up. Dealing with the app ecosystem. Closing rings, which sounds motivating until you have a bad health day and the rings become evidence of your failure.

The watch was adding cognitive load, not reducing it.

Enter the PineTime from Pine64.

Twenty-six dollars. Open source. Community-maintained firmware (InfiniTime). It does: time (yes, really), steps, heart rate, sleep tracking, basic notifications (calls, messages, alerts), timer and stopwatch. Battery lasts seven to ten days.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

What surprised me is how restful it is.

There's no ecosystem to manage. No apps to update. No rings. No complications to customise. No "suggested activity" based on my movement patterns. It just sits on my wrist and tells me the time and occasionally buzzes when something needs my attention.

For someone with a nervous system that's already overloaded, this is not nothing. Reducing sensory and cognitive input from your devices is an actual intervention, not just minimalist aesthetics.

The heart rate monitor isn't as accurate as the Apple Watch's. The sleep tracking is basic. Neither of those turned out to matter as much as I expected.