A friend was complaining that his wrist size falls more naturally between two size holes on his Apple Watch sport band. The holes are spaced so closely together that they don’t really give you an option of improvising an extra hole.

To increase the odds of a good fit, Apple includes two “holey” band segments with the Sport product: one for “Small/Medium” and one for “Medium/Large”. The natural result of this for many of us is that we get to choose which of the band segments to use. If you’re a “medium” then you’re likely using one of the last four holes on the smaller band, or the first four holes on the larger one:

I thought it would have been a supremely “Apple thing” to do if the holes that overlap, at the medium-sized positions, were carefully offset such that they were in fact half-sizes on one band in relation to the other. So, I drew lines through each of the holes’ (rough) centers, to see where the lines correlate on the opposing band segment:

Putting aside my imperfect placement of the watch bands on the floor, this is pretty interesting! Maybe not precise enough to indicate Apple intentionally designed it this way, but it’s convenient that the holes line up offset from one another. If your wrist size lands in the “medium” zone on the Sport band, switching from the “Medium/Large” to the “Small/Medium,” or vice-versa, could be just the adjustment to help fine-tune the grip of the watch to your wrist.

Update May 20, 2015: Jörg Schwieder on Twitter offered an insight that I hadn’t considered: the way the holes line up linearly on the floor is not a sufficient comparison because, in the case of the longer strap, the excess overlap that then slides under the counterstrap narrows the overall diameter of the band, such that it squeezes slightly tighter on your wrist.

I’m not sure if this exactly counteracts the size discrepancy of the hole placement. It’s possible the discrepancy was itself an intentional design to counteract this phenomenon. In any case, if you try to switch up from a small band to a larger band, and it feels a little snug yet, you might try trimming (egad!) the long end of the strap so that it creates less volume under the band when you tuck it away.

Another sizing hack this brings to mind is that, if you find something comfortable to glue to the underside of the non-hole half of the band, you would effectively increase the volume and tighten up an otherwise loose fit.