I'm looking at fitness trackers / smart watches again and going insane...

I hate shopping for electronics. There's too many options and none of them are quite what I want and most tech is ugly and ugh...

The Garmin Lily is genuinely pretty and clearly designed for women ✅ but it's CA$400 for a device that's probably a great fitness tracker but pretty dumb as smart watches go.

I can get just as good (maybe?) a fitness tracker from FitBit but that's also a smart(ish) watch for CA$150 but it's ugly as sin.

Apple Watch SE is probably the best as smart watches go, it's an okay tracker, but it's aesthetically meh.

Given how many people wear them, it's not like they look that out of place with anything and you at least have a lot of options when it comes to bands. But, seriously, the slightly rounded rectangle really isn't it when it comes to watch aesthetics.

I'm gonna end up being a basic bitch and getting an Apple Watch, aren't I?

At least with the Apple Watch, there's a lot of band options available to take it from "not ugly" to "kinda cute".

But, gods… why is that the bar? And why do I have to hand over CA$400 to the fruit gods to meet that bar?

I think I’m leaning towards the Garmin Lily.

Ugh... And the engineer in me knows exactly WHY they made the trade-offs they did. Dropping from 42 to 35mm cuts out a LOT of area/volume. Area drops by radius squared and you're already burning some for the enclosure. Making a 35mm smart watch requires smaller electronics, a smaller battery, etc. So of course it's going to be dumber.

The LCD display is also probably a battery saving measure. The fact that the battery is smaller but people still expect multiple days out of it, while still running Linux (probably) and all that fitness/monitoring tech really squeezes your power budget. Since the screen is often one of the biggest power draws, cutting back to a LCD makes sense.