I love my Apple Watch Sport with the exception that every time it taps my wrist, it freaks me out. Is there some way to disable this before I have a heart attack??
There’s a lot that the small print in the user’s guide disclaims, but I’m fairly sure that there’s no disclaimer about you having a heart attack because of the haptic (actually, Apple calls it “taptic”) feedback. So let’s get that disabled for you before something really bad happens! 🙂
Actually, the entire taptic engine is quite fascinating because it really does feel like someone tapping on your wrist when you’re wearing the Apple Watch and it’s triggered. If you really want some excitement, have your paired iPhone offer driving directions while you’re wearing the watch. It taps and taps and taps to tell you where to turn…
Disabling the haptic feedback from the taptic engine (sheesh, confusing enough yet?) is pretty easy, fortunately.
Start by pushing on the Crown to get to your app view:
Settings is the gear app and for me it’s adjacent to Photos (the rainbow flower). Tap on it to launch Settings, then swipe down to find the following:
Okay, here it’s called Haptics. Tap on “Sounds & Haptics” then swipe down to find the Haptics settings:
I would recommend that you turn the Haptic Strength down to the minimum setting, then swipe down just a tiny but further to be able to read what “Prominent Haptic” actually is:
There ya go. Disable this too. Done.
Now, in case you’re curious, if you popped off the back of your Apple Watch (though I don’t recommend it!) you’d see that internally this feature is called the “taptic engine”, as you can see:
Apple says: “the Taptic Engine [is] a linear actuator inside Apple Watch that produces haptic feedback.”
So now you know. And we prevented a heart attack. How cool is that?