I've had Apple Watches for quite a few years^[1], and I gotta say that watchOS 27 is probably the most disruptive release so far. If you haven't upgraded yet, my advice is: don't.

The big problem is Siri. Voice recognition is obviously the main user interface on a 1"-wide display, The new Siri^[2] is dog-slow, even on a brand-new Series 12 watch, which other plenty of other people have noted. I assume they'll do something about that (maybe just go back to the pre-LLM Siri for the watch). However, the thing that really kills me is that tilting your wrist at all now dismisses Siri right away. I've always used the watch by raising it to my face, saying "Hey Siri, add bananas to my grocery list"^[3], and then putting my wrist down while the teeny tiny watch CPU figures out what I said. On watchOS 27, as soon as I put my wrist down, the interaction is silently canceled.

The watch also re-springs every few hours, but, you know, that's life with a .0 OS.

It's a shame, because I actually like the new app launcher and some of the other changes. Maybe 27.2 will be better!