Windows 95 on Apple Watch: Completely impractical... yet, eye-opening.

YouTuber Nick Lee, from TENDIGI, has recently managed to install Microsoft Windows 95 on an Apple Watch.

The experiment, though successful, is merely a gimmick, and totally impractical from a usability standpoint. With that said, there are some considerations to be made on how this video puts things in perspective, in reference to how far we along we have got, from the early beginning of consumer computing.

An Apple Watch is by no means a MacBook, but by standards dating back over 20 years, Apple’s wearable device, possesses higher specs than most consumer desktop systems of that era. The Apple Watch’s 520MHz S1 processor is considerably faster than the typical mid-90s 300MHz Intel Celeron CPU, found on many 80386 and 80486-based systems running Windows 95, and Windows 3.1, not to mention the RAM on most machines of the time, was usually restricted to 4-8 Megabytes, and storage options started at a few hundred Megabytes as well.

As the first part of the video shows, Windows 95 takes about one hour to start on an Apple Watch, which requires a motorized device connected to the digital crown, to keep the Watch from going in standby.

Once the boot-up process is complete, using the actual interface requires multiple swipes, on very specific locations of the touchscreen, just to bring up the Start menu.

Running Windows 95 desktop applications on Apple Watch is extremely challenging, mostly due to the slow response of an operating system designed to run on a very different architecture, with that said, it’s clear that the hardware specs of the Apple Watch fit the requirements of the 20+ years old operating system, including screen resolution which is well above the 800x600 pixels required by Windows 95 to run.