There’s a very wide range of prices on the Apple Watch and a lot of that variation can be chalked up to variations in the band style. You don’t have to pay Apple a huge premium to get a different band, however, as you can swap it out at home with a myriad of styles. Read on as we show you how.
Why Do I Want To Do This?
There’s a wide range of reasons why you might wish to remove and change out your Apple Watch band but nearly all of them can be boiled down to cost (with perhaps a sprinkling of fashion sensibility thrown on top). All models of the Apple Watch are identical aside from the cosmetics of the body and band. If you spend $17,000 for the gold Apple Watch or $349 for the sport model, the guts of the watch are absolutely the same: same components, same apps, same Watch OS.
In light of that most people are loathe to pay a premium for the high end models just to get a different band or a different material. It’s much cheaper to buy aftermarket bands.
How to Remove Your Apple Watch Band
Removing the band from your Apple Watch is ridiculously easy. So easy, in fact, that we were completely surprised by the process. It bears absolutely no resemblance to the kind of tools-required fiddling you need to do in order to remove the bands from traditional watches.
To remove the band simply turn the Apple Watch over in your hand, locate the small oval buttons at the top and bottom edge of the watch body, as seen in the photo above, and gently press them in with your finger while sliding the strap away from the case of the watch on a perpendicular plane (it doesn’t matter if you slide left or right as long as you depress the button).
Once the straps are removed you can easily see the mechanism that holds the strap on a little raised plastic bump kept under tension by a spring (depressing the button on the watch case depressed the tiny plastic bump and allows you to disengage the band from the watch case).
Installing an Apple Watch Specific Band
Replacement bands come in two flavors: Apple Watch specific bands and adapters. The Apple Watch specific bands are complete watch bands that include an integrated and non-removable connector for the Apple Watch case (just like the Apple-supplied bands do).
In such case installing the strap is as simple as removing the original strap, as we did in the previous section, and sliding the new strap pieces onto the Apple Watch case.
Installing an Apple Watch Generic Band Adapter
While there are already quite a few Apple Watch specific straps out there thanks to the popularity of the Apple Watch, that small pool can’t even compete with the sheer number of regular watch bands on the market. If you want to buy a regular watch band for your Apple Watch, you’ll need to purchase an adapter for the Apple Watch that links the standard pin-style watch strap connection to the body of the Apple Watch.
Using an adapter is a tad bit more fiddly as it required the use of a screw driver and a steady hand, but it’s not too much of a hassle. There are many adapters on the market but they all essentially use the same design. There is a section that mimics the Apple-specific strap connection with the plastic bumps. Then, there are two little L-shaped pieces that slide into each other and then screw into the main body of the adapter. This is how you attach the strap to the watch, as the little linked L-shaped pieces replace the traditional tension pin.
In the above photo you can see a stainless steel generic adapter assembled with a strap in place, demonstrating how the L-shaped pieces replace the tension pin that would normally link the strap to a traditional watch body.
And here is that same stainless steel adapter inserted into a space gray Apple Watch. We purposely used a clashing adapter color to demonstrate the kind of fit and alignment you want with your adapter: notice how the edges of the steel adapter smoothly transitions into the body of the Apple Watch without any burrs or protrusions.
Now that you have mastered how to change your apple watch band, see our collection of Apple Watch Straps and the adaptor!
Source : https://www.howtogeek.com/232027/how-to-change-your-apple-watch-band-wit...
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