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Tattoos Found To Interfere With Apple Watch Sensors

An anonymous reader writes: A number of early Apple Watch adopters have complained that their tattoos cause interference with many of the new product's key features. According to multiple tattooed sources, inked wrists and hands can disrupt communication with the wearable's sensors installed in the underside of the device leading to malfunction. Owners of Apple Watch have taken to social media to voice their frustration using the hashtag #tattoogate and sharing their disappointment over the newly discovered Apple flaw. One user reported that the Watch's lock system did not disable as it should when the device was placed on a decorated area of skin – forcing those affected to constantly enter their security pins. A further source suggested that notification alerts would fail to 'ping' as they are supposed to, and that heart rate monitoring differed significantly between tattooed and non-tattooed wrist readings.

10 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Waitasecondhere... by NatasRevol · · Score: 3, Informative

    Um, actually they did.

    https://support.apple.com/en-u...

    --
    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
  2. Re:Waitasecondhere... by rockout · · Score: 3, Informative

    or C) neither of the above

    https://support.apple.com/en-u...

    --
    I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
  3. Re:Waitasecondhere... by dontbemad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just to make a note: That article currently has a "last modified" date of April 29th. For comparison, I've linked to the April 9th snapshot of the same article.

    http://web.archive.org/web/201...

    No mention of tattoos anywhere, to my knowledge. Granted, this is being fairly pedantic, but it surprises me that posters on slashdot would look at a page on the web in its current form and make statements that seem to imply that page has always existed in that same form.

  4. Re:Waitasecondhere... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You have an archive link for that?

    "Last Modified: Apr 29, 2015 " - makes me think they noticed and edited

  5. Re:Waitasecondhere... by pr0fessor · · Score: 4, Informative

    That was recently modified to include the part about tattoos check the page in the wayback machine before it was updated yesterday.

    http://web.archive.org/web/201...

  6. Re:Struggle by j2.718ff · · Score: 4, Informative

    The ultimate hipster struggle is real!

    Since when do hipsters care about whether their fashion is actually functional or not? Having a watch that doesn't fully work may be more hipster than one that does.

  7. Re:Straitlaced Engineers by Khyber · · Score: 1, Informative

    As noted by FUCKING HISTORY you are absolutely full of shit, you apologist shill.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  8. Re:Struggle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    The bigger problem is that the Apple watch is the only smart watch with this problem. Samsung watch works just fine on my tattooed wrist, I haven't tried the Apple watch though.

    It makes me wonder how Apple let an obvious thing like this slip. I know people that work there, and some of them have wrist tattoos. Was that never even a consideration?

    What if the watch doesn't work on anybody but white people? That would open a whole new can of worms.

  9. Re:Struggle by jfengel · · Score: 3, Informative

    They definitely did test it on people with naturally dark skin, and it works fine. The natural pigments are fairly transparent to the green light they're using. It's the artificial pigments, which are blacker than any actual black people, that are problematic.

  10. Re:Struggle by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not about capacitance. The watch shines different coloured light through the skin and monitors colour changes to figure certain things out. Ink is going to absorb or reflect that light in a way that the watch isn't calibrated to handle. Ink isn't melanin, so darker skinned people won't have the same problems.

    My sleeves look a lot better than an Apple watch ever could, but I may just barely have enough open skin to wear one if I wanted to.