Over eight years, the Apple Watch has sensibly evolved—activity rings, rest-day pauses, Walkie Talkie, widget redesign—and become an indispensable daily companion. Yet its clever hand-washing feature from watchOS 7 is plagued by incessant false “loud environment” alerts from hand dryers and repeated dish-washing triggers that never get fixed. It’s baffling that a device capable of life-saving crash detection can’t handle drying your hands, making me suspect Apple’s engineers never actually wash theirs.
“Loud environment detected”.
Well, because the air dryer is fucking loud! And even the ones that are not that loud, your watch is that close to it, so it will say it’s a loud environment. That’s what it does!
I wear hearing aids and air dryers annoy the hell out of me because they’re so loud. Almost as much as leaf blowers annoy me.
Hearing aids don’t have the ability to filter noises so it’s like plugging a microphone into headphones and trying to carry on conversations. Mine can now reduce loud noises a little bit so they don’t damage my already horrible hearing further but that wasn’t the case when I had them as a kid and air dryers started getting more popular, that shit hurt.
I have the AirPod pro. It has a feature called transparency, where it transfers the ambient sound into the ear, plus the music, so it should be like you aren’t using anything. The problem is, the frequencies are not the same. I start hearing louder noises in higher frequencies. I think I understand what you go through with the air dryer.
Yeah I have the AirPods Pro and have tried out the transparency feature, specifically because Apple has been floating the idea around that these could technically act as hearing aids and I’m looking for alternatives that might be cheaper now that I’m on disability.
It reminds me of when hearing aids first came out when I was a kid, only not quite as good. But you get the idea with the frequencies and also background noise. Go into a loud coffee shop with them on and try to carrying on a conversation with someone only using the transparency feature.
For someone with slightly declining hearing it might be ok. For me I have mild-to-moderate hearing loss and I have to use an actual hearing aid, not a hearing device which is what all these “hearing aids” that are cheap are. I have to order them through an audiologist and they are not cheap and barely covered by insurance (most of which won’t cover them if you don’t use THEIR cheaper brand). But hey, at least they’re kinda covered now. For 40 years or so of my life it was all $4,000 - $6,000 out-of-pocket every 5-7 years depending on how long they lasted and if they could be repaired.