Apple Watch Series 10 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Watch Series 10

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214 pointslatexr456 comments

As I have big wrists and my eyes aren't getting better, I like a larger screen a lot. But for me, the most important update might be, that the screen now updates every second instead of every minute in the "inactive" mode. I do use the seconds display of any watch a lot when timing short things, especially when cooking. Whenever I want to watch the seconds, with my current watch I have to keep shaking my wrist to keep it active. Having a seconds display all the time is the big step to make it a real watch. I hope they also add a digital watch face with seconds display.

I would have like a bit better run time - as the CPU is getting more efficient, I hope Apple is downplaying any enhancements. With my 7 series Apple watch I do still get 24 hours of run time (wearing it at night) after 3 years, so it is just sufficient. But a bit more would add safety margin.

A future Ultra 3 would be tempting with a longer run time and especially the red "night vision" watch face. I would so much like to have it on the plain Apple watch - clearly that is an artificial limitation.

With my 9 my watch sometimes falls off my charger as a result of it being 3D printed and my watch having a rubber case on it. The result is sometimes I don’t get a good charge for a day or two and it chugs along. On the newer watches it presents the option to charge to 80% and stop to extend the battery cycle life.

I think you’ll be pretty happy with the incremental energy efficiency gains.

One of the stupid activity/sport faces has a digital seconds display. I wish there were a better one. I think Modular + digital seconds complication is probably the closest, but it doesn’t give HH:mm:ss like it should.

I hope they add a hh:mm:ss watch face/option soon.

You can add digital or analog seconds to most of the faces that accept complications. I use the Solar face with the analog seconds view, which is larger than the complications.

I used to use smartwatch timers a lot. I bought a couple magnet timers to throw onto my fridge instead. Best $3 purchase I've ever made. Just smash the buttons, hit it, and go about your day.

Agreed, the UX of a magnet timer on the fridge beats using any kind of smart device for the task of setting kitchen timers. Most of them start a simple count up if not programmed for a specific duration, so you can watch the seconds.

Most magnet timers also remember the last duration, so if you use the same timer a lot for the same task (tea, for example), it’s literally a single button press. The same operation on any kind of smart device contains a staggering number of steps, each of which requires cognition and attention.

Magnet timers are also super cheap, so you can get another one if you have two favorite durations. A simple solution meets a simple problem

And the fact that the digits are big enough to see them meters away. And it has big buttons so you can manipulate them with your knuckles.

For me it is quite simple: if a watch has a seconds hand, I wand to be able to see it :) So I consider this change really an important part of "always on". I hope, they adjust most watch faces not to hide parts any more in idle state.

touch it with your nose to wake it

Bud whad if you don’d have a nose?

Hopefully you still have two ears and a tongue.

Well, shaking the arm will do the trick. But I really look forward to have the seconds hand visible all the time. The always-on display was a huge step for the Apple watch and this enhancement completes it, as all hands keep visible all time. I hope, that affects all watch face elements which were hidden so far.

For cooking I like Alexa as a timer.

All that and no improvement to battery life. I've been wearing an Apple Watch for a few years, the data collection is good but the abysmal battery life and associated charge management is a real downer. I'm Apple ecosystem for almost everything but the battery and touch sensitivity issues are enough to get me to do the work to go to a different platform for health data.

At this point, it’s pretty clear Apple targets a specific battery life (18 hours) and builds the techs around that. As a result, I don’t think we will get an improvement in that area anytime soon.

However, it does look like they improved the charging story—something like 80% in 30 minutes? Not bad.

Yeah, they could've made the size decrease less impressive and boasted of a 24 hour battery life if they really wanted to.

I've thought about this. How much more battery life would they have to build in for it to be noticeably better?

When I charge my watch at the end of the day, I usually have plenty to spare, but not always enough to make it through to the morning (especially if I tracked an exercise). Even if a new watch got 24hrs of battery life, I would still have to charge it at night so I wouldn't really matter. I'd guess that 18hrs it a balance that keeps people content and gives Apple's engineers enough room to fit in all the features they want.

Of course, I would love to be able to track a long exercise or a 10-hour hike...but there's a different price tier for that.

That’s a good point. Maybe 36-48 hours?

Even then you’re still charging every other day, so is that so much better than every day?

18->120 hours would be a real change, but that’s almost a 7x increase.

To me 72 hours is the right number.

I want to put that thing on in the morning on a Friday, get a text message from a friend about some crazy party of weekend event and be able to attend that to make it home Sunday night to get ready for work on Monday.

Apple Watch Ultra in low power mode should do it for you.

For me I need a routine. Charging daily works well for me, else I would want 7 days. I think Apple targeting super quick charging really alleviates the issue for me all together. I’m on an old series 4, and instantly preordered this one. I’m sure it is gonna feel like a whole new level of luxury compared to what I was already pretty happy with.

If you were on a 4 the speed difference, plus the bigger screen, are going to be amazing.

Enjoy it!

Three days would be solid, that would get me mid day Friday to mid day Monday. Sleep data is a high priority for me and it's go time pretty much from when I open my eyes (little kids) so I wear the watch pretty much 24h/day. On desk work days I charge there (not much activity to miss) but over the weekend or if I'm traveling that gets disrupted.

Yep they do this for all their platforms, set a battery target based on ~90%tile daily usage of particular form factor (e.g. 18hr watch/iphone, 10-12hr macbook/ipad) and then let ID & chip teams do whatever they want to hit that. The value add of every additional minute/hour of battery life drops off from there because daily loops for charging are realistically what everyone will do, and there's more value add in other places like making things thinner, faster, or do something new.

Looks like they target 18 for apple watch 36 for apple watch ultra.

I moved to an Ultra 2 to get an average of two+ days per charge. And recharging if fast.

Size? I have small wrist but it feels fine and is reasonably comfortable with the standard wrist band. Impressive screen and tactile UI.

Normal use: up to 36 hours

Low Power Mode: up to 72 hours

I got the 2020 version of the watch and this is how fast it charges.

The Apple watch ultra, while expensive, at least has 1.5 to 2 day battery life, which has completely eliminated the issue of charging midday that I used to run into if using gps or fitness tracking for more than a few hours.

Yeah but "expensive" is an understatement. It's double the price for barely any functional difference other than battery life.

maybe, though I think it's possible there are GPS improvements and other performance improvements under the hood. I'm not sure, and I agree it's quite expensive. It was a gift, though one I happen to irrationally love and it would have been worth it for me if I had bought it.

Yes! Agonizing that 10 years in and the battery still can't get you through more than one day. My pebble from 2013 was a much more practical and useable device than any Apple watch I've owned over the last decade.

The Ultra can go two days, so there’s an option available if you need it.

For the low low price of 2x the regular watch...where do I sign up?

They now state that the series 10 can do 36 hours on low power mode, which is a nice option to have in your back pocket.

Wouldn’t want to run that all the time though with all it likely disables.

I wish they would let us customize low power mode and other features to tailor battery life. I'd trade battery life for less frequent heart rate readings, for example.

I've got a Garmin epix and it lasts over a month.

My 5 years old Garmin 935 still lasts 15 days, same as when it was new.

That also means it takes 15 years to have the same number of charging cycles as Apple gets in a year.

RE charging cycles, my five year old Series 5 only just dipped under 80% this year so considering the required charging frequency they do pretty well in terms of battery lifetime.

Could you please compare the performance of the first Apple Watch and current one? I believe then you will see how battery life improved.

I don’t think the battery life has improved? Maybe compared with the very first generation, but they hit 18 hours pretty quick and have stayed there.

They’ve used efficiency gains to get more features over the years.

"My pebble from 2013 was a much more practical and useable device than any Apple watch I've owned over the last decade."

You're full of shit. I've owned a Pebble and now own an apple watch and the Pebble doesn't even come close to the features.

Got Garmin Fenix, use mainly for the sports features. Lasts a week on a single charge including several activities with GPS usage. Can’t imagine having another device to charge daily.

If only Garmin had an unlocked LTE watch, it would be perfect. I had been eyeing the Garmin Instinct Solar, with "infinite" battery and Garmin Pay, but to be able to leave my phone home I'd need LTE

Get the instinct X. It has a flashlight, which seems super gimmicky, but it's like the most useful thing in the world.

I've got the instinct and couldn't be happier with it. Definitely going to be rebuying/upgrading to whatever is next if it ever bites the dust, which it probably won't for a long time since it's also rugged.

Without any activity tracking it lasts ~40 days on a charge, and charges in about an hour. If you live somewhere sunny like I do, even with tracking it lasts practically forever cause of the solar panel.

The flashlight also seemed like a gimmick at first but it's surprised me in how often I reach for it

I don't care about the usual smartwatch crap. I already have a phone, not gonna be sending messages on my watch, but I guess that can be a bummer if you care about it.

Fwiw, Garmin has their inreach platform, and their watches can talk to their transceivers. So not LTE, and not second device free, but an inreach is about the size of a zippo and has global satellite coverage

> Can’t imagine having another device to charge daily.

This is precisely why I stopped using my Garmin. I did really like it and used it when I was running daily. But when I went on long hikes (8+ miles), I often ran out of battery. The watch charged very fast, but I got sick of having to remember to charge it daily if I wanted to track an activity.

I now wear my Fossil ('dumb'?) watch daily. After maybe five years, I've replaced the battery once. It's so much nicer than a daily recharge.

My epix goes for over a month. Got the largest model. With GPS on it will last more than a day.

I have a garmin enduro 2 that I got for under $500 with some discounts. When tracking activities with GPS it lasts for over 100 hours, closer to 150 if you’re benefiting from some solar charging. In normal smartwatch mode it gets up to 40 days.

I’ll randomly once a month remember to charge it and that’s enough. I’ve never had the battery dip below 27 days remaining.

My old garmin was a forerunner 945 and I could about two days of hiking in on a charge, maybe more with battery-saving stuff on, but this is a whole different ballpark now.

definitely feels model dependent, cuz the higher-end ones really do handle the GPS stuff.

Though there's some options that will drastically improve battery life (I think measuring Blood oxygen is a good battery life killer IIRC)

Which Garmin did you have?

I think most models can easily do 5+ hours of GPS on a single charge.

This. I like my apple watch for doing mainly two things; tracking workouts and being a silent alarm clock that lives on my wrist. The <2 day battery life is really becoming annoying, as I have to remember to put it on the charger for at least ~1 hour a day or it won't have enough juice to wake me up in the morning.

Also, it boggles my mind but the alarms/haptics in my S8 seem weirdly unreliable. Like 10% of the time my alarms just decide not to vibrate and I don't wake up. Tons of people have this problem and it seems to have something to do with the cover to mute gesture, but disabling it in settings doesn't fix the issue.

For those two reasons I'm strongly considering ditching my apple watch and grabbing a garmin instead. Just trying to decide if the move outside of the ecosystem is worth it and which model to buy.

That's just the use case I have for my cheapo Xiaomi SmartBand for ~30 USD and I charge about every 2 weeks for this

If you're willing to live with not enabling raise to wake, AoD and Sleep Tracking, you might be able to pull off like 20+ days of battery life, not that I would want to, I like it not dropping that far so I haven't tested it fully

I'm not aware of how well do Xiaomi's Bands play with iOS, but might be worth a shot, it's a cheap enough option

I don't understand features like sleep apnea monitoring on a device with an "all-day, 18-hour battery life," unless they're expecting people to get one watch for the day and another one for the night.

I wear my Apple Watch all the time, even when I'm sleeping. I pretty much just charge it when I'm in the shower or getting ready in the morning. It charges super fast, and I've found that having a regular charging routine is actually better for these gadgets.

Funny enough, watches with longer battery life can mess up your charging habits. I had this problem with my old Pebble watch. Yeah, the battery lasted longer, but I'd forget to charge it and end up with a dead watch more often than I do with my Apple Watch.

Now, I just pop it on the charger every morning, and I'm good to go. No more worrying about it dying on me out of nowhere.

A personal habit thing perhaps? My Pebble Time is still going strong but I religiously charge it every couple days (around 60%)... as you mentioned, while I showered. Before the most recent battery change I was down to about 48 hours on a charge. I do love taking weekend camping trips and not needing to take a charger.

I have tried a couple other smart watches but I keep going back to my Pebble as it does all I care about. Until they can get to a solid 4-5 days of life (or Rebble stops working) I don't know that I'll be too tempted to replace it permanently. The Garmin line is interesting though.

Time Steel here n exactly the same boat as you. How the world upgraded to a worse battery experience is beyond me. All I want is a watch that tells the time for days and it's nice to have smart features.

I used to use the Pebble, then the AmazFit Bip (with something like 40 days battery life) after that — finally only switching to an Apple Watch when Series 5 came with an always-on display.

Apart from telling time, I like how it tracks my steps and sleep, and can send music to my earphones so I don't have to bring my phone out for a run. I also like being able to use the watch as a camera viewfinder/remote.

One huge plus of the Apple ecosystem is the sheer number of watch straps I get to choose from, which lets me dress up the watch if I have to. And to top it all off, I get a nice screen.

I wouldn't have made the switch if the battery life was incompatible with my lifestyle, but so far, so good.

+1 to this. I charge whenever I'm in the shower as well, and this routine works for me.

To each their own, I wear my watch in the shower so I can change the song on my bluetooth speaker.

I feel like if you are making it through more than a couple songs, your shower is too long.

I do a lot of thinking in the shower. I’ve unblocked myself on many problems from shower thoughts.

Also, it’s just enjoyable.

I like that you like it, but as a minor PSA many people who care about the environment might not realise that a really long shower is probably one of the easiest wins in terms of carbon reduction they can make. I really enjoyed showing in my last place because we had solar hot water heating, but I’m always mindful of just how much energy it takes to heat water.

I know the Apple Watch is water resistant, but that doesn’t necessarily include the effect of soaps and detergents. Be careful with those, even if your gear is rated for the water itself.

That would be a very nice excuse to upgrade since I've been waiting for my S3 to kick the bucket for years. It's very scuffed, and have been wearing it to the shower since it was new, and even taken it river rafting.

Yet somehow it's reporting 90% battery capacity. I might finally upgrade anyway, since it's the only device holding me back from enabling advanced data protection on iCloud.

I used to do the same thing, but the UX was never great. I've now bought five of these cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker that has play/pause/skip controls on it, and it was a life changer. I keep one in my suitcase for travelling, one in each bathroom, and have a couple paired in stereo that I keep in my office. It sounds amazingly good for the size and price of the speaker. Some of the best $20 I've spent. Brand is "Notabrick": https://www.amazon.com/NOTABRICK-Bluetooth-Speakers-Portable...

I went the other way around haha. I used to have a cheap waterproof bluetooth speaker, but upgraded to a much better wall-powered speaker. Ikea sells white-labeled speakers made by Sonos, called ENEBY [1]. Their dual-woofer speaker was amazing for the price, on-par with something like a full size Homepod, for $90!

Unfortunately Ikea discontinued their larger version, and now sell Sonos/Ikea co-branded speakers instead with less drivers, and more money. They sound good, but not as good as their older, larger predecessors.

[1] https://www.siam2nite.com/en/magazine/lifestyle/item/834-mee...

Thank you! Did you bail from the small speaker because of sound quality?

Do you use your watch to control the Bluetooth playback? If so, When controlling it in the shower, do you find that the touch screen has a hard time sometimes registering your touch, or having it accurately sense?

The other good charging time/place is your car/bike when commuting.

If you have a 20min commute each direction you can get most of the way charged and make it through the night!

Yep, just work in short frequent charges during downtime like that. I was worried about being annoyed by the charging too but in reality it’s not been a problem at all

When you notice your Garmin is under 10% it still means full day or enough battery to track 2-3h activity and still have some battery left. I'm surprised Apple watch battery is still - more or less the worst in the industry. Even if we forget about Garmin, comparable Samsung watches are multiday devices.

Garmin is great, but it is a fitness sports watch first and less of a smart watch. Once Garmin can have apps like overcast and omnifocus on them I will think of them as being in the some category as the apple watch.

Garmin has apps like Overcast. There are multiple music services built in like Spotify and YouTube that support podcasts. And there are additional third-party podcast apps on the Connect IQ store.

https://apps.garmin.com/search?keywords=Podcast

With my Garmin, I know 10% battery is probably almost enough battery for it to get a GPS lock.

Maybe. If I keep still for about 20mins and there aren't any buildings around.

And it's not a cloudy day.

Charging your wearable device shouldn't require "habits". If they do then the device is defective by design. Competing watches from Garmin don't seem to have this design flaw.

Not to mention the Chinese smart watches. I have an Amazfit Bip that will go 60+ days between charges, no problem.

https://i.imgur.com/4HT2Q6G.jpeg

How often do you track exercise with it? That watch looks like it doesn't actually run anything on it except a heart rate monitor and is just a passive bluetooth enabled notification display so that would definitely explain the difference in power usage.

Yes, for sure it does much less. It just has basic health monitoring, steps, heartbeat, sleep. I have the continuous heartbeat monitoring off, and turn it on for workouts 3-4 times a week. It will show messages, email, or other app notifications. For me that's most of what I want from a smartwatch, and I'm willing to trade the more advanced features for the battery life.

Ok but you can understand why comparing the battery life between these two makes no sense right?

> Amazfit Bip

I thought you had typoed but no, that's really what it's called.

Chinese naming can be pretty interesting. Probably would pay for itself to hire some native English speaking naming consultants. I've got my Bip on a Niziruoup rubber strap..

> Charging your wearable device shouldn't require "habits". If they do then the device is defective by design.

Why?

> Competing watches from Garmin don't seem to have this design flaw.

This oversimplifies the issue. The Apple Watch has a much broader range of functionality than Garmin's products, doesn't it?

Does it? Which specific functionality?

Late to the party, but the first thing that comes to my mind is an LTE radio. Yeah, there’s the Garmin 945LTE, but that is probably the worst Garmin purchase I’ve made ($12/month, can’t reply to texts, and it will burn through battery faster than an Apple Watch if it can’t find a cell tower).

> Funny enough, watches with longer battery life can mess up your charging habits.

My experience with Kindles!

Yep! Funny how often I am traveling and get to the hotel and open up my kindle to find it needs a charge.

During the night, my wireless charger base on my nightstand charges my iPhone. When I get up in the morning I take my iPhone and put my Kindle on it during the day.

I don't mind charging my watch daily when I go to my desk to do e-mail, I just want the watch to be handle skipping that for a few days due to travel or a weekend or whatever.

I mean it's literally a few minutes on a charger to go from 5% battery to 60%. Would it be more convenient if it went longer? Sure, but as it stands, if you carry a watch charger in your bag, like... even the most minuscule time on a USB port will have it ready to roll.

I've got an SE at current (had a 4 before it finally keeled over, and this one has essentially identical features and was readily available) and I just don't get the battery griping. Mine only uses a scant 70% ish of it's available capacity. I wear it every day while sleeping and to/from work, then come home and toss it on the charger till bed time.

I have a handful of watch chargers including one at my desk and one in my laptop bag. A full day of kid activities and work around the house doesn't really see either of those though. Do I detour to top up the watch a couple times a day? Yes. Does my watch run out of juice some days? Also yes. Would a Fitbit or Garmin have this problem? No. It's a bit of a slog moving my health data out of Apple's ecosystem which is why I haven't done it yet.

I have a garmin watch. Charge it every day while I'm taking a shower and it's always ready.

...but I can miss a day... or 12 days. 13d = full charge

I don't think a Garmin watch and an Apple Watch are truly comparable. The Garmin is primarily a fitness watch, while the Apple Watch is a smartwatch. When a Garmin can run apps like OmniFocus, Overcast, a Mastodon client, an Instagram client, and even join a Zoom call, then I'll consider it a smartwatch.

Everyone has their own list of needs for a smartwatch though. Mine are always on display, steps and heartrate tracking, and notifications. I can't imagine ever caring about running any of the apps you listed on a watch, and I don't think I'm in the minority.

We used to wind our watches in the morning. I think that could be Apple’s thinking. Your positive experience with a daily routine reenforces that idea to me.

Back in the day many of us switched to automatic mechanical watches that didn't require manually winding.

Yes, once it was technically possible. I think interesting idea is from a Human Factors perspective. I contend from human factors perspective using 24ish hours is good technical limit. Most humans operate on a 24 hour cycle so keeping devices on that cycle has a certain simplicity. It is easy to communicate and shares a historic limit with its mechanical ancestors.

This could also help in keeping the battery size in check. The engineering of all aspects should be balanced.

every single Apple feature or change creates this kind of weird negative-metric-reinforcement no matter the product whenever the number slides backwards or keeps parity

Battery doesn't last long? Well, let's forget that the entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for long-life batteries -- it's a feature to help coordinate 'charging habits'!... whatever that is.

Less keyboard space and battery life? No worries because that touch-bar is going to increase productivity so many more times than without it!

"No user replaceable battery? Of course not -- those are dangerous!"

which eventually devolves into :

"Well, my reception is terrible, but I was holding it wrong "

It's not really a grievance of mine, it's more like an utter amazement that somehow Apple and Tesla are the only companies that seem to be able to foster that kind of behavior in their fans.

The price points of both groups make me think it's sort of an advanced 'buyer's remorse' , but I don't know.

I largely agree with the parent comment. As of the series 7, charging became a non-issue since it’s so fast. It was painful before that.

And don’t _dare_ compare the charging situation to the touch bar. Let’s just all agree that was an abomination.

Worst / funniest case of this (if you have a grim sense of humor) is when early unibody macbook pros would get 70C or so to the touch and physically burn the users to the point of minor scarring. People who’d complain about this would be berated by apple defenders stating that “its not a laptop and apple never called it a laptop. yet at the time a simple search for “laptop site:apple.com” sure seemed to indicate that they are referred to as laptops by apple.

I save a lot of energy in the winter because I can turn down our home heater and the hot laptop keeps my fingers warmed up and typing fast!

The entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for lighter and thinner devices.

Exactly--GP's preference for a watch with a longer battery life and user-replaceable battery is at direct odds with the desire for a thinner watch. Presumably Apple has just done the math and decided the market is better for the latter? It's always been a bit chunky for a watch--maybe now it can finally approach "normal" watch size.

This is a bit hyperbolic. They take occasional risks like the touchbar and then they addressed it after bad feedback. I personally like their aggressive sense of design mission and not always playing it safe merely because it will cause flame wars on technology forums. Yet generally they keep the UX extremely clean and consistent through major versions.

Their mission with watch clearly isn't a multiday battery thing, it's a compromise for high quality displays and performance. The market exists for alternatives. The lack of good ones would be on them not just Apple.

In my decade plus experience those bad examples like touchbar are few and far in between.

Every tool has a correct way to be used. You can’t tell me I shouldn’t slide my electric toothbrush from side to side “because of market forces”.

Battery technology just isn’t there. Bigger battery means heavier device. Duracell made a smartphone with a huge-ass multiday battery… that the market did not ask for. It has to be a compromise unfortunately.

As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it. The execution was subpar but I miss its ability to autofill forms just like on the iPhone and generally using the autocomplete UI the same way. There’s no replacement now.

As for the batteries, I hope they’re eventually forced to fold on that issue, but it will come at the expense of design, size and weight. Again a compromise.

The reception one you’re right.

No I still don’t understand the Apple Watch battery issue.

I have a xaiomi mi band 9. The body to screen ratio is roughly the same as the Apple Watch. It does HR tracking, workouts, has excellent 1000 night brightness, weather, notifications etc. I get about 15 days from a charge. They say I can get 21. But either way. I understand the Apple Watch is running better hardware and more things in the background, but there’s also significantly more space in the watch for battery. It might be doing more but a factor of 15x is a crazy differential.

Comparing Apple Watch to Mi Band makes no sense. Apple Watch is more of a microcomputer than a cheap smart band. It would be better to compare it to something like Garmin Fenix 7X that lasts you almost 40 days with 120 hours in GPS mode and does much more than a Mi Band.

Calling it a "microcomputer" is meaningless.

What is it doing? Monitoring some sensors, communicating with a phone via bluetooth, running a screen.

It's miniaturized iPhone as it can be used without phone to make calls, receive messages, stream music etc. as it has e-SIM capabilities. It runs Game Boy Color games which is pretty cool even if not very useful.

Mi bands are low powered, low-feature and fairly miserable experiences if you interact much with the screen. They are great at no-effort tracking of fitness metrics and providing basic information.

Apple Watches are designed for much more interaction and variety of capability.

It can be hard to understand this if you haven’t used an Apple Watch.

You’re misinformed about the space for substantial additional battery. Look at any teardown to see the compact component fitting.

Your mi band is a great device; just be realistic about the tradeoffs. Other devices don’t have to suck for yours to be good.

(I’ve owned multiple Xiaomi and Apple devices.)

> As for the Touch Bar I don’t really understand the hate for it

You don't understand why people wouldn't like something that takes away what they used regularly (function keys) and gave them something that necessitated looking away from their screen in order to even use and provided extremely limited use cases?

Seems pretty easy to understand

throw in the mac magic keyboard (no backlight - not even on the 2021 revision) and the magic mouse 1.

> let's forget that the entire market has trended towards catering to a customer desire for long-life batteries

apple sells 34% of smartwatches: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/22/apple-watch-domin...

and most of the rest are deeply crap Android things that don't have week-long battery life.

I think it's more interesting that Apple creates this reaction where people will endlessly harp on about things that happened over a decade ago under different leadership (holding it wrong) any time they update their products.

It’s even worse than that. Those words were never uttered. People have interpreted their own sentiment from what was actually said and now that phrase is repeated as it if it was.

What do you use to charge it? I haven't found a good base station for it

I just put mine on the Apple Watch charging cable.

I use a Pixel Watch 2, not an Apple watch, but my charging behavior is pretty much as you describe. It goes on to charge during my morning loop, and is always full by the time I'm ready to head out the door. It's good enough that I don't have to think about the charge state at all through the day, it'll last regardless of usage, and that's all I need.

I still wear my series 6 that I bought in 2020. It usually tops off within 15 minutes of charging, And then it's good for the day.

I know what you are talking about with longer battery life :)

I have a "dumbphone" with a battery that lasts 1 to 2 weeks depending on use, it's such a surprise when the battery goes that I'm often stuck without it being charged.

You are literally trying to show an enormous flaw of an otherwise amazing watch as a something positive which makes no sense to me. My Garmin also charges fast but lasts almost 3 weeks and I just plug it in when it tells me it needs to be plugged in and I don't need a "charging routine" for that.

You charge it for an hour before you go to bed. 23/24 hours is pretty good.

It gives you no margin - you come home late, you lose the data for the night. It is mental overhead that don't want.

My watch can get a night’s worth of charge in 10 minutes.

Sounds fun. And you get to charge again first thing in the morning.

Let me get this straight: your evening routine has no margin for 10 minute parallelizable tasks, yet you’re commenting sarcastically about supposed chores in my life? In order to defend doing the same but every 3 days instead?

While I get the concerns about battery life, like most things in tech it's about weighing different tradeoffs against each other. Battery life, ecosystem, quality of sensors, app availability, resale value, etc.

I already have daily habits around charging, so that doesn't bother me, and if I'm traveling I can either bring a charger or put the watch in low power mode where it lasts a surprisingly long time.

My Apple watch purchase was basically for one feature. Fall detection, and automatic 911 calling. I bought the watch when I had a close call with a car while riding my bike to work, and wanted to make sure in case of an accident, I'd at least probably die in the ambulance and not on the side of the road :)

It's amazing that anyone would consider that "pretty good" when competing products with similar features can go literally weeks between charges.

'Similar' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Competing products with that kind of battery life offer far fewer features and lack the app ecosystem of the Apple Watch. That might work for some, but it's a dealbreaker for me. As a runner, a Garmin might seem like the perfect choice, but it lacks many features I've come to rely on with the Apple Watch.

Which features specifically? There are a lot of features that are built in to Garmin devices so they generally have less need of additional apps. But there is a rich ecosystem of apps as well.

https://apps.garmin.com/

The apps I use aren't available on Garmin, like Overcast for podcasts. I haven’t found an email client, which I use every morning, and I doubt any of the available options would sync properly with my email services. I rely on OmniFocus for GTD, but it isn’t supported by Garmin; at best, you can get to-do notifications sent to the watch, which isn’t what I need. Zoom doesn't seem to be supported either, and I occasionally join meetings from my watch when I'm just listening in.

There also don’t appear to be any Mastodon or Instagram apps, or at least none that I've noticed. My recipe manager has a watch app that guides me through the steps, provides ingredient lists, and sets timers at each stage — nothing like that exists for Garmin. My strength training app includes demonstration videos on the watch, which I don't see on Garmin. My diet tracking app isn't supported, and I haven’t found anything comparable. Adding things like an Amtrak ticket to a Garmin seems complicated, and I've read mixed reports about how well it scans QR codes.

Overall, while Garmin excels at fitness tracking, it lacks many of the features and apps I've come to depend on.

There are a variety of podcast apps available for Garmin, both built in and on the app store. It also has strength training animations.

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=IPD6X8JSLBAUQOXvz7zBO6

You have a valid point on the other missing apps.

I don’t care about random generic podcast apps, I want the podcast app that I use. Also the strength training animations are generally crap. I use a specific strength training app because it gives good videos on the watch.

One feature is heart rate and sleep tracking accuracy.

The Quantified Scientist on Youtube has ever-updated charts in pretty much any of his videos that investigate the accuracy of a given health tracker wearable.

You can find updated data in newer videos, but here's his video on the Apple Watch Series 9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4igZ3DEhrk4

Check out the chapter titles with "Comparison w/ other watches" to see charts for heart rate accuracy and sleep accuracy across different product lines. Apple Watch is best in class (e.g. 99% convergence with Polar chest strap).

Yes, that seems to be consistent with the test results from DC Rainmaker. The Apple optical HR sensor is marginally better than Garmin in a few limited scenarios. So a win for Apple there and very technically impressive, although the difference would only tend to show up intermittently during certain intense activities. Serious athletes who really care about accurate heart rate will usually use a separate chest sensor as there are inherent limits to what an optical wrist sensor can do, especially if the wearer's skin is darker or tattooed or dirty.

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2024/08/garmin-fenix-8-in-depth-...

Kind of grasping at straws to require 99.99% accuracy. At that point a Polar chest strap is better. Olympians use Garmin watches all the time and the heart tracking is pretty great in most of their more expensive watches.

Well, there's also sleep time accuracy and sleep stage accuracy. What about those?

And the whole point is that you don't need to wear a Polar chest strap and a bunch of sleep lab electrodes to get good results. We're talking about something you get to wear on your wrist that takes calls and does all sorts of things.

But the person above asked for a differentiator.

Went diving last vacation and my Ultra 2 turned into an excellent dive computer (after paying $10 for one month of the corresponding app). The equivalent watch from Garmin is much more expensive.

Garmin now has some cheaper models available with basic dive computer functionality. This is built in and doesn't require buying a separate app.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/1228171

Good for them. I do like Garmin.

But the "cheaper models" are still more expensive than what is Apple's Top Model. Which excels at my main usage scenario (being a smartwatch) and also superbly supports various secondary activities (like diving).

And, by the way, having to decide from all those models is not exactly a selling point. I am not primarily a diver, a skier, a runner, a hiker or a biker - but I occasionally do all of those.

With superb integration in the Apple ecosystem, apps for everything and cheaper prices for top hardware, Apple watch is the perfect default choice. It's Garmin's burden to convince me to switch and they are not succeeding.

I wear my watch all day and night, charge it for 30mim while I sip coffee. I don’t get the issues people have around battery life. Mine is on me almost 24 hours a day and a daily charge. Two watches seems dramatic for a single 30m charge a day.

Edit: note on charge, it’s probably more, but it’s just while I sip my coffee. I never pay attention to it despite the claims of battery life woes.

Series 7 here. I do <= 30 minutes a day twice -- usually closer to 20 minutes at a time, on the Apple Watch fast charger plugged into an Apple 20W power adapter. Otherwise, I wear the Watch 23.25-ish/7 and never run out of battery.

I was in the same boat, but the 30 minute fast charging now makes me think that this actually might work. Sleep with it on, wake up, pop it on the charger while you get ready, bam basically a full charge by the time you leave the house.

I don't wear an Apple watch at night (and I don't plan to upgrade to this one) but for the first time I think I could see how this might work for someone.

My band doesn't feel right when I'm done exercising, so I usually throw it on the charger when I sit down.

Now if it could charge from the face while still on my wrist ...

They’re never gonna do that. What would that look like, you holding your hand next to a charger? That is very unApple.

Vision Pro’s battery fits in your pocket. Cables falling from your body isn’t a new thing for Apple.

But yeah I don’t see it happening because they’d never acknowledge that taking your watch off twice a day is a chore.

I don’t think it would be wise to keep the watch on for days or weeks at a time to be honest.

I also don’t see the logistics of how on arm charging would work. Would I just hold my arm in a fixed position for 30 minutes? Seems like a nightmare.

The Whoop band has an elegant solution. They provide you with a small (~30x30mm) power bank that you can slide onto the band to charge. The band stays on your wrist. When done, you just slide off the power bank and charge it again.

my 2 year old watch lasts longer the 24h and i simply charge it when i shower.

It charges insanely quickly.

8 minutes charging gives 8 hours of sleep tracking. Just read the watch page. They improved charging immensely.

I set an alarm to charge my Apple Watch for an hour each evening. I never run out of charge.

It takes like 40 minutes to charge fully. That’s really easy to fit in between a shower or breakfast or anything else really.

They did apparently improve the charging speed. Still wish they made it the same size, but with better battery.

Is this not a decline in performance? I have the Watch 8 and I'm pretty sure it lasts slightly over 24 hours. 18 hours means that if you put it on the charger daily for 1 hour then you have to shift the time at which you charge it 5 hours earlier every day.

Even if it was just 24 hours that's not good enough. Let's say you religiuosly charge it immediately after arriving home from work, at 6PM. Then one day you go out to dinner and grab some drinks and stay out until 11. It'll have been 28 hours since you grabbed it off the charger the previous day so you won't have use of your watch that evening.

went back to a casio f91w. battery last 7 years, can buy 200 for the price of one apple watch se and no privacy issue. Just get a polar h10 to monitor sport activity and honestly it's as good or better, having to charge it everyday is painfull.

Apple is run by a bunch of well-past-middle-age executives who have zero incentive to do anything but coast to the finish line. The sleep apnea feature makes no sense for a product that is charging on my nightstand every night because of it's shitty battery life. Apple has gotten too fat.

Go garmin. I have a vivoactive 5, it has 11 days of battery and loads of stats. I love it. My wife liked mine so much she dumped her Fitbit and now has the same watch. It's great.

Garmin's own product webpage highlights the biggest problem with Garmin.[0] They have too many options, with very little distinguishing features. Instead of making hardware to justify the number of models, they cripple watches in various ways using software.

For example, on my Vivoactive 4, recording a "Hike" activity is impossible. Instead, I have to record all my hikes as "Walks".

They should trim their offerings down to fewer than 10 models instead of the 28 currently listed.

0: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/wearables-smartwatches/?curre...

My Garmin 965 lasts about a month, I can't believe it compared to my pixel watch which is flat in a day. Haven't touched it since.

Vivoactive doesn't have the best heart tracking, especially compared to Apple watches which are the gold standard for it. Someone who can afford an Apple watch should probably go for Garmin Venu 3. Same hybrid model benefits with a better sensor.

Whats wrong with it? It seems to be very high resolution, continuous, and accurate whenever I've compared it.

I follow The Quantified Scientist on YouTube and he's reviewed both I believe. I think the Vivoactive has the older HR sensor and that's why it performed a bit worse in that category.

Battery life is the main thing that made me upgrade to the Ultra model. It has double the battery which gets it to the point I don’t have to worry about battery.

FWIW: My first gen Ultra can go a couple days without a charge pretty easily, but I did have issues with my previous Apple watches. If battery life is the issue, you might do better off going with the Ultra...

I really wish they made it independent of the iPhone.

I think for people that only use smartphones occasionally, it'd be ideal to have just a watch and a desktop/laptop.

It'd also be a great move by Apple towards reducing distractions of its users. Watches can be much less intrusive than phones.

Thats got to be a super tiny population of the world

I suspect OP is also including Android users in the group too.

FWIW, I don't use Apple anymore. But I think this would be a nice product and it'd also stimulate the market.

Right now, most expensive fitness trackers rely on smartphones.

I think only Garmin and Polar can be set up without a smartphone, but Polar still relies on smartphones for GPS updates.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. There are many studies showing that age is strongly correlated with reduced smartphone use, additionally, youth only makes up a small portion of the whole population.

Youth are fewer, youth have an outsized affect on consumption however. Meanwhile, older people tend to slow down consumption a lot, and therefore you can't really make as much money catering to them.

I think you have the reasoning backwards. Older people have considerably more purchasing power, after all they've had all their life to make money. There are many industries that do extremely well catering exactly to that fact.

You mean like Harley Davidson?

Ya, they have more buying power, but they are choosey about what they buy and aren't so interested in new gadgets. Younger people have less buying power but they are full of wants. They also get more money and will buy more over time, whereas baby boomers are going to retire quickly and their buying will fall off.

You're still reasoning backwards. Apple produces new gadgets that appeal to young people, so they don't have as strong consumption from older people. That's a decision they made, but there's nothing baked into the laws of the universe that prevented them from designing around older consumers.

> They also get more money and will buy more over time, whereas baby boomers are going to retire quickly and their buying will fall off.

You're assuming this is a generational thing and not an age thing. If older people (and to be clear, I'm talking >40 vs <40) naturally gravitate away from smartphones for some more fundamental reason than generational differences, then that high-buying-power market will remain underserved even once today's young people age into that bracket.

Consumption != purchasing power. To say young people have outside portion consumption compared to their numbers isn't very controversial at all in retail. It is why advertising is geared toward young people, why NBC couldn't make money on Matlock and Golden Girls (they were very popular, but the ad dollars were not there), why you go broke aiming at a 60 yro demographic rather than a 20 yro one.

You are just claiming that the market is being inefficient, but they have been burned so many times before assuming that somehow the 40+ crowd is going to drive the market for new things.

Visit any restaurant that has Michelin stars and look at the clientele, the more stars the restaurant has, the higher the age of the average customer. The same holds for any luxury goods and services, whether it's cars, housing, jewelry, etc. You can easily spend a new phone's worth of money per person per evening at one of those restaurants, and these people go out to eat way more often than a young person can afford to buy a new phone.

I figure if I'm in that group, it can't be that small of a group. I'm a turbo normie and no thought I have is remotely unique or original. There are at least dozens of us out there using our watches as phones.

But seriously, probably millions of people would prefer to not carry a phone everywhere yet still have the essentials (texting and calling) handy if need be.

A friend has his kids use LTE Apple Watches. He set them up with his iPhone and they don't have them. It supports "Kid" mode on the watches and everything. They can call and text him when ever they want, which is really nice.

Walkie-talkie mode is really nice.

Dick Tracy mode is great for screening calls.

How old are the kids? My wife can’t find well fitting watch bands for the smallest Apple Watch due to here thin wrists. Can’t imagine finding some for a kid.

Many of my daughter's 11-year-old friends have Apple Watches as their mobile device. Some of them have tiny wrists.

You can find handmade Apple Watch bracelets on Etsy. Alongside a lot of dropshipped crap ones from Aliexpress - but the point is it seems like third parties are able to make bracelets that replicate the mechanical “interface” for the bracelets, so you should be able to find any size you want.

You can also get adapters that allow you to connect any standard watch band you can find at a store to an Apple Watch.

Example: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07YTN8VY4/

Probably makes it even easier to find watch bands that work/fit kids/that they like.

Apple might have sold me one last month, but I'm not switching phones just because I'm getting a watch.

I last tried to ditch my phone and just wear the watch with a Series 4, so things might be different now, but you give up way too much compared to using a smartphone.

Only being able to take calls on speakerphone, not having access to the long tail of apps you might need on occasion, and not being able to effectively input text into the apps you do have are the biggest problems for me.

Its alright for the kids and old people thing they have now where you really want a life alert/GPS tracker combo and calling/texting is a nice bonus but the form factor isn't viable for solo use.

> Only being able to take calls on speakerphone

I was under the impression that if you had AirPods, they would work for phone calls through the watch.

Can confirm: AirPods work for calls, music and podcasts.

You can but in practice this doesn't end up working well. By the time your airpod is out of your pocket, out of the case, in your ear, and connected to your watch, the call has stopped ringing.

If you are only worried about placing calls and not receiving them, it works better but you still have to contend with bluetooth, which is less than 100% reliable, being an essential component of your setup.

>"You can but in practice this doesn't end up working well. By the time your airpod is out of your pocket, out of the case, in your ear, and connected to your watch, the call has stopped ringing."

How is the form factor of this any different than when you connect AirPods to take a call on your iPhone? This exact order of premeditation prior to the action of taking a call is already commonplace if for the iPhone - why not for the Apple Watches too?

Well the difference is that I can hold my iPhone up to my ear to take a call in public, whereas the only options with the watch are airpods or speakerphone.

That's fair enough - I wonder if the sales pitch for users already accustomed to taking calls with their AirPods will be a lot more susceptible to being swayed into using the Apple Watch for them instead, then?

Probably! I see a lot of people, particularly young people, out and about these days who seem to keep their airpods in all the time, which probably helps too.

"Hey John, you're on speaker right now -- give me a second putting my AirPods in"

The kind of situation where not carrying your phone works is one where usually you either have your AirPods in your ear, or when you're driving and it is connected to your car audio, or you don't mind answering via the speaker phone.

Transparency mode is good enough on AirPods that I feel safe using them when I am cycling or running, and not having to carry a phone during those activities is a big win for me.

Of course this means getting even more locked into Apple ecosystem, but I even forget that AirPods are bluetooth devices given the way they seamless work with other apple stuff.

> or when you're driving and it is connected to your car audio

This was actually another problem I had with going Apple Watch only, it refused to connect to my cars Bluetooth.

Not sure if I should blame that failure on Apple or Ford, though.

Not to mention severely limited battery life when using it for calls - like half an hour if you're lucky.

I use my LTE watch for smaller errands where I don't want to lug around the phone, yet can still take or make a call if it is really necessary, make payments, etc. Like going out for a walk, or leaving my desk at work for a few minutes. It's a nice convenience, not a substitute.

> I think for people that only use smartphones occasionally, it'd be ideal to have just a watch and a desktop/laptop.

Apple doesn't want to build a world in which people occasionally use smartphones.

They're an iPhone company.

They're building things to make iPhone's more valuable and to keep / strengthen their lead / profit engine.

Would love to see anti-trust enforcement to force Apple to allow pairing with iPad or Mac. There is no good reason to limit to iPhone.

Ideally you wouldn't need to pair it with anything.

iPhones required a computer with iTunes up until iOS 5.

Hopefully it will also work with apple tv

I 100% agree, and this is the only reason that I have not purchased one. I've got an Android phone and an iPad pro (with active eSIM). There is no technical reason for Apple to not allow me to "tether" to my iPad, or even any reason to require me to have another device in order to have/use all the features of the watch. It's purely a marketing decision, so I will continue to pass on the Apple Watch until they untether it, or let me access all features with my iPad.

The Watch’s operation is independent of the iPhone, especially if you get one with LTE. You need an iPhone for setup, but that’s it.

That's the problem. If I'm not going to use an iPhone, it's wasteful.

Why not letting me do that, at least, from a Mac or an iPad?

You don't

How do you perform setup without the iPhone?

It's not, many applications don't really work without your iPhone connected via Bluetooth even if your watch can make it's own internet connection. It basically seems like Apple and app developers are not considering people using their watch without their IPhone present as well.

This. I have cellular activated on my watch, and I seldom, if ever, carry an iPhone outside my home. It does everything I need from tech, when I am on the go, and that includes recording hours long bike rides.

Can you unlock your Tesla? Also can you do navigation?

> Can you unlock your Tesla?

Yes but you have to use a third-party app for that, the official Tesla app does not have a Watch version.

> Also can you do navigation?

Yes.

Watch App for Tesla is also great in that it can act as a key, so you even get prox unlock with your Watch.

A few times I've forgotten about this, went to get something from the car without my phone, and been puzzled why the car unlocked lol

the Apple watch can be independent from the iPhone. Ask a family member or a friend with an iPhone to set it up, there is an apposite function for it. Just buy one with cellular.

Amen to that. I only bought an Apple watch for the fall detection so that if I have a seizure it calls 911. Even got the LTE one so that I could use it when my phone is dead etc.

So imagine my surprise when I switched my handset to Android and my watch reported "no service". Keep in mind that this is marketed as a stand-alone product, that had its own data plan. But once I didn't have an iPhone activated, a soft switch in my watch (read: medical device) was flipped in order to disable it.

It was at that time that I sold every apple product in my possession, and bought a pixel watch. My pixel watch does everything better than my apple watch did, without exception.

Am I being irrational here, or is it wrong for a company to disable device B because you don't have device A anymore, when they're marketed as independent devices with independent data plans and eSIM etc?

I'm mostly happy with my Apple Watch, but you better hope that it doesn't calibrate itself poorly. There's no way to force it to recalibrate and it persists through full reset and even full replacement of the Apple Watch itself. I've more or less given up trying to fix it. So according to Apple I've been standing upright all waking hours for the last 3-4 years.

I've heard similar issues for people using crutches. They get like 3-5x the amount of steps, or not steps at all, and you've guessed it, no way to calibrate it.

(I'm sort of posting this in the hope that someone actually know how to force it to recalibrate)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105048

> Reset your calibration data

> Here's how to reset your calibration data:

> On your iPhone, open the Watch app.

> Tap the My Watch tab, then tap Privacy > Reset Fitness Calibration Data.

I understand this will reset motion calibration data but does anyone know if heart rate measurements also use calibration data? My Ultra 2 always seems to undercount my heart rate compared to my older Series 6. This is especially noticeable during higher intensity workouts.

There’s some info that may help you and the original person I replied to at this other support page as well:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105002

I'm going to chalk this up to the decline in Google search to save my embarrassment, because that was very straight forward, and I don't understand how I didn't find that. Admittedly, it's a couple of years since I looked and it could be a new feature.

Funnily enough one of the demonstrated use-cases of Apple Intelligence was looking up information like this.

Check this other support page too, as you may need to enable wrist detection to resolve some of the other issues you described.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105002

Check your weight in the health app. I’ve entered a very low value by mistake and had this happen.

I can’t believe all the bellyaching about battery life here, blanket statements about how it’s “useless” because it doesn’t meet one’s personal preferences.

Apple has sold more Watches than iPods. Remember iPods??!? The Watch is a huge hit and tons of people find daily charging to be a perfectly acceptable price of entry.

I agree with you. People will find something to complain about, but the sales speak for themselves.

There’s also the Ultra, which easily gets you 2-3 days of life.

Charging is so fast night, that it’s a non-issue. My watch gets fully charged while i eat lunch or dinner!

Totally. These things have incredible battery life. In a practical sense, they run forever if you remember to put one on the charger when you shower/get ready in the morning.

I can't tell if this is satire

I have an apple watch. When I shower I put it on a charger. I have never gotten it under %10. Eventually this won't be true in all likelyhood due to degraded battery.

I shower 1-2 times a day though.

Not satire. Have never been stranded with a dead watch, don't even think to check its battery life ever.

Granted, I have all notifs muted so it operates mostly as a watch, but still

My phone also runs practically forever. It charges while I'm driving, and I don't remember the last time it died on me.

> incredible battery life

I would hardly consider <24 hours to br "incredible battery life", especially since their competitors have significantly better battery life - and Apple is on their 10th iteration.

I can go 3 days without a charge on my Ultra. I'd say that's pretty incredible!

Calling an 18-hour battery life 'all day' still feels like at best borderline fraud to me.

In the arctic summer, days can be longer than 18 hours. Or if you don't sleep, I guess. Excepting those cases 18 hours seems all day to me.

I think it just throws me off due to cultural differences. Most homes and offices in my country have electric lighting, which means we can end up living and working outside of daylight hours, especially on Fridays. I have on numerous occasions asked people how their day was, and they tell me about things that happened while the sun was not up.

Depends on your definition of 'all day'. I wear mine from about 7 or 8am until about midnight and it just about lasts that entire time. It's a series 6 so not the newest either.

I guess if you want to wear it to sleep it just means taking it off sooner to charge. Personally I hate wearing it to sleep, it feels very uncomfortable and bulky for that.

The sleep thing is important IMO. That's extremely useful data to have. Feel tired? Check your sleep then remember what you did the day before to mess it up (drink/bed late/eating etc). Trains you to sleep better which is the most important thing in a productive life. But Apple watch doesn't make it easy to do both yet.

I guess it depends on if your definition of the day is when the sun's up, or the entire 24 hour period. Advertising loves living in this grey area with a big smile.

Get some sleep

I wear it 23.25+~ hours a day and charge it while i drink coffee in the morning (probably 30-45m on average, while i sit at my desk). I wear it all day, and while i sleep for sleep tracking.

I get annoyed when they say 18h and people freak out.. i'm not sure what they're testing vs my daily usage but it doesn't feel the same. I assume it's like 18h with a ton of screen-on time?

Either way i wouldn't wear a watch that i had to charge for 6 hours a day, and the Apple Watch is definitely not that. Hasn't been that for at least as many generations as i've owned.

I have a launch day Series 6 (4 years old) with 78% battery health, that I wear all day everyday, and charge in the evening for 30 or so minutes. So it easily lasts 23.5 hours and by that point its at around 25-30% battery life. I genuinely cant understand where the 18 hours they predict come from!

Don't get me started on "Life Sentences"!

yeah apparently no one told them that for sleep tracking you need to wear it while you sleep.

they're being dumb/conservative in marketing material. my 7 year old apple watch still lasts > 24 hours - I wear it ~22.5 hours a day, just plugging it in to charge while I'm getting ready in the morning.

Finally they are focusing on making that thing thinner!! That watch is currently obnoxiously thick and can sometimes get caught on clothes and stuff.

But now it's also apparently larger! I'm sure I'm not the only person hoping for an Apple Watch that is reasonably thin and small.

Monkey want big shiny rock, not stupid little rock

You made my day

I'd love that old 38mm watch, but thinner.

The problem is more little mini watch apps are adding more functionality / touchable area, to the point it's hard on my older 41mm (I think? Maybe 40?) watch to touch some of the touch areas.

I'm guessing most devs use the giant size watches.

Even Apple themselves are guilty of ridiculously small touch targets these days. Hold the side button until the emergency screen comes up. I defy you to hit the “power off” button on a 40mm watch on the first try. Hell, I have a hard enough time on my AW Ultra with these old eyes.

agreed : it's worse when your display has a hardware failure, you remember how to try turning it off, and you screw up and trigger an emergency instead, which i've done.

Can’t have as much ads, distractions and other “engagement” features on a small screen.

I have had an Apple Watch for some time now, and have never once seen a single ad on it. As far as distractions I get only the notifications I want.

Even the biggest Apple Watch screen is still tiny by any reasonable metric.

They aren't filling the extra space with "distractions", they are giving you space for an extra widget or two and making it marginally less painful to type.

The if you compare the 45mm series 8 from two years ago and the new 46mm series 10, it’s 1mm wider, 1mm taller, and 1mm thinner.

Not much of a change on the other axis. The thickness is mostly notable because that’s about 10% gone.

Thick wrist watches are in style every few decades, nothing says "wealth" in just about any century quite like "big chonky arm jewelry". I personally wouldn't have minded more battery rather than thinner. 18 hours still seems far too short compared to competitors, especially with a growing emphasis on sleep tracking. (Though I appreciate that claims here that charging time went down even further with this thinner model.)

Most of my friends with one would rather have longer battery life than have it be slimmer.

That’s the ultra.

Yeah but it's still not enough. Also the ultra is more money than anyone I know is willing to pay for an apple watch.

If 36 hours (Ultra 2) isn't enough battery life, then you and your friends aren't the target audience for a smart watch with a display.

I guess we yearn for a world long past where there weren't so many daily charging cycles because things were just either plugged in or not.

It's partially the general UX of charging a watch. I find it easy to put my iPhone on a stand next to my bed every night, but for some reason I find it annoying to take off my watch and put it on the same stand. Both devices generally need the same amount of effort to charge but ones more of a burden.

Maybe I just want to do it less because I'm wearing it not carrying it in a pocket or having it sit next to me somewhere.

Since I sleep with it I find it easier to just have a charger on my desk. Generally only needs about an hour a day to fully charge.

Sure, but that's just the price you pay for having fancy portable gadgets. You want longer battery life, there are tradeoffs.

Personally, "it's finally a little thinner" is the thing that has me planning to buy an Apple Watch for the first time.

As a Garmin watch user, I don't mind the bulk, it's mostly the general _shape_ of the Apple Watch that kills me. It's shaped in such a way that it just sorta knocks into things in weird ways.

I'm ultimately still very glad I ditched the Apple Watch in lieu of a more fitness oriented watch but still like to keep an eye on what they're doing. Looks like a decent upgrade for someone that hasn't upgraded in several generations.

what garmin would you recommend, it seems they have a plethora of options

I think it depends entirely on what you want to do.

Do you want a smart watch or fitness watch? I think if you want a real smart watch you're better off with something else, like an Apple Watch.

If you're looking for fitness, I think the Forerunner series is a great starting point. What you'd want to do is look at what you _want_ to do and then go look at the specs for each watch.

For example, if you want to see maps on your watch and get turn-by-turn, that's not available on all watches, and you'll have to move way up the range to get it.

If you want to run, do strength training, monitor your heart rate all day, sleep score, HRV, etc. Those are usually available on all devices.

Their training readiness is another interesting option, that's only available on the higher end watches. Same with endurance score, and a few others.

I have an Instinct 2X because I really like the battery life (40 days just as a watch, I get around 30 or so with a workout every day). The 2X is a pretty big watch though, at 50mm. There are 2 and 2S models that are smaller though.

Usually the sizing goes S for small, just a number for the middle range size, and X for larger size.

With the Forerunner you get more features as you go up the number range. So 1xx, 2xx, and 9xx are the more common model ranges.

I think for most people the 255/265 are pretty good starting points and can often be had at pretty nice prices on sale. I think I paid $250 for my Instinct on a sale recently, might have been $350.

If the Enduro 3 was available at the time I might have gone with that.

Another option is looking at Coros, I think bang for buck, they're the better option usually. The Pace 3 is a stellar watch at that price range. My only complaint with Coros is they don't do ANT+ and that's a feature I kind of want/need since I have a number of devices greater than the typical bluetooth stream count (usually they max out at 2 bluetooth connections simultaneously). But if Garmin ditches MIP displays, I'm switching to Coros.

Edit: Also, based on Garmin's pricing for the Fenix 8 and Enduro 3, I'm really afraid to see the pricing for new models going forward. $800+ for a fitness watch is nuts. The other models are likely to come in under that, but, Enduro 3 went down in price (weirdly) but the Fenix 8 is up rather significantly over the Fenix 7 and Epix that it replaces.

I completely disagree. I'd much rather have battery life than thinness.

Yea, this was the one "feature" I've wanted. My S8 is still working just fine, so no upgrade this year, but I'm glad they're trimming it back after several years of slight increases.

If the ultra wasn't so durable mine would be dust by now from all the random crap it knocks into. They're giant, blocky watches.

Interesting. I find the thinner S10 less appealing visually speaking.

Bummer not to see a more meaningful Ultra 2 update. I would have at least considered it. I recently received the new Garmin Fenix 8 Sapphire and, while expensive, it is really a stunning piece of hardware. Perhaps it's not quite as well crafted as the Ultra, but it certainly is close and has a better battery and, in my mind, better software specifically for people more serious about fitness. (In my case, running ultras.)

What's neat about the Ultra is the idea of heading out for a run with no phone and your podcasts are still synced. "Running (mostly) free." Half the time, though, I start my run and realize the content isn't really there because it can only sync on the charger with more than 50% battery.

It's all to say, Apple products are tough because they arrive to markets late and then self-impose one- or two-year update cycles. It's SO SLOW getting to parity with existing solutions.

what’s missing from the ultra

My Series 9 totally fails at sleep detection and regularly claims that I am in "Deep Sleep" while I am lying there trying to get back to sleep. Instead of fixing that, they are adding sleep apnea alerts. I wish there was an alternate ecosystem that was actually competitive with Apple.

That sounds like a peculiar issue, so maybe it'll be bug-fixed in the new iOS. They don't announce small fixes.

It's a common issue with all health wearables because they don't have sufficient data.

When your heart rate and respiration rate are at sleep level because you just slept for four hours, but you woke up and now you're waiting to go back to sleep, there isn't much that a wrist strap can do to disambiguate.

My series 6 consistently said I had 4 minutes more sleep time than in bed time, and neither really noticeably tracked anything. Our a and Fitbit sleep tracking might not be truly accurate, but at least they’re semi plausible.

The series 9 is best in class for sleep accuracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr4p66vSmLY (18:20 mark)

We're now four generations of Apple Watch beyond yours.

My sleep tracking works pretty well on my S9. It isn't perfect and there are glitches and bugs I've noticed, but overall the long term trend tends to even out and feels pretty comparative to my old Fitbit.

Garmin is actually pretty competitive. It's definitely more athlete and exercise focused though, to a fault.

I meant a company with a full ecosystem (PC/Phone/Watch) that was competitive.

I've found that the Garmin stuff actually integrates with healthkit pretty effectively. You can't make calls on (most) of the garmin watches, but they also have 30+ day battery (and in worse case, active GPS and music playback usage 72+ hours).

But I don't want to make calls or texts or be bugged by a fitness device.

Plus, the long battery life means you can sleep with it on without thinking about or caring about charging.

pixel watch 3?

S6 user here, yeah sleep tracking can be dodgy. Good to know it's not a device issue. Also the OS keeps getting slightly more buggy/glitchy with every major release. I like it that I sometimes still get a new useful feature (sleep tracking wasn't this good on release) but it kinda sucks that a 4yro device is getting overall worse because of software.

Still agree, wish there was competition worth considering.

Try turning off sleep schedule and automatic sleep focus on/off. AFAIK sleep tracking uses sleep focus to determine if you try to sleep or not, it gives off false positives a lot. For example I was watching a movie, sleep focus turned on automatically at 9pm (due to my sleep schedule being set to start then), movie was boring, I had a low HR and the watch thought I was asleep. Managing sleep focus manually made the measurements pretty much spotless as I turn it on whenever I lay down to sleep and turn it off as soon as I wake up.

Check out The Quantified Scientists video Best Wearables for Sleep: Scientific Rankings.

He uses science test smart watches and Apple watches ranks at the top.

Maybe there are other brands that works better for you or maybe this is as good as it gets with just a watch and not a full sleep lab setup?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvqRLG0K4SQ

Apple introduced a "new" 42mm smaller size, and with that, added a whole lot of confusion to band compatibility. The Sport Loop and Milanese Loop now come in 40mm, 42mm, and 46mm variants.

From one of their updated watch strap pages:

> Strap Compatibility

> You can match most straps with any Apple Watch Series 3 or later case of the same size.

> 40mm, 41mm and 42mm straps are all compatible with 40mm, 41mm and 42mm case sizes. 44mm, 45mm, 46mm and 49mm straps are all compatible with 44mm, 45mm, 46mm and 49mm case sizes.

> The Solo Loop and Braided Solo Loop straps are only compatible with Apple Watch SE, Apple Watch Series 4 or later and Apple Watch Ultra or later.

> For Solo Loop and Braided Solo Loop, the 40mm, 41mm and 42mm cases are compatible with strap sizes 0–9; the 44mm, 45mm, 46mm and 49mm cases are compatible with strap sizes 0–12.

I'm having such a hard time trying to parse this, especially since Series 3 was available in 38mm and 42mm variants, and it was Series 4 that upped the numbers to 40mm and 44mm.

There are still just two strap widths - small and large. Why Apple won’t just come out and say that I have no idea.

I think the most plausible reason to do this would be to avoid future confusion if they decide to introduce new band sizes.

Also, the current differences in case sizes mean that band sizes are slightly different when used with different watch models, even if the band width is the same. The same solo loop on a 38mm watch fits slightly smaller than the same exact band on a 40mm watch, even if they're the same mounting mechanism. So, to be precise about fit, you already need to specify the watch size specifically, even if the band width is the same.

Captain Axually checking in to say that there three widths. The Ultra is wider enough that the “large” bands, though they fit the Ultra, leave a bit of a noticeable gap where the band hardware slides in.

I use the original band from my 38mm S3 on a 40mm S6, it definitely fits perfectly between them

But I bet they omitted the original 38/42 sizes from that list because now it overlaps with 42mm being the small size of S10

Sizing the watches by mm instead of naming them small/large feels like a weird relic from the original apple watch launch when it came in a $10,000 gold version and Ive was positioning it as a fashion item

Looks like nothing has been announced that is groundbreaking here.

It seems it was rumoured that the Apple Watch Series 10 would have blood pressure monitoring but instead removed the blood oxygen detection from US models in the fine print:

"The ability to measure blood oxygen is no longer available on Apple Watch units sold by Apple in the United States beginning January 18, 2024."

maybe i'll buy one on my upcoming trip to europe then...

Apple Watches (even Series 9) sold by Apple resellers in the US (Amazon etc) still came with blood oxygen detection, even after firmware updates.

Only those that shipped before this year. They were getting hard to find even last may.

Oh is that true? I was under the impression that retailers still were selling the series 9 with it enabled to this day

I presume they can use over-the-air updates to disable the feature when the device is activated?

My watch’s logs always have some OTA stuff.

The blood oxygen detection is disabled to comply with a patent ruling.

I think it's interesting that the new sleep apnea detection uses the accelerometer for detection, instead of blood oxygen levels.

In another article I read last week, Apple just couldn't get passive blood pressure to work well enough. The tech isn't there yet, but I can't wait until it's standard.

Whoop (another wearable) has been doing closed consumer testing on optical blood pressure. Probably trying to figure it out for the Whoop 5.0, but if it Apple couldn't figure it out this year, I don't think anyone will. Maybe next Christmas.

18 hour battery life seems tiny compared to my 10 day battery life on my Garmin Venu 3.

Does Garmin just have better battery technology, or some patents that Apple can't use? Why such a large gap in comparable products?

Because they're not even remotely comparable products

They seem like they’re directly the same category of product at a glance.

Yes, and an office PC and a gamer PC are both PCs. Pick and choose another example, using eg. car models.

Telling time, showing notifications, and tracking sleep is 99% of what I need the Watch to do, and Pebble could do that with a week-long battery life.

They’re still not comparable products, you just use them the same, limited way.

What's the major differences between them? I can't really tell from the marketing material for both, they seem very much in the same class of watch.

Been hesitant to get due to battery life. My fitbit lasts for days on one charge. Is there ways to configure the watch settings to extend the battery life for more than a day?

The usual suggestions I’ve read about are to disable the “always on” display, disable WiFi and/or cellular, turn down the brightness, limit notifications, and so forth. However, I cannot state how much impact these would have.

daily charge is a pain. you can stretch it to two with some tweaks but it's my biggest gripe

I thank Apple for not releasing an Ultra 3. No FOMO this year :).

Honestly seems like the main reason to buy an Ultra 2 over a 10 is if you dive, or really, really need the extra battery life.

I don’t care about either of those, personally.

After breaking 3 Apple Watches, I just needed something more durable. I’ve been happy with it for a few years now with no real damages.

Cheaper to just buy apple care

Is it really good to treat things as disposable just because price incentives happen to make doing so cost efficient?

If the GP has a lifestyle that's hard on their watch, good on them for selecting the durable product that can survive it instead of churning needless extraction, labor, shipping, time, and e-waste.

I don’t think it’s bad to treat things as disposable.

I think it’s easy to scoff at (and look down on) someone who does treat things as disposable.

But the reality is that we all (in the developed world) treat everything as if it’s disposable. But we just like to think that we’re mindful or whatever because it makes us feel good.

You can only buy AppleCare+ for a 2-year length.

AppleCare now has monthly until you cancel plans - not just for watch but for phone and even the monitor. (I'm not sure of the macs). It's a bit confusing when you order and I'm not sure if it's because Apple is trying to discourage this; I just decline during order and then add it separately and this option always shows up for me.

AppleCare+, since 2019, has been renewable (presumably until Apple declares the product obsolete) for most products except the AirPods (in my experience) in the following countries [1]:

Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101560

TIL - thanks!

You can buy AppleCare+ monthly indefinitely (until they EOL the device) at a monthly rate. You can even renew it after the 2 year length into a monthly plan.

Runners like the dual band GPS in the Ultra 2.

Some concrete reasons I have for wanting that extra battery life: camping, hiking, and road tripping.

I can keep up with charging when I have a predictable schedule. When I don’t, I’m always running out of battery and often in the worst moments, i.e. when I’m just starting a hike.

road tripping: you can charge in the car

camping and hiking: sure, but for overnight trips, i have a battery pack (for my phone) that also has a magnetic watch pad.

It’s my experience charging it in the car and while camping with portable batteries that makes me want more battery.

Can charge in the car, sure. Will I actually charge it in the car? From experience, it’s a constant struggle because I’m outside of my normal routine and I’m not usually seeing the low battery warnings while I’m in driving mode. I often realize when it’s too late, and then my watch is dead til I’m back on the road for a major segment.

And I just prefer to have fewer things to worry about each day so I can focus on why I’m traveling in the first place.

I don't really, really need the extra battery life. I treated myself to a Ultra 1 when they came out and now I'd never go back to having to charge my watch daily. Among other things, now I never wonder if it's charged enough before bed to track my sleep. It is. It always is.

Unfortunately the reports from other divers say that the Ultra is not a very reliable diving computer with OS crashing and rebooting at times. Something that's unthinkable on a Shearwater, Garmin or even a Suunto.

Never encountered this. Maybe a pointer to those reports would be helpful.

I don't "really really" need the extra better life but I just bought a Ultra 2 on Amazon today because they were on sale and the 10 doesn't improve battery life at all.

I've been doing hikes that last 6-8 hours (I have little kids so we go slow, takes breaks etc) and pretty much every time my Series 8 either runs out our I have to really carefully conserve battery. I'm hoping the Ultra 2 will mean I can just record my hike and not worry about it.

That's my experience with the Ultra 1. If I have even 50% battery, I'm ready to run or hit the gym or paddleboard or whatever.

The 10 got the diving stuff this year, though perhaps not as good as the ultra.

I think the big story on the ultra is just going to stay battery life + better GOS (for now?). Want to do a 12 hour trail ride? It can keep exercise mode without fully draining your battery.

The Ultra 2 also has better GPS and microphone.

I had assumed that it also had a significantly larger display, which would have been compelling for me since I'm getting old enough to where things I could read without my glasses a few years ago on my Series 4 are now too small. Based on 49mm vs 44mm and assuming display area goes as the square of watch size the Ultra 2 should have a display 24% larger than that of my Series 4.

But two things can invalidate that square of the size assumption. First, the aspect ratio of the cases is not the same, and second, the percent of the case area occupied by the screen is not necessarily the same.

On the watch comparison page Apple gives the actual display area and it that tells an interesting story:

    Watch    Size   Display   Pixels  Δ Display  Δ Size^2
  ---------  ----  ---------  ------  ---------  --------
  Series 4   44mm   977 mm^2  164864      -         -
  Series 9   45mm  1143 mm^2  191644    17.0 %     4.6 %
  Series 10  46mm  1220 mm^2  206336     6.7 %     4.5 %
  Ultra 2    49mm  1185 mm^2  205820    -2.3 %    13.5 %

(The SE 2 has the same case and display specs as the Series 4).

The "Δ Display" column is how much bigger the display area is than that of the watch from the prior row. The "Δ Size^2" is how much bigger we'd expect the display to be just based on the square of watch size.

Based on this it appears that if I want the largest display then the Series 10 is the way to go.

I got the Watch 10 with cellular, so that I could cycle without taking my phone along for emergencies. Turns out the battery life of the 10 with cellular is horrible (even more so if you use cellular for music streaming). So I upgraded to the Ultra 2 purely for the battery (though I have started liking its look as well).

I'm hoping that means the Ultra 3 will be more interesting later on, in some way. Maybe a 51mm circular option to compete with Garmin on form factor? Maybe a bigger battery? It's disappointing they broke the lockstep release of the Apple Watch this year, though.

I have an Ultra 1 and the battery life is a lot worse than the Ultra 2, but there's no new watch for me this year, so now I'm stuck.

Sounds like this isn’t a compelling new release for many of you all but as a person with autism the training load feature is something I missed from Garmin. My interoception isn’t very keen and to have this help me train mindfully is nice, I’ve had a history of either under or over training because I can’t sense how my body is adapting.

Thank you for sharing. Were you by chance diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder[1]?

https://www.autismspeaks.org/sensory-processing-disorder

A good visual representation:

https://psyche.co/films/enter-the-sensory-world-of-an-overst...

This depends on the model, e.g., the non-entry level Forerunner series watches have had training load-related metrics for a while now. That said, Garmin is mainly a cardio watch, and by extension the Apple training load metrics seems to be giving a more presentable UX to the "default"[1] approach to cardio training load.

[1] https://evokeendurance.com/a-new-and-better-look-at-training...

I’ve been using an awesome app called athlytic that takes this to the next level.

Titanium is really soft metal. Stainless Steels can be much much harder than Ti alloys. Or, if they really wanted to make it a luxury item, how about tungsten carbide? I'm not sure why the obsession of Titanium is still a thing, other than I guess consumers don't understand material science.

> maintaining all-day 18-hour battery life

My Garmin Epix Gen2 lasts _literally_ 3 weeks without charging. Granted the app ecosystem between the two isn't really comparable, but the Epix does all of the core functions of any iWatch better... and it has a flashlight.

Once Apple gives up on their "thin" trend and focuses on battery life I'll switch.

I wish Apple had more design variation for their watches. When I'm not using my phone, it's in my pocket. When I am using it, I honestly only care about the screen, the camera, and the audio. If it looks cool great BUT that ultimately doesn't matter.

Watches are different. Watches are a true fashion accessory. Watches have style. Apple watches are so damn plain and boring and sterile. Swapping the band doesn't fix that. I would love a watch that looks like my Fossil 6 but doesn't suck. Why can't Apple make something like that?

The large version of the Pixel Watch 3, with the brushed silver metal links band [1], isn't quite the same aesthetic as the Fossil 6 but is a lot closer to it than the Apple Watch. And it's reasonably good as a smartwatch, is based around the tech Google bought when they acquired Fitbit, and (unlike the Fossil 6) will continue to be supported by software updates.

Also unlike the Apple Watch, the SpO2 sensor actually works on the Pixel.

(I am a new, happy owner of the large version of the Pixel Watch 3 with the silver metal band.)

The slightly annoying thing about the Pixel Watch though is that you kind of have to decide on the watch band color you want prior to buying the watch, since the watch itself comes in different colors and it looks better when the colors match (i.e. if you want the silver band, you should make sure to get the silver watch base; if you want the black band, you should get the black watch base; etc).

1: https://store.google.com/product/watch_band_metal_link

> Watches are different. Watches are a true fashion accessory. Watches have style. Apple watches are so damn plain and boring and sterile. Swapping the band doesn't fix that.

Swapping the band does fix that, at least for me.

I treated myself to the stainless steel version, and have something like 14 bands in various colours, in either synthetic rubber, nylon, or leather.

That's enough to dress things up a bit.

Apple Watch Ultra 2 is stuck on the S9. The S10 looks different if visually inspected but curious to know performance differences as they didn't mention much about S10 improvements this time.

By performance, is there any stat outside of battery life that really matters here? It is a watch after all

It does bring some feature improvements year over year. Siri works offline on S9 and Ultra 2, the S10 has a neural network to remove background noise if you use it for phone calls.

Good observation. I wonder if that's something S9 can do too.

Siri doesn’t really seem to work offline on my S9 despite the claims.

It's probably a limited subset of things that can be done on-device. Even starting a timer or workout doesn't work for you?

I have an S6 and if I go outside for a run without bringing my phone I definitely can't do it with Siri.

Yeah screen brightness, viewing angles, being thinner.

Keep in mind it's an SiP. It might just be a reconfiguration to fit the different sized case and not much in the way of a new chip. That would be why AWU2 gets all the new features of the AW10.

It's essentially the same as S9, sharing the same cores (t8310).

I still have the series 5 in stainless steel. After 4 years, I recently received "battery service", in which they just replace the whole watch. I still like it. Biggest downside for me is one of the more recent watchOS versions they introduced roughly a year ago. To this day, sometimes the notifications can't be dragged down and the display seems to be unresponsive once every 2 weeks for a while.

If you get a new watch, beware of the Milanese loop: it tends to destroy the fiber of long sleeve shirts.

it’s annoying that they can’t put the sapphire glass on the regular 10. What is the cost of this glass and why do they refuse?

> Ion‑X front glass (aluminum cases) Sapphire front crystal (titanium cases)

Non sapphire is lighter and perhaps less prone to breaking from impact (even if not as scratch resistant), that works better for sport use cases.

Many users don’t need sapphire glass for non-sport activities either.

I made a big scratch on my SE by accidentally rubbing it against the corner of a quartz countertop. Of course, this was not covered by AppleCare, because the display still works and is not cracked.

I'd have loved to have this not happen, but the only option (even with the non-SE model) is to pay a premium for steel and cellular, neither of which I care about.

my series 8 has two big scratches. We have the technology to eliminate this but they are gating it behind the less needed features

how much lighter could it possibly be? half a gram? I can’t see that being anything that matters to people and they put it on the titanium case this time which is the light weight version.

Anyone else wondering where the recycled titanium comes from?

> Apple Watch Series 10, made with 100 percent recycled aluminum or 95 percent recycled titanium…

I'm guessing it is `waste` from milling iPhones and Mac. Plenty of that and a marketing win even though this would always get recycled anyway.

They’re not made from titanium. Last years’s pro phone is.

The Apple Card is too. So I did wonder if there was a little of that in there too.

My Apple Card just expired and they sent a package to send back the old one when giving me the new one. Would be pretty neat to know they are being remade into watches.

Exactly what I was thinking. Felt odd shipping a credit card back but I get why.

Presumably aerospace & medical devices.

From my digging...

Apple seems to get most of their recycled titanium from IperionX:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/iperionx_over-20-years-ago-ap...

IperionX announced they get their recycled source Ti from ELG Utica Alloys:

https://www.aero-mag.com/new-partnership-creates-100-recycle...

From ELG we can read that a source of scrap Ti comes from companies like GE, Boeing, etc:

https://cdn.ymaws.com/titanium.org/resource/resmgr/2010_2014...

But this article from 1990 (may be outdated) states that a misunderstanding of the public is thinking that scrap mostly comes from old devices or planes. But these types of things last long and don't get recycled enough to provide enough volume. This seems to say that the bulk of scrap comes as a byproduct of the smelting process:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11837-018-3278-1

The following article from 2004 however says that recycled Ti comes from 10% old scrap (old recycled parts we normally think of as recycled metal) and 90% "new scrap" which is partly wasted Ti generated when making parts. For example in 2004, the aerospace industry used 12000t of Ti but wasted 10000t of that.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/circ1196-Y/pdf/Circ1196-Y.pdf

Dang, I felt safe getting the series 9 last year and that there wouldn't be any major features this year. The sleep apnea detection would be something that could be handy as I suspect I'm borderline. It would be nice to non-intrusively test over several months to see how I trend vs. the one night sleep tests doctors typically use.

Sleep apnea detection is coming to the series 9 too.

Oh really...interesting, thx

I doubt that the sleep apnea detection will be useful in borderline cases aside from saying "you might have sleep apnea", which you already know.

Since that would come from a different source, that would still be helpful. Or there might be no notification.

A lot of people who live alone might not know. I think I have it but a Phillips home test was inconclusive for me. I don't really love the idea of the doctors office sleep study since I'm not really experiencing any daytime affects but having my watch keep an eye on it is a nice peace of mind.

Was kinda hoping for blood glucose :/

Blood pressure and blood glucose would be amazing.

I was thinking about shelling a little extra for the enhanced casing this year, because I'm pretty tired of the cheap-looking aluminum…

what's this, polished jet-black aluminum? Dang, I think they might have designed themselves out of some upgraded purchases this year!

The enhanced casing this year is titanium, no?

Yep. A great change. I’ve loved the polished stainless steel but it’s heavy as hell.

The larger non-ultra watch goes from 51.5g to 41.7g. A 20% reduction is very welcome.

They offered a special titanium model a few years ago but didn’t have it last year. To have all the fancy versions use it is fantastic. The fancy ones are expensive enough without an extra titanium cost penalty on top.

That shiny black watch is going to be littered in scratches after 2 weeks. My Ultra 2 has a big scratch on it. It's not the materials are bad or anything, people just bump into metal often. For me, it's metal tables at the coffeeshop.

That's one reason I like the stainless (now Titanium) models. They have sapphire crystal instead of glass and I haven't had scratches in years. Scratches on the body are just patina.

If only it could play mp3 files.

It can, if you load them via itunes onto your iPhone and then from the iPhone to the watch.

At least, I am pretty sure I did that on my Series 8 the last time I was using it.

It sort of can. For example you can load spotify playlists to it, podcasts over podcast app etc. The interface to achieve this is quite cumbersome, though.

Those things are not mp3s.

This drove me insane for a while trying to figure out how to get long (1h+ mp3s) downloaded to the watch for offline playback. The solution is to use an app called iCatcher!

Works reliably for me

I think there's a TestFlight beta for a foobar2000 watchOS app. I don't have a relevant apple watch, so I can't testify. The foobar2000 ios app is truly excellent though. My only real complaint is the lack of a carplay app.

Can we get one of these you don't wear on your wrist?

I'm all for the exercise and health tracking, but I hate wearing a watch when I'm typing or at a computer a good chunk of the day, where it would be resting on something.

This may be as good as it gets https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/17/24200520/tinypod-apple-wa...

But I’m uncertain how polished the experience would be.

What do you mean? It just stays in your pocket like a pocket watch? Where else would you wear it?

Check out the Solo Loop - not having a clasp is a game changer for desk use of the Watch.

I like to upgrade every 2 years to have a fresh tech and battery but I think I’m gonna skip 10 and keep my 8.

9 was already pretty underwhelming and 10 only brings a larger display. I really want a blood pressure sensor. And for the watch to last more than a day.

I used to wear my 8 for 24hr a day and charged it while showering or similar. But the battery took a significant hit after about a year of this and Apple refused to replace it (within AC+) because it didn’t hit the 80% design capacity mark. In real life, the battery life was so stretched out to its limit that even the 10% rendered it annoyingly insufficient (or the percentage doesn’t really represent true capacity and hid the truth).

Having the watch to be rated for extra 6hrs would have been a game changer.

That being said, I managed to crack the display so I just received a replacement with fresh battery.

yeah my S5 finally dropped below 80% earlier this year and it was nearly unusable by that time. Even now with a fresh battery it's still a lot more battery management than I'd prefer.

So they finally figured out the sleep apnea patent issue? You used to have to download a separate app for sleeping breathing detection. Wasn’t built in like Fitbit

I wonder if it’s being backported to old models

Nobody wants a thinner watch, everyone wants more battery life.

Both the regular Watch and the Ultra are very much on the side of “only just bearable” regarding their thickness. They do not fit very well for anyone wearing button-down shirts with buttoned sleeve cuffs. Thinner is definitely welcomed.

that's an interesting concern. would you still make the tradeoff for 30% battery ?

True for phones. Not even close for watches.

Garmin fenix , instinct . Many Gshocks are thicker . Only apple has 1 day battery. Are you desiring a smart Skagen ?

In a perfect world, sure.

I dunno. I just meant that phones are already thin enough that going thinner is irrelevant to most people. That’s not the case yet for smart watches.

From the description:

"Apple Watch Series 10 is nearly 10 percent thinner than Apple Watch Series 7, Series 8, and Series 9, while offering all the advanced capabilities users love, adding new features, and maintaining all-day 18-hour battery life."

Well, I'm pretty sure a full day has substantially more than 18h.

I really can't understand the appeal of yet another device I must charge at least once a day. I would be willing to pay for a watch that had good sleep tracking and activity tracking and that lasted at the very least 1 week. But, this is not it.

I just use whoop these days for better accuracy and battery life. Not interested in the complex screens and notifications.

I hate the subscription model for Whoop.

The annual subscription though... $319. That is an absurd amount of money imo

It's 240 USD which is $20/mo. The $30/mo plan is still a one-year commitment thus operates more like a loan with $10/mo overhead.

I got a Whoop the other month and really like it. The ulti-day battery life + no screen + low profile gadget are what won me over even though I like Apple Watch's tech.

The way I see the $20/mo subscription is like a gym: if this thing can't even give me $20/mo of value, then it's not doing anything for me.

But it gives me much more than that in value because it has me always going for extra runs, doing extra sets of push-ups and pull-ups at home, and it regularly has me turning down late night snacks / drink to get better sleep. If I had to choose, I'd pick it over my much more expensive gym membership.

i've heard plenty of commercials and still don't quite get it. Why whoop?

> Why whoop?

- I want a health and fitness tracker.

- I don't want to be locked into an Apple/Google ecosystem.

- I don't want screens and notifications.

i see yeah that's about what I gathered from their commercials.

um.

How do people wear the watch during the night so monitor their sleep? The bloody thing doesnt usually make it 14 - 19 hours before it requires a recharge.

It is the most natural for me to take it off and let it charge when I sleep.

I guess I could take it off when I am at my desk and charge it there, but the various notifications and software is handy to have all day.

I charge it while I am doing my night time routine. It gets full by the time I am in bed.

I charge mine while I shower and do my morning hygiene routine. It's usually 100% after that.

I usually charge mine in the morning when I sit down at my computer to start work. I let it sit there while drinking a hot beverage and when I need to pop into the loo, it is charged enough.

Anyone else concerned about what apples use of titanium means for medical implants? Like does this not hamper production of things people need?

Is there a titanium shortage?

Nah I just happend to know that the guy who used to produce titanium coated magnetic implants had to stop somewhere around 9 months before the release of the iphone 15 cause the capacity of the company he contracted with for the coating was used up and every other vendor he tried as well. Its not about the titanium itself but rather the ability to work with it for implants in concerned about. I figured it was related to apple as they have very high standards. I can find the source on the implant if anyone is interested iirc its called the titan.

Global production of titanium is about 210,000 metric tonnes. [1] An iPhone 15 Pro Max has about 18 grams of titanium in it. [2]

Rounding 18 up to 20 for the slightly larger 16 Pro Max, Apples sells 231 million iPhones per year. (210,000,000,000 grams)/(20 grams/iPhone * 231,000,000 iPhones) = 50.72

Apple is using at most 2% of the world's titanium. Obviously many of their phone sales are of smaller or titanium un-endowed models.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_production_by_country [2] https://www.benzinga.com/general/entertainment/23/10/3511608...

If someone is willing to sell me titanium chopsticks for a reasonable price (and they are), then no, I’m not concerned that Grandma doesn’t get a new hip because Apple Watch used up all the titanium.

Weird use of semi-colons in the sub-heading?

I've been noticing that more often recently in text -- using semicolons to separate list items when one or more of the list items has a comma.

I know that's been a technically correct usage of the semicolon for a while now, but I've never actually seen it in mainstream news/marketing until in the past few months.

It's standard to use semicolons in complex lists where list items have commas.

Meh. Stopped wearing my S9 in May. Not sure why I bought it. Think AW wore off here finally. It’s a nice toy but useless for me (even cycling / hiking etc).

I take an F91W when I go hiking as it doesn’t need charging.

I still use mine mainly for

- sleep tracking combined with Athlytic for Whoop-style metrics (might not be the most accurate, but good enough). also silent alarms

- runs tracking -- nice to be able to track my run and listen to a podcast all from the watch

- swim tracking -- i guess Garmin is just as good, but love being able to see the screen while swimming to check my progress

if the silly cellular plan wasn't such a JOKE ($15/month to share my already $60 plan???), I'd enable that and not need to carry my phone for emergencies on hikes/bike rides, etc.

What's the value of something like Athlytic/Whoops against just sticking to a routine?

Routine is Step 1, you're right. But for training, seeing things like HRV, resting heart rate, etc. allow you to optimize your training for the day based on your recovery/sleep.

I used Athlytic for a bit, but didn't find it that useful. Ultimately I figured I could just read HRV and RHR from the Health app to optimize training.

Shame on me for not knowing it was already there..

> if the silly cellular plan wasn't such a JOKE ($15/month to share my already $60 plan???), I'd enable that and not need to carry my phone for emergencies on hikes/bike rides, etc.

I'm replacing my old Apple Watch without cellular soon with one with cellular, and since my carrier (T-Mobile Connect) did not have any watch support I looked around to see what my options were.

I ended up switching to Verizon Visible. They have two phone plans, Visible for $25/month and Visible+ for $45/month, but frequent promotions or coupons often knock those down by up to $10/month for a year or two. The $45/month plan includes watch support, which is a $10/month add-on to the $25/month plan.

Better than promo codes is they offer annual billing at $275/year for Visible and $395/year for Visible+. Those work out to $22.92/month and 32.92/month, respectively, which means if you are willing to pay annually and want watch support there is no reason to get plain Visible instead of Visible+.

One potential issue with an MVNO like Visible, even when that MVNO is owned by the major carrier whose network they are on, is that their data may be deprioritized first if the underlying network is congested.

Visible+ includes some premium data that is treated exactly the same as Verizon's own traffic. You get unlimited premium data when on 5G Ultra Wideband, and 50 GB/month premium data on 5G and 4G LTE.

If you are fine with those data limits, want a watch on your plan, and don't travel outside the US, Canada, Mexico, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico for more than one day a month (or don't mind having to pay extra for talk/text/data when you do leave those places for more than a day) then Visible+ paid annually was the best deal I could find.

The other thing with MVNO is that they have no or limited roaming.

It's often not a huge deal, but in sparser areas, it starts to matter a bit, at least if you are concerned with coverage.

I do like T-Mobile for their 5GB free/included international data (and unlimited texting).

The other concern I’ve read about with MVNOs is that some people were unable to transfer their number out. Don’t really want to lose my number.

Give garmin a go. One week+ battery and it's outdoor activities tracking is just great.

I have a lower entry Garmin and it's amazing for running, biking and every day tracking, it's a Forerunner 245, but it's no smart watch.

I'll pass on that. I've got a Garmin handheld and OrganicMaps on my phone which are both fine for any remote activities I do. I don't need to track activities.

Useless is bit extreme criticism. I'm not an athlete or super intense, but somewhat more active than average (regular strength training, hiking 10-20 miles 3000-6000ft gain, bike ride 25-35 miles). It works just fine, its precise enough -- and I don't care about extreme precision. Sure there are better devices out, and battery will last much longer for bigger hikes, but its good all-around for most people which works for both active and regular life.

Willing to sell it?

I love cycling with my apple watch, its actually the largest use case for owning one in my opinion. If I'm not exercising I don't wear it, I like getting the heart rate states synced to strava.

Urgh it's the worst for cycling I find. I just use the phone. The watch is in the wrong place to see it, the controls aren't tactile and the thing distracts you. All recipes for trouble.

when i’m riding a route i know, the apple watch paired with my power meter gives me everything i want. if i need directions i use my bike computer and a heart rate strap.

I also ditched my apple watch.

Even when working out I didn't really bother using it to track my workouts. Going to the gym is the only thing that mattered.

For checking the time and apps? I have my phone in my pocket at all times...

Charging it was annoying in my experience, if I didn't wear it for 1 or 2 days, when I wanted to wear it, it was dead...

But I know some people that actualy take advantage of it, so it depends.

If battery lasted a whole month, I would probably reconsider. But honestly I do without just fine...

I use my watch a lot to unlock things and pay for things. It is weird how much more I use it than my phone now (which can do all those things also, but is usually in my pocket and not on my wrist).

Apple pay over the watch is killer app IMO. You can pay everything with it. In civilized cities like london you can use it to pay the public transit. While it may sound gimmicky, this is actually an improvement (if only slight) to daily chores.

I live in London. You have to wear it on the right hand side for TFL gates and contort yourself to use them. Also it's not quite as reliable as the iPhone.

It was fine for ordering beer.

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