Dave, I feel your pain! We bought the watches and my wife's phone through the Apple website with the intention of picking them up at the Apple Store at the Oxmore Mall in Louisville. We then attempted to buy my phone on line, but ran into a snag with the Verizon part of the transaction. It kept saying we couldn't add a second phone to the line UNLESS I was the administrator of the account (which I am). We got into a stupid loop and fussed with it for about an hour. We then decided to go to the Apple Store, pick up the stuff we bought and buy my phone there. That worked without any hitches.
The Max is simply too big for my smallish hands. The 12 is wider and longer than my 7. My wife and I went around and around on the Standard versus Pro question. She tends to blank whenever I try to describe why one technical thing is better than another. When someone asks you to justify spending $200 for some technical upgrade it's a very hard sell. Since I don't really do any photography for commercial purposes, there's no payback to defray the extra cost. If I do get more articles published then I'll have some cash influx that can be used to justify the camera. If we can sell the 7s and my Canon, the cost difference is moot. I was convinced by several responders to my various threads that going for the better camera was a no-brainer. After seeing what it does, I think that's true. I offload images and only keep those on my phone that I want to share with others, so 128 is fine.
I ran into trouble transferring the data from MY 7 to the 12. This is funny because the transfer to from my wife's 7 to her 12 went without a hitch. At the start of the transfer, the new phone said it needed to update the OS 14. It downloaded the new files and then got stuck on installing… for hours. I shut it all down, and downloaded the update with the new phone isolated from the 7. When the upgrade successfully loaded, I put them back into proximity and let the data transfer continue. That hung too. It sat for about an hour showing the data transfer icons, but the status bar was showing no progress. I shut that down too and did the transfer from the Cloud. That worked, but I was unsure if all the 7's stuff was all transferred. After evaluation, all of it transferred from the Cloud.
I don't know why my phone was being difficult, but it worked out in the end. My daughter's had the Apple watch for a few years and really relies on it. I was unsure about its value. I was wrong! It was the same with the iPhone. I was a late adopter, not getting my first until version 5. I was wrong with that too. Don't know about life without the darn thing. And you know what? You can even make telephone calls with it.
That was one of the funniest lines in "Spy Kids" when he was showing this fantastic thing on his wrist, but the only thing it COULDN'T do was make phone calls.
So, I'm glad you're going this route. You won't regret it.
