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Comment by Hippocrates | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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