MacBook – Is it possible to disable Apple Watch iMessage notifications while the MacBook Air is unlocked

I'm afraid that's not possible in the current iOS.

But there are a few work-arounds:

• You can define a specific vibrating tone for that specific contact person which will do almost nothing (unlike the default long and hard vibrating)
• or you can disable vibrating when you enter Silent Mode and when you start having this rapid-fire conversation, just switch your iPhone to silent mode and no vibrating will happen!

I restarted my iPhone to try to fix this. Then I took a look at the Messages settings for my iPhone in the Settings app. It turned out that Messages was logged in to the “old version” of my Apple ID—a couple of months ago I changed the email address of my Apple ID and Messages was still showing the old one. I logged out and back in, using the new email address this time, and now I’m getting iMessage notifications on my watch again.

Since these notifications were working initially, though, I’m guessing that the Apple ID mismatch was a red herring and that restarting was what fixed the problem.