Did a smartwatch change anything for you after month three, or did it become a step counter? Long-Term Wear

The drawer risk is real and it's mostly about charging. That 2019 band probably needed charging every few days at an inconvenient moment. Whatever you buy, decide in advance when it charges — mine goes on the puck while I shower, every day, and that habit is the only reason it's still on my wrist four years later. A watch you have to remember to charge is a watch you will stop wearing.

Year four. The things I use daily, in order: notification triage, silent alarm, timers, paying for things, and finding my phone. Health tracking is something I look at maybe monthly. Nobody sells you a watch on the silent alarm and the kitchen timer, and that is what earns the wrist space. If notifications-without-your-phone is the thing you want, that's a completely legitimate reason to buy one and it's the feature you'll use twenty times a day.

Sleep tracking, honestly: directionally useful and precisely wrong. It knows whether you slept badly. It does not know your sleep stages to the minute whatever the graph implies. I found it useful for about three months while I learned that alcohol and late food wreck my sleep — and then I'd learned it, and the graph never told me anything new again.

On iPhone at your budget the entry model sits around $249 at list and gets discounted regularly, so you have room. The thing to actually check is what battery life you get with the always-on display and sleep tracking both enabled, because those two together turn a two-day watch into a nightly-charge watch — and nightly charging plus sleep tracking is a contradiction you'll resolve by not tracking sleep.

I wore one for two years, took it off for a fortnight's holiday, and never put it back on. Not because it was bad — because I hadn't realised how much low-level checking it had added to my day. Worth knowing that's a possible outcome and it isn't a failure of the product.