Comment by blairbeckwith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blairbeckwith | Hacker News Reader

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I would love to hear more about your opinions on this as someone who has been experimenting with as a semi-serious runner after years of being Apple Watch exclusive.

What I see is benefits around battery life, form factor (buttons are awesome), and good native support for "compound metrics" like Endurance Score, Hill Score, Training Status, etc.

But when it comes to actual stats and metrics, Apple Watch feels superior in most ways. Garmin sleep tracking anecdotally feels much less accurate. It baffles me that it only shows pace to the nearest 5 seconds during a workout. It confuses me that it only shows a Vo2max estimate to zero decimal places.

Then, Apple Watch is at least 10x more customizable via third party apps. Want a Whoop-like experience with strain score, recovery score, etc.? Bevel and Athlytic are there. Want a much more in-depth and customizable workout experience? WorkOutdoors puts Garmin to shame here.

What am I missing that makes Garmin so pervasive, while Apple Watch is derided as "not a serious sports watch"?

I'm hardly a serious runner, but I'd say the pros you laid out for Garmin are quite nice, and the cons are inconsequential to your average fitness tracker user. I'd probably argue they're inconsequential to everyone but the absolute elite and, for them, are pointless.

Sleep tracking is hard to action on for the average user outside "you slept this long" and none of the writst-based devices are that good anyway.

Pace to sub 5 is a little more annoying, but probably not useful for the majority considering most people are just running, not craning over their watch the whole time.

VO2 max is also a wild estimate, and I'd hazard it's not particularly accurate for the average person. It's off by close to 20% for me, and I should be a pretty good candidate.

On the flipside, you can get tons of data out of a Garmin that costs significantly less than an Apple watch. Plus, the majority of Garmins sold are fitness devices with some smart features, with Apple watches being primarily a smart watch. While maybe not justified (I think the Apple watch features are quite nice) I'd expect that's a major part of the reason Garmin has the rep it does.

If someone is buying a device to run, most would recommend the cheaper, light, simple, specialized, long battery life watch over the opposite. If you already have an Apple watch, it's probably a no brainer. For the high-end Garmin devices, it's a little more complex, but not many people are considering a US$800+ device without knowing the nuances of the discussion, or having enough money to not care.

I think you're probably right on a lot of this.

I do think the pace having more granularity than five seconds is important for anyone who's doing any kind of speed work, where a pace off by 5 seconds can result in a fairly significant variance. Admittedly I am not a total novice, but my 5k and 10k pace times are about 10 seconds apart, and I do some interval workouts at 5k pace and some at 10k pace. 5 second granularity doesn't give much wiggle room there! Although of course, GPS and cadence-based paces are also estimates, so maybe the 5 second accuracy is better than 1 second which could inpsire a false sense of confidence in the estimate.

As far as Vo2Max goes, totally agree – my lab test results vary widely from both watches. However, I think that actually makes Apple's 1 decimal place more significant – it has a lot of value in offering a fitness trend, even if it's inaccurate. I might train hard for 3 weeks and see 0 movement in my Garmin Vo2Max, whereas I might see a 0.3 increase in the Apple Watch. This is valuable for even the novice runner.

That's very true, and I'd love to see some actual documentation on how they get to pace numbers.

I'm in the same boat with regard to 5K/10K pace, but I reckon it's probably not a huge issue in the long run. While plans specify those times, I think it's more about shorthand for effort zone where 5K is "this hard" and 10K is "a little bit less hard".

VO2 max improvement is a good point, though, and I'd probably agree. If I had a hazard a guess, Garmin would say that their training productivity tracker/race estimated are the preferred way of presenting that data. as an aside, I think VO2max has sorta been coopted as a "fitness number" when it actually represents a very specific thing that may or may not be emblematic of actual performance in the majority of cases. It is nice to have a a single value to look at that can sum up whether what you've been doing lately is productive, though.

That could just be me coming from the world of cycling where watts are king and there's far less variability. In my mind, all these running stats are mushy, but that might not actually be the case.

I feel the important piece to remember with VO2Max estimation is: Its an estimation. Its significant figures [1]; reporting the value to one or more decimal places communicates a level of confidence inappropriate for how inaccurate these estimations generally are. Especially the Apple Watch's; Garmin's is known for being pretty decent, usually +/- 2, but Apple Watch's is all over the place and is infamous for being really inaccurate.

Clamping pace to 5 seconds is a similar idea. GPS isn't super accurate: within 16 feet some sources say [2], though it gets better if you've got dual band, if you're moving; but it gets worse when you don't have an open sky. Just ten feet of GPS inaccuracy over a ten minute mile means your recorded pace is somewhere between 9:58/mile to 10:02/mile. And, experimentally, these systems are way, way more inaccurate than that: on a recent bike ride, with no major sky obstructions, I wore both an Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Garmin Enduro 3; the AWU2 recorded 25.05 miles, Enduro 3 recorded 25.18 miles. That's a difference of ~686 feet; ~27 feet/mile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures

[2] https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

If vo2max is displayed without decimals it would take months to see progress for most people starting running. It’s baffling that they would make such a mistake.

I was considering a Garmin watch, but if they make such a stupid decision regarding vo2max then what other mistakes are lurking in their apps?

IMO the biggest reason why the Apple Watch is oftentimes interpreted as an "unserious" exercise smartwatch is actually quite simple: The display & lack of physical buttons makes it difficult to interface with in the variety of conditions that outdoor activity enthusiasts often find themselves in. If its bright out, the mps displays on many Garmins will outperform OLED. If its raining; good luck using a touchscreen. If you're wearing gloves; ditto. If you've just ran a marathon, you're dying, your vision is blurry, you're sweaty and collapsing, that "swipe over a screen then click the end workout button" workflow is the end of the world; it wasn't designed by someone who has ever been in that situation, its designed for and by people who take their nice little walks to the cute little grocery story.

Battery is another less major factor: Even the AW Ultra 2 struggles to make it through a full marathon run (~70-90% battery usage IME) and that's not an uncommon-enough situation for users of the quote"ULTRA"endquote to be an invalid criticism.

Nothing else matters. Your comment continues into talking about sleep tracking and recovery scores and strain scores and third party apps and literally none of that matters. That's silicon valley brain stuff that many customers don't care about. The Apple Watch is, to some people, a Bugatti without a steering wheel; it gets a lot of the basics wrong.

One note though: Many Garmin users would also say that Garmin is, sadly, also losing track of what their core userbase wants, as the experience has become more buggy and less focused over the years. I'm not asserting that Garmin is king and Apple are idiots; Garmin just has momentum and is generally great at the things its users care about.

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