Apple’s Watch faces are broken.

Zac Hall from 9to5Mac rants about the Always-On Display with ticking seconds hand on the Series 10:

It’s the only model that displays seconds on the watch face in always-on mode. There’s just one catch: only three watch faces support this hardware feature. Now, that number has grown — to a whopping four.

Zac’s a lot more kind that I am about this lack of consistency in hardware support, but I’m glad someone else is talking about this. I hope he’s wrong (so does he) about Apple’s strategy moving forward with the watch face support:

The good news is that Apple’s new Unity Rhythm face in watchOS 11.3 supports always-on seconds, just like Reflections.

The bad news? This sums up Apple’s watch face game plan: introduce a few new watch faces annually that feature always-on seconds, while simultaneously removing some less popular watch faces that lack this feature.

Ideally, this is incorrect, and watchOS 12 updates all watch faces to support always-on seconds. A standard analog watch face with numerals, like Utility or California, should support always-on seconds — especially if Apple isn’t going to update each face. Every watch face should support the hardware’s capabilities though.

To complicate things further (pun intended), there are a lot of Time based complications that also would benefit from the Always-On Display with ticking seconds hand, but I can live without those for now.