22 November 2020
So there we were, running on the Wound VAC's battery while standing in line at the Apple Store already half an hour after our appointment. I made up various dire scenarios to amuse myself. "Sir, we are on battery support with just 20 minutes remaining."
But, as I told Joyce, we won't even remember standing in line in a few minutes. And we didn't.
Nick the Associate walked us over to the Apple Watch displays and showed us what was available. Fortunately we'd already done the case size, color and band game on the Web site. So we pretty much had this figured out.
We just needed to try on both sizes (the smaller size was perfect) and find the right sized strap (a 3 was snug but a 4 was loose).
I had put a watch in my cart a few days ago as the one I would have bought her and I swung and missed on both the watch color and band. She ended up picking a black case with a black woven band.
Nick confided that the woven bands were $50 more. "It's a gift, Nick," I joked, "let's not talk price."
We moved on to the iPhones since her six-year-old iPhone 6 would not pair with the new watch and thus prevent her from getting blood oxygen readings, which was the bright idea in the first place.
Again, the one I would have picked for her (iPhone Mini) was not the one she picked (iPhone 12). But this was her present to herself.
She managed to score an Apple Card (something I can't do despite a perfect credit score; apparently I bought her a house in San Francisco a few years ago). So she gets three percent cash back.
I got to carry the bag.
She did buy a silicon case to protect her new phone but it won't fit in the hard case she uses for the iPhone 6. Just barely not. So I gave her back the padded sunglasses case she bequeathed to me when she got the hard case. There will be more to this story, I'm sure.
We got home on battery power and took everything out of its boxes, copied the old phone's data to the new phone after moving the SIM card over, paired the devices and before we knew it, she had a watch talking to a new iPhone.
Carol1 had called so she called her back on the new iPhone. Or Siri did. So the phone works.
Meanwhile, she picked a watch face with the default complications and tried the blood oxygen reading. Nick had said if we had a problem with a wrist reading we could try it on a finger. No, Nick, the fingers don't work with Reynaud's Disease. That's the whole point of the watch.
When we couldn't find out how to get to the apps (you have to press the crown in a couple of times), we asked Siri to launch the blood oxygen app. And there it was.
It takes 15 seconds, as Mike2 had explained to me when I asked about his experience with it. When he turned 65 earlier this month, he received an Apple Watch himself.3
But it was a fast 15 seconds. And the verdict was a delightful 97 percent. Salwa the LVN is going to be happy to hear that tomorrow. She hasn't been able to get an oximeter reading from Joyce for a month. She just been asking Joyce if she's still breathing.
We watched a couple of tutorials on the watch because there's no documentation. We learned you can hold two fingers on it to have it speak the time. And when you take it off at night (if you aren't letting it monitor your sleep), it goes into what I call Clock Radio mode (although Apple has a more modern word for it). It's dark unless you tap on the nightstand and then it shows you the time.
Come to think of it, I think I'll wander up to the bedroom now and check on it.