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> so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, who recently fell victim to a ransomware attack)

I'm not sure I follow. AFAIK Garmin refused to pay, preemptively shuttered every single area of their operation possibly connected, even those not directly tied to the attack, to assess the fallout, and took the time to restore whatever was affected from backups. It looks like they did the right thing, and thinking anyone is impervious to a ransomware attack (which has nothing to do with privacy) is ludicrous.

Meanwhile I could use my Garmin watch in complete autarky while their service was down. And this service is entirely opt-in, off by default, and I could just pull the .fit files via standard USB mass storage to process myself or upload to, a third party, like Strava. Interestingly enough, you don’t even need a smartphone even if you want to use Garmin’s cloud.

Amusingly with 12-15 days of battery on average I did not even need to even recharge my ForeRunner 735XT during the whole downtime.

I’m not getting any wearable that doesn’t cross that baseline.

Regarding the ransomware attack, my point is that Garmin's security design was weak enough to allow it to happen. We were all, apparently, simply lucky that the variant of ransomware used didn't happen to exfiltrate all our health data.

Garmin is notorious for their software issues, and Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments. But more importantly, because Apple end-to-end encrypts users' health data, nobody would be able to access any of it even if they were successfully attacked.

I agree it's nice that Garmin wearables can mostly keep working independently even if Garmin Connect is down.

> Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments

Oops

https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/

This is a bit like comparing a 90s pocket organizer to a modern smartphone. You’re not wrong, but you’re missing an awful lot.

I may be, and some of the smart watch features do appeal to me. (And if a standalone Signal app were available for the Apple Watch with LTE, that might push me over the edge to switching.)

But for now, Apple lags far behind Garmin in terms of fitness tracking for outdoor activities. That's more important to me, and it's more important to people like marathon runners who are more serious athletes than me. But we're also probably a minority of the market; I don't doubt Apple knows what they're doing here.

A modern smartphone can do anything that a 90s pocket organizer could do and more. But Apple Watch still hasn't caught up to Garmin in many important respects.

Wait, what activity / health tracking does the Fenix have over the AW? EKG is a big plus of the AW in that regard. Battery life isnt great, but do you exercise for more than 24h at a time? Genuinely asking, trying to decide for myself

Missing ANT+ was mentioned above. I was recently looking at the Apple Watch and rowing machines. Ignoring that a wrist-based heart monitor isn't great for things like boxing or rowing, you can't really get the heart rate monitor to connect to gym equipment. Instead of ANT+ or Bluetooth LE Apple did release GymKit in 2017--but very few things support it. The "rowing" exercise doesn't measure things rowers find useful (it's basically a generic cardio workout). When using a separate heart rate monitor and syncing your workout with Apple Health you can get double measurements heart rate (the AW constant heart rate and the strap during the workout).

The fitness industry has a pretty well-developed ecosystem (I grabbed a random 5 year old heart rate chest strap and it paired immediately to the rowing machine). Garmin has seemed to have embraced that for at least a decade. It can definitely use improvement, but Apple has its own thing and it'll give you grief if they didn't have your use-case in mind.

To be fair, others like Fitbit has similar issues. With them you can't even grab detailed heart-rate data.

> Battery life isnt great, but do you exercise for more than 24h at a time?

Not the grandparent poster, but Apple Watch battery life is bad enough that going on medium-length hikes (and tracking it as a workout) requires you to pull out a powerbank and then awkwardly slide the charging pad in between your skin and the watch. Ugh.

(I'm still torn on whether I actually like my Watch; I'd definitely prefer a Lightning port to the custom charging pad that's not even reversible.)

I'm curious what generation watch you have. Certainly, using the newer generations on a reasonable hike has never come close to depleting my battery.

It might be possible your battery has degraded considerably?

It's the 5th-gen watch, it has never lasted two days (including sleep with the display turned off) even when I don't use it for navigation or workout tracking. It also charges much more slowly than the 3rd-gen that I had before.

Is it cellular? I hear that can kill battery when not near a phone or wifi--especially when hiking where cell service is spare phones tend to use a lot of power trying to get a signal.

The Apple Watch Series 6 is rated for 7 hours of battery usage while recording an activity with GPS. That's right at the edge of some hikes I've done, and it would leave a multi-day hike out of the question.

Compare to Garmin: The Fenix 6 is rated for 36 hours of GPS activity recording per charge, or 72 hours in a battery-saving GPS mode.

That's strange. I've never had that problem. The battery on my 3 usually lasts for a couple of days.

If you're an endurance athlete the Apple Watch will not compare to the Garmins, Suuntos, etc., of the world.

I am a Garmin user and a friend is a PM for Apple and I've had this argument too much to rehash it here :). But it really comes down to depth for the fitness use case (Garmin) versus good-but-not-as-great fitness tracking as part of a more general use case (Apple).

Apple Watch's EKG app only works if your heart rate is between 50 and 120bpm. see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208955.

Recent theVerge.com article says the Apple Watch is sending too many people to doctors for further investigation (only ~10% had actual cardiac problems). see https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/1/21496813/apple-watch-hear...

Also the main new feature of the Apple Watch 6, blood oxygen monitoring, was reported as unreliable in theVerge.com review: https://www.theverge.com/21496141/apple-watch-series-6-revie...

and a Washington Post article put down the Apple Watch and the FitBit Sense's blood oxygen monitors:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/23/apple-w...

> I was eagerly following Apple Watch Series 6's release. But given that they still haven't fixed their battery life, it's very likely my next watch will be a newer Garmin.

The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life.

They could maybe increase the official battery life from 24 to 36 hours. Then people would forget to charge in the morning/evening and run out of battery midday -> Angry customers.

The same will happen for every value short of "one week", which is most definitely not possible with the current form factor and hardware design.

They could have made an incremental move in that direction, though. And incremental moves could build up to something more over multiple generations of the Apple Watch.

I expected they'd be coming out with a more efficient SoC for the new Watch, and they did in the S6. But they chose to use the extra efficiency to divert more power to a brighter display instead of provide more battery life.

> The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life.

I don't buy this at all. AW has worst on class battery life - with a huge margin - compared to other smartwatches including the horribly optimized android wear watches.

Its still good enough to last all day under any usecase though. What I found with my pebble watch is it would always go flat on me in the middle of the day because I didn't have a real charging schedule. With my AW I just stick it on the charger when I go to sleep and it will never go flat on me.

But then it doesn’t track your sleep...

I never found the sleep tracking to be useful. I get enough sleep and the watch doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting. I did it a few times and can see my heart rate overnight but it isn't something that changes day to day.

My Apple Watch (see my response above) has lasted well over a day including sleep tracking, on a single charge. It would go to 2 days if I let it. It’ll be able to track your sleep, just turn the always on screen and several notifications off.

I have everything on on my series 6 LTE. After 23 hours on my wrist it usually at 50%. It is new though. But the screen is always on. It seems they have improved battery life on series 6 comparing with my old series 4.

I should have added this is an Apple Watch 6, as well.

It’s definitely reached a point where I’m not worried, so far. Tomorrow I’m going for a run, so that should be interesting.

This is exactly the issue with "all day vs a week". Schedule.

If you charge the device every night, that's routine. You go to sleep, pop your phone and watch in a charger. Done.

A week-long battery has 1-3 days to remind the user to charge.

2-4 days isn't something you can build a routine on, it's not really a full work week even.

That’s not the GP’s point. The point is that there are two usable battery duration points: needs charge once a day, and doesn’t need charge for a long time (GP says one week, I believe it would be longer). If there are Android Wear watches that have batteries that last a week or more with comparable usage, then maybe you have a point; otherwise, it doesn’t make a difference.

In my opinion it would be quite useful to reliably be able to skip one day, when you forget or are on a short trip for example. It would also give more margin for heavier uses, such as tracking a long hike.

You just wrote that 1-day (barely) battery life is okay for Apple Watch since Android Wear can't do whole week. What kind of argument is that?

BTW, I use neither of those two.

Alright, I’ve been running an Apple Watch test and I have some numbers to report. I just bought it and I was worried about battery life.

At 1am, Thursday night, I took the battery off the charger, at 100%

I have slept 2x in it, but I wasn’t asking the phone to record my sleep on the second night and so it didn’t. That seems to matter to Apple’s sleep-tracking software.

It is currently 2:50pm on Saturday, and my battery charge is at 38%

Seep tracking, night 1, took about 10% of the battery life. Might have been 8. I don’t remember.

I have nearly every notification turned off. The standing notification is still on. I have heart rate tracking, blood oxygen tracking, most health tracking I can get turned on.

I’ve run at least one, maybe two ECG’s in this battery life.

I have the always on display turned off because I don’t need my display on all the time and I think the feature is mostly a gimmick.

I’ve been playing with my watch a bit because I find it fun and it’s new. I’ve used it to read email, to log me in to LastPass, to check SMS 2FA, to purchase drinks and other items and so on.

I did take it off for about 3 hours last night, but did not charge it.

I have not taken the watch for a cardio exercise yet. I have the wifi and gps-only version.

Long story short, I could absolutely see this watch lasting 2 days with my usage patterns, absolutely no problem. Charging it 30 minutes when I’m in the shower to push it back to a healthy battery life is absolutely not going to be a problem.

When you used it in Exercise mode, it uses considerable energy. Multiple leds are illuminated on the back to measure your heart rate, plus real time GPS. Many in this thread have usage patterns that require long exercises.

Yesterday I went on an 80 minute walk and run with exercise mode and today I did a 22 minute indoor exercise.

During the 80 minute event I barely noticed the increase in power draw, again with all the visuals turned off, but I had all the extra tracking. I imagine on a day-long hike, the numbers may completely change and it may substantially draw power; but, that wasn’t the case for the long walk.

The 22 minute indoor exercise seemed to draw proportionally more power. It might have been the type? Indoor I chose the one that implies strength training, so maybe it has to pay closer attention than the 80 minute walk/run?

Apple Watch also has sapphire crystal among other material configurations; the configuration flexibility offers financial flexibility to consumers. There's also a difference between health tracking and fitness tracking, and in this regard I'm not sure Garmin will even intend to race with Apple.