Tag Archives: ranked

Apple Watch Bands, Ranked

The 2023 Pride Edition Apple Watch band outside the Apple Store

This is my ranking of all the Apple Watch bands you can currently buy:

  1. Sport Band/Nike Sport Band
  2. Milanese Loop
  3. Woven Nylon
  4. Silver Link Bracelet
  5. Trail Loop

I have a problem, and it involves Apple Watch bands.

I now have third-party versions of most kinds of the Apple-branded (i.e. not Hermès) Apple Watch bands. It’s not that the genuine Apple ones are bad, but for the few genuine bands I have compared to their third-party equivalents, there’s just not enough of a quality difference to justify the difference in cost. Especially when we’re talking about the liquid silicone rubber sport bands, or the nylon sport loops, no matter if they’re called fluoroelastomer or whatever other fancy term Apple uses.

Apple’s first-party watch bands are nice and all, and their sport bands have a better-feeling silicone/rubber texture than the third-party ones, but it quickly becomes cost-prohibitive to have any more than one or two colours, especially seeing you can only wear one at any given moment in time. Multiply that by the multitude of band styles, seasonal colour variations, and special editions, and third-party fakes quickly start to become the only way you can stay ahead of the watch band game.

Genuine vs third-party differences aside, there’s now so many different types of Apple Watch bands that it’s hard to know what bands you might like, short of buying them all and trying them, or going to your local Apple Store and trying them on in-store.

But by the same token, because there’s so many, if you have certain preferences for materials, looks, or both, you can choose a watch band that suits your own personal tastes.

If I had to pick watch bands based on personal preference, it would be something like so:

  1. Milanese Loop
    The Apple Watch band I wear most of the time is the Milanese Loop. Because I have the stainless steel Apple Watch, the Milanese Loop matches the polished, shiny look of the stainless steel really nicely. It uses a magnet to hold the strap against the band, which is always cool, and it’s both understated enough to not be too flashy on first glance, as well as being slightly fancy if you take a closer look. It’s only real downsides are the fact that it isn’t casual as something like the Sport Bands, and it’s heavy — not as heavy as the Link Bracelet, but definitely heavier than sport bands or nylon watch bands.

  2. Sport Band/Nike Sport Band
    It’s hard to go past the venerable Sport Band and the Nike Sport Band, mostly due to the fact that they’re the best watch band for most people. They’re available in a huge range of colours, and while they use the simplest pin-and-tuck fitting system that might not provide the fitting granularity or fine-adjustment capability of something like the Sport Loops and Nike Sport Loops, they’re casual but smart, and light but durable. The best thing about the Sport Bands is that they’re extremely hard to fault, which is probably why they’re regarded as one of the best Apple Watch bands of all time.

  3. Woven Nylon
    The Woven Nylon watch bands, despite no longer being available from Apple new, are probably the most traditional Watch bands you could have bought. Short of a real leather watch band, the Woven Nylon were light and had a classic pin and buckle style arrangement that was like the pin and loop design of the Sport Bands, only less modern. But still, the Woven Nylons look great with basically any outfit, and while they aren’t as formal or flashy as the Milanese or the Link Bracelet, they still represent good value both in terms of practicality and monetarily.

  4. Link Bracelet
    The Link Bracelet is the kind of watch band you’d expect to wear with actual high-end watches. With the exception of the higher-priced space black Link Bracelet (which is at least partially justified by the special DLC coating that makes it very, very scratch resistant), you would wear a Link Bracelet with your Apple Watch if you were attending some kind of formal event, for example, and still wanted a high-tech watch instead of a traditional Rolex or similar. By that same token, I probably wouldn’t recommend it as a daily driver.

  5. Trail Loop
    I am generally against Velcro watch straps. They might seem like a simple, easy option that’s suitable for everyone, but this belies the fact that they’re more utilitarian than I’d like. There are two major downsides to the Sport Loops and Nike Sport Loops that Apple sells. Firstly, they feature the loops on both sides of the watch band, which puts loops in contact with your skin, not the watch band itself, and worse still, show the loops on the outside of the watch band which looks awful on your wrist. Secondly, the sound velcro makes when you’re taking it off is always jarring, and you’ll hear it every day when you take your watch off to charge. That being said, I begrudgingly acknowledge their overall place in the hierarchy of Apple Watch bands thanks to the sheer number of Sport Loops and Nike Sport Loops. So if you absolutely must wear a Velcro band, the Trail Loop is the best of the worst purely for the reason it has the loops only on one side of the Watch band. While the colour selection isn’t great, it is one of Apple’s newest Watch bands, so that’s kind of expected.

Tilted and Muted

“Reported in 1 matches by 3 different parties”. Evidently, that game was a bad one.

With the introduction of the ranked role queue in Dota 2 for Dota+ members, I’ve been playing ranked for the first time in years. You can say what you want about Dota+ as a whole, and I’ll be equally as honest and say that there aren’t that many tangible benefits, but ranked roles improves on a crucial aspect of the ranked queue experience by guaranteeing you’ll be able to play a particular role and lane. By removing that extra potential point of friction, you could argue that it’s a little pay to win, but it’s perfect if you want to grind out tens of games on a particular hero.

Which is exactly what I’ve been doing. Much to the chagrin of my teammates, I’ve been picking offlane Luna and relying on a good support to do well enough to get past the laning stage, at which point I’ll focus on pushing out the lanes and creating space — either until my team’s real carry has enough farm to carry the game, or until I get big enough to feel that I can.

And it’s been working. Kind of. Dotabuff says I’m 13-9 on Luna in ranked games over the past three months, and while I’ve only played one game since patch 7.20, it’s early enough in the patch, here’s hoping that I’ll be able to get away with it until early 2019. Even though I consider myself pretty good at pushing out the lanes and making space with a carry that can farm, this tactic of picking offlane Luna isn’t exactly winning any popularity contests. Unless my team wins, in which case all is forgiven, but losing inevitably makes me the prime target for most of the blame.

So even though I know what I’m doing — playing a carry from the offlane position, making space for our “real” carry, even if that turns out to be me — some of the time, my team isn’t on the same page, which leads to mistakes and pickoffs, which often leads to some very unhelpful suggestions in chat.

I’ve said before that ranked is a festering cesspool of the worst Dota 2 players, which carries the unique distinction of being the only game mode where you can literally measure how good you are at the game, relative to everyone else, either via the ranked medals they introduced a little while ago, or via the MMR that you see on your profile page.

My thoughts on that haven’t changed — I continue to believe that ranked is the most toxic game mode in Dota 2, like any competitive mode in any other game — but on the other side of the scale is my own willingness to improve in a game that I’ve spent thousands of hours in. I cannot believe how truly awful I am at a game for the amount of time I’ve spent playing/watching/reading Dota. It’s actually unbelievable, and the only reason I haven’t quit altogether is because I know I haven’t played anywhere near enough to be good (and also because no one really quits Dota). If you want to get better, you play, and that often means playing a lot.

And so, if you want to see how good you are at Dota, or measure how much you’ve improved in any way, shape, or form, you play ranked.

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