I have had my Apple Watch about 3 weeks after they started shipping. A few days ago the watch started to be difficult to operate. It would not respond all the time to touch. After a few hard reboot it sort of got better until it got bad again. This morning I did a full reset on the watch (difficult given the display only responded to touch one in roughly 10 events). After the reboot it was no better. I have captured a short video showing the issue. You will notice it sometime respond to touch but most time not.
I brought the watch to an Apple genius and he confirmed that the touch screen was indeed defective. He created a repair ticket for it. When asked he said that he never saw anything like this before. A quick search on the web did not turn much either. I really hope this is an isolated incident and not something other Apple Watch will start to suffer from over time. That would be bad.
Some background about my watch usage: I have been showering daily with the watch and taking the occasional swim with it but never for long period of time and never deeper than 1 meter. I never dived with it.
The watch started to go bad when I came back from a quick swim in the ocean last week during a summer vacation in Florida. At 1st I thought it was the sun screen I sprayed on myself that somehow got on the screen and made it unresponsive but after cleaning it off it was no better.
I will report back if I get more info from Apple.
UPDATE: Aug 21 2015
The watch is back from repair. I have some mixed feelings so far. 1st, they claim they could not reproduce the problem… but the guy at the Genius bar clearly saw it… so this is puzzling. Either it fixed itself by magic or they are not 100% true about that. Perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge this type of issue… strange.
Anyway, they did a full reinstall back to Watch OS 1.0.1… the watch was running watchOS 2.0 beta 5…
So, right now the watch is charging (it came back dead) and I am restoring my last known good backup of watchOS 1.0.1 on it. So far the screen is indeed responding properly to touch… so this is also interesting. Perhaps this is something in the OS that totally goes bad due to some bug and is causing the touch screen to not respond properly… even if one does a full watch reset and start back at the 1st setup level like I tried.
I will run on 1.0.1 for a bit to test the stability and once the next beta of watchOS 2 come out I will upgrade to it and hope things don’t get back again. Some others have reported a similar issue with watchOS 1.0.x so it might be an issue that is currently plaguing both OS versions. I hope this get address soon I this is not a fun bug at all.
UPDATE: Aug 22 2015
OK, the watch is almost unusable. See the following video showing the issue in action:
So I called Apple care and they are arranging for a replacement.
UPDATE: Aug 25 2015
While waiting for the replacement watch shipping box it appear as if the problem has gone away. I don’t know what to make out of this. So strange. I guess a new watch will for sure take care of possible future issue with this unit but having a problem like this come and go to then come back and go again is puzzling. I wish I could find a way to replicate the issue on demand but I have not been able to.