When Apple released their smartwatch in 2015, many people expected it to have a round display. Not only because traditional watches feature circular faces, but also because the previously released smartwatches like the Moto 360 had round displays. But Apple chose the rectangular form factor instead. And they had a couple reasons why. Primarily, they realized that, while we call a device strapped to our wrist a smartwatch, it’s more of a miniature smart phone. Most of the content it displays comes straight from our iPhone, which has a rectangular display. So formatting things like texts, emails, and calendars on a circular display would cause serious optimization issues. Just look at this message on the rectangular Apple Watch, it can be formatted to take advantage of every pixel. Reaching the top, bottom and sides of the display area. But if you move this to a circular display, you’ll struggle to take advantage of the screen real estate. Enlarging the content to take advantage of the display width results in information being cut off, minimizing the content leaves areas of the display unused. And if you’re thinking, well a round smartwatch would reformat this type of content in order to optimize for its display, then take a look at this screenshot from an actual Galaxy Active watch. It had to shrink the text, buttons, and even the time in order to fit all the elements onto its round display. Leaving all of these areas unused. And wasting screen space on a something as small as a watch is a huge problem. That’s why, in order to optimize the user experience and deliver as much content as large as possible, Apple chose to make their smartwatch rectangular. And that seems to have been the right decision, since the Apple Watch has captured almost 30% of the entire smartwatch market worldwide. That’s more than Huawei, Samsung, Fitbit, and Garmin combined. So while Apple might make some radical changes to the Apple Watch in the future, it’ll likely always retain its square shape.