Apple Watch Series 8 (Refurbished - S&D) (Open Box)

This isn't a long term review, but if anything changes I'll update it. As of now the watch is amazing. I see after one person mentioned presentation, that improved greatly with mine lol. Packaging aside, everything is working great, battery life is 100%. The entire watch looks and feels brand new from the apple store. The first day had me seriously concerned about the battery lasting though, but apparently the watch was just doing a lot of downloading and setting up in the background which was decreasing the battery by at least 20% per hour which I thought seemed nuts. After changing some settings and getting things set up efficiently plus the set up process finalizing, everything is perfect. Under normal circumstances it's been on for over an hour now with a few text alerts coming through etc. and battery is still 100%. At this rate it should last a solid amount of time. The apps on this are really cool. The health stuff like heart monitoring and blood oxygen levels are awesome to have. The workout apps are set up pretty nice as well. It would be nice if there were a better way to do updates and whatnot though than doing it via your iphones bluetooth. Like youtube reviews etc. mention it's sooooo slow. I thought something was wrong with the watch at first. Set up and downloading watchOS 10 take a solid 3-4 hours. The install is beyond slow doing it via bluetooth. Going through this thing with a fine tooth comb and getting every single app optimized for battery efficiency etc. took a good 12 plus hours and a ton of youtube videos all mentioning different little tips and tricks. Lots of troubleshooting occurred too. The complications on the watches face screen weren't functioning right which required to reset the location and privacy data in the phone plus a couple other steps. The watch was doing a lot of weird stuff that was destroying it's battery and wasting storage at rapid speeds. That's all just apple, nothing to do with it being renewed or the seller etc. They all run the same software in them regardless. Just being real about it, the set up process of this watch wasn't pleasant and kinda made me disappointed in the purchase initially but once I got that out of the way it's working incredibly well. Also this being a cellular version, you need to contact your carrier in advance and register this with them via the IMEI number from the phone's about section. You'll just get errors when trying to set up cellular prior to that. All in all though, the watch is great, and I love the design, especially how easy it is to switch out straps of whatever style or color you want. Those are much cheaper than I expected them to be as well so I immediately grabbed a handful of different options. Definitely recommend anyone interested in an apple watch to try this. It shows up in brand new condition, these only came out less than a year ago so even original parts are still very lightly used with a long life ahead of them. Even with a few frustrations, it gets two thumbs up from me.