I’d bounced off smartwatches before this one. They were either fitness bands pretending to be watches or watches pretending to be phones. The Watch 4 was the first that just fit into the day without asking for attention, and it’s the one that turned “do I even want a smartwatch” into “which one next.”
The everyday stuff is what won me over: health tracking that’s accurate enough to trust, notifications I can act on with a glance, and Wear OS meaning it isn’t locked to Samsung’s ecosystem. None of it flashy, all of it reliable.
The tell is that I upgraded rather than abandoned. When a gadget makes you buy its successor instead of walking away from the category, it did its job. The 4 did — I’m on the 6 now, and I got there because of this one.