> Garmins easily last a week.

I'm getting basically exactly what Garmin claims on my 45mm Venu 3-- 14 days. Wild that nobody else is even close.

I still get a little over 24-hours on my first generation Ultra. For a device that I barely "use" I do expect a lot more battery life out of it.

Why can't Apple produce a watch that you don't have to use with an iPhone?

There's not a shot in hell I'm ever switching from Android to iOS. People rarely do this.

Theoretically, I might buy an Apple Watch or Air Pods or Apple TV if they didn't go out of their way to make them either impossible to use without an iPhone or a living nightmare.

Solving for a longer charge may get them some sales from holdouts who went out and bought a Garmin instead. Cramming more features that make existing Apple Watch users feel like their watches are obsolete will get them a lot more.

> Garmins easily last a week.

Oh, really?

https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/GUID-EECCAC99-90D6-4...

Looks like they last dramatically less than that if you buy an Garmin with comparable display and actually use the advertised features.

Two different consumer groups? I look at a garmin and have no care about a week long battery.

I'm surprised Apple hasn't used the strap to extend the battery life. Is that a thing with an aftermarket strap or for phones from other providers?

This was a huge concern of mine before I got an Apple Watch but it really doesn't make a big difference to me. If anything charging every night makes it easier to remember to charge it than there being random off-days where I have to remember.

Knowing very little about the Apple Watch and Garmin, I would assume the goal of being a generic application platform means the watch needs to guarantee a higher level of cpu/gpu/sensor resources than a watch for fitness enthusiasts who only use it for tracking?

Or does Garmin have all the same apps as the Apple Watch or just a much better battery?

There was this discussion recently where owners of an Amazfit watch (including me) said it has great battery life https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843888 I could not stand having to charge my watch every day.

Its because Apple can't NOT have a beautiful screen and smooth FPS.

Garmin uses AMOLED (ForeRunner 965) and focuses on the tradeoffs of battery life.

I only ever charge my Ultra 2 while i’m in the shower and getting ready for bed. It never runs out during the day for me, and run at least an hour a day often more.

Doesn’t seem like all that big a problem tbh.

I’m content to charge every day, but I need the thing to be guaranteed to last the length of a slow mountain 50 miler. Remember the intro of the original Ultra, with Scott Jurek? You know Jurek, won Western States 100 (et al.) a few times? Yeah, well, us mortals sometimes need 12 hours to finish a 50 mile race with lots of elevation or desert heat (or both), and my experience says that I’m not guaranteed to get 12 hours of GPS activity tracking out of the thing without turning down GPS/HR frequency.

I love my Ultra, but for big running I had to go back to Garmin. I can leave the house with it half charged and still get a good 12 hours of running out of it before it dies.

OTOH, I’ve also had a Garmin 945TLE, with a cell radio in it. Fire up that cell radio, and goodbye battery life. I’ll be curious to see how that new Fenix does in the real world with its LTE radio blazing away.

I'm surprised they can't do a "fitness" band style watch with 2-3 week battery life... like the itouch nano tier.

Case in point from the article: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2025/09/introducing-ap...

Yup, I would be in the market for an Ultra if it wasn't so large lol.

It's strange that Apple keeps pushing large watches, given how sensitive they are to design trends. Among traditional non-smart watches, things have started to reverse in the last couple years, with 36mm-39mm watches enjoying a resurgence in popularity.

Agreed, a 46mm x 40mm watch face is absolutely massive, you’d need 8”+ wrists to have it look right. It would look like a hockey puck if I tried it on right after removing my 36mm automatic, but I have 6.25” wrists.

It’s approaching the size of the (in)famous Diesel ‘Mr Daddy’ watches lol: https://shop.diesel.com/en/man/watches/mr-daddy/

On the other hand, I just use my cheap Timex (with years of battery life) unless I need/want the more advanced features of the Apple Watch Ultra. I've been of two minds about the Ultra (and the Apple Watch generally). When I'm really using it like on a hike, I really like it. For more day to day stuff I mostly have notifications turned off and I rarely get legit phone calls when my phone isn't handy.

Mobile phones two decades ago lasted for weeks. I don't remember how many, but long enough, that we constantly lost our (expensive) charging cables. I believe battery time went down as fast as screens got bigger (and colorful).

That exists, always has since second gen. It’s called low power mode. It’s a toggle.

There's a stream right now, you just aren't watching it.

The BP monitoring on the watch seems pretty awesome. Translation on the iPods seems nice if it works well. Are they really slowing down?

>> It's not like there's a shortage of things to do

I'm curious what your list of things is. We're way past the point of 'flashy' but quick to implement changes in my opinion. The things people want take much longer to develop and with their annual release cadence each release is going to feel less dramatic. You just need to look back at some of the Apple keynotes from 10-15 years ago. An iPod with a COLOR screen! Bigger screens! Camera that does VIDEO! Camera that isn't a potato! The bar is much higher now.

with plutonium ?

SOS message went out with your GPS coordinates, so best advice is to remain where you are and use its reflective surface as a signal mirror.

So keep the garmin? This also sounds like an edge of an edge case. If the SOS went out it includes coordinates. You would want to stay put.

Basic survival advice is to stay put and wait for rescue unless you're in imminent danger. So maybe if your watch is your only lifeline stop running around the mountains once it dies.

Or use something intended for the purpose like a Garmin inReach. The satellite SOS features on phones and watches are nice to haves that could absolutely save your life but they're no replacement for being prepared. Really no device is a replacement for being properly prepared in the wilderness, even with your location you still need a way for rescue teams to spot you, for example.

I personally wouldn't rely on my phone/watch if I'm headed anywhere remote without cell service & electricity. With Garmin inReach you don't just get better battery life - you also get the Iridium satellite network and a team that's more experienced at search and rescue.

That being said, I do think that these new emergency SOS features will come in handy for people who don't know what they're getting themselves into, or who just run into unexpected bad luck on what was supposed to be a quick day trip.

> So if I am in a critical situation in the mountains, with only 8h battery left,

Please carry a personal locator beacon.

If you’re really into fitness and/or min-maxing your own stats. Honestly, it can create a bit of an obsessive loop once you get deep into it.

If you're a serious runner/swimmer/cyclist/surfer who likes to track workouts and already invested in the Apple ecosystem for messaging/music/etc and like the idea of leaving your phone at home.

I once thought I wouldn't need a mobile phone and that landlines were sufficient.

Data can show a lot about your health. Anecdotally I find the sleep disturbances (apnea) monitoring to work for me. The trends are a pretty nice, will track general changes in health on the data it monitors. They now can capture high BP to some degree of accuracy. It’s not for everyone but for me it’s one of the more useful devices in my life.

Depends where you are at in life but I found as I have gotten older that some of the data points are helpful to track to see how my body is aging and when/what to adjust.

I use it mostly because Apple Pay is so convenient, no need to carry a wallet

For my aging eyes, Apple Watch Ultra is the only watch where I can have time and date and read it comfortably. I used to have a cheap casio that would do the same job, but the digits are getting too small for my eyes.

TBH I only use the Apple Watch as a dumb watch. I have disabled all notifications and smart features. Just time and heart-rate when I exercise.

For me its:

- Apple Pay (I don't have to take out my phone to pay for things). One really cool feature is that the apple watch maintains your credentials as long as you don't take it off your wrist, so you don't need to unlock anything to pay for something.

- Apple Car/Home Key (I don't have to take out my phone to unlock my front door)

- notifications on my wrist when my washer machine is done

- notifications on my wrist when an unhoused neighbor door checks my car in the middle of the night.

- Apple Health: metrics on my daily workout.

- Screen time: grant kid 15 minutes of Roblox without taking my phone out of my pocket

- Edit: I'm embarrassed to admit that I also use the "find my phone" feature a lot when at home.

I don't really need an ultra for any of that, and I don't see a reason to upgrade my 2-3 year old Apple Watch now.

I bought one for my grandma for fall detection. She lives alone.

I ask the same question. I see people around me who own these spiral into obsessive tracking of arbitrary health related metrics without any purpose other than to make themselves worried sick (pun intended) about the reported numbers.

In my family, we use them for payments, front door & car keys, and surprisingly often to find phones lost in the house.

Accountability for your fitness.

Did you actually get 7-8 hours? Did you actually get good quality sleep? Did you actually move some target amount every day?

I'm not hypochondriac and don't use any of the health monitoring features. What I use it for:

* Notifications (imessages mainly, but anything that sends a push notification to your phone can also notify you on your watch)

* Quickly responding (thumbs up/down) to messages

* Apple Pay

* HomeKey (I can unlock all the doors in my house with my watch)

* Some apps (like AllTrails) have nice watchOS apps which give you the important info by glancing at your wrist.

Apple is not-bad at proactively notifying you about potential health problems it discovered, instead of you spending time and effort looking at the numbers it records.

The watch will tell you if it thinks you have sleep apnea, heart rate irregularities, drops in fitness, out of baseline sleep, dramatic trends in any health statistics, and high blood pressure.

The vast majority of people wearing them are doing so because they think they look cool.

It doesn't actually report blood pressure to the user, so it's not a question of accuracy in a traditional numerical sense.

It doesn't give you a live BP reading. It just does some sort of fuzzy inference using data over time kind of like how the Whoop tries to estimate your BP in the morning based on overnight data.

The Apple Watch just notifies you when it thinks you might have high BP and you have to use a cuff to see if it's correct. So, we're still some ways away from passive BP.

It doesn't give you a blood pressure number -- just alerts if it thinks you have high blood pressure. I wrote a bit about the science of blood pressure on the wrist here: https://www.empirical.health/blog/apple-watch-blood-pressure...

You can have the battery replaced

Only if we can get that data exported in a format that can be used by the next 'standard'. I've already got health data on my Android phone, a Fitbit account, my Withings devices, my old iPhone, and probably more elsewhere.

Our start-up is essentially the anti-thesis of this.

We've had bathroom scales for over a century, yet as a society, we are more obese than ever.

More data isn't the answer, and all this talk about "insights" is just re-packaging of that data.

Next generation wearables go beyond harvesting data and showing pretty graphs. They directly affect our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology in real-time to improve our health. That's why we call them Affectables. Wearables that affect.

We're beginning by focusing on enhancing the restorative function of sleep. Not more sleep, not falling asleep faster, but the directly affecting the neurological processes that define the health benefits of sleep.

If you're curious to find out more, check out https://affectablesleep.com

They have a flashlight app, which turns the screen on bright. You can activate it with the action button. It works really well.