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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

In a somewhat similar vein, I find that when I use my Apple Watch to track a hike, it will frequently auto pause or ask me if I've finished when I'm climbing slowly up a steep ascent. It annoys the heck out of me because that's often when I'm working hardest. My watch is also tracking my heart rate - and I think it's pretty safe to assume that if my HR is holding steady at 150 BPM then I have not stopped for a break.

Or at least give me the option to turn off Auto Pause/Auto End just for hiking workouts - instead I have to turn off the feature for all workouts. But I suppose that level of customization would be very un-Apple.

The world of appliances is littered with these "smart" features that purport to make life more convenient, but are implemented so crudely that they end up causing more trouble than they solve.

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The Apple Watch is definitely fashion accessory first and fitness device second.

I can't use it running in the colder seasons - a sweaty sleeve triggers the lap count (tap the screen - no ability to reassign to a button). It's one of the most annoying and fixable (if they cared) issues on an Apple device I've encountered. Not even the ultra-premium, ulta-outdoorsy Ultra version lets you map "lap count" to the extra button!!!

It's just both (or more for the casual jogger than serious ultra runner for example). If you need a proper, dedicated sports device get a coros, garmin or suunto. Apple Watch is more leaning towards day to day, while these things are for sports and just for sports. But suck at day to day stuff if you want the fancy apple watch things. Pick your poison.

Pretty much. I have an Apple Watch, my wife has a Garmin.

I’m jealous of the advanced metrics and data she has on all of our workouts and the accuracy. And that battery life.

She’s jealous of all the slick bells and whistles (unlocking my laptop automatically, deep app ecosystem, managing grocery lists etc).

Neither is perfect but both have their uses. You have to pick a side (or spend twice as much and pick both sides ;-)).

The battery life negative on the Apple Watch is the big thing. I have an Ultra that is a bit better but I don't wear it say-to-day because the charging routine is a bit of a pain.

why do you want your watch to manage a grocery list? seriously

I can see it being useful to have a list on my wrist whilst going round a supermarket.

i find it very convenient being able to, at any point in the day whether my hands are messy or my phone or a piece of paper are far from me, simply raise my wrist and say "add greek yogurt to my grocery list"

What metrics does garmin provide that the Apple Watch doesn’t

Mostly things like recovery time recommendations, body battery, training status, some scores, stuff like that.

There are tons of secondary apps that provide all of those things. Fundamentally the Garmin records less baseline parameters than the Apple Watch does for instance it does not do blood oxygen level monitoring, so whatever stats it’s providing are just software algorithms.

honestly, if you're asking that question you don't need a garmin/coros. I'm a long distance trail runner, so I appreciate things like a cleaner heart rate (strap), hill climb alerts (length + degree), food alerts, loading a map (mandatory for races to have the route as GPX on my watch). Also stuff like training readiness, recovery etc. Stuff like that. If you're a recreational jogger, you don't need a specialized watch imho.

To my knowledge, Apple Health is the only health/fitness data storage with end to end encrypted data, which is one of my main reasons to stay out of other fitness eco systems even if their hardware is way better.

Garmin lets you connect your device as an USB storage device and manage everything manually though.

I do this to completely skip online uploading, and am keeping track of stats using a mashup of bash scripts and cli tools.

I feel like there has to be a middle ground between giving everything to an untrusted cloud and manually downloading raw data and building home grown tools to try and process and make sense of it. As a user, I don't want either of those extremes.

There is https://gadgetbridge.org, which seems like a cool project but I never used it since it is Android only and don't know how good the support actually is.

That sounds good and I will look into it.

I use the water lock which is a bit annoying when I need to actually swipe on the screen.

Yeah, if you don't need to track laps at all, that works.

But if I'm doing an interval set on the road in January, it's a terrible UX.

Unlike a Garmin Watch it will actually take a charge.

Does your garmin watch not charge? If you call them and are nice they'll probably give you a heavily discounted replacement. Mine died on me randomly and they gave me a new 900 series forerunner for $125

It charges if and only when it wants to. And I've been a Garmin enthusiast for a while and been through a few devices already though I am getting sick of the charging unreliability.

Like if I am really careful I can plug my watch into the computer and it might start charging in a few minutes. Or like last night I made two tries and neither of them worked. I want to be able to plug it in to charge and completely take it for granted that I will come back later and it will be charged. I might wind up attempting to charge the watch for four whole hours in a day as it is now.

Personally I am very traumatized by USB connections that don't work and when I hear the sound of a USB device dropping out on my Windows computer I feel like a veteran who thinks a misfiring car is a gunshot. I want a charging connector which is 100% reliable and I want Garmin to pay me $10,000 if I ever hear that sound because of their poorly designed connector.

So I want a replacement watch that charges reliably, I don't want a cheap newer watch that has the same improperly designed connector. Next week I am going to be off grid at an event where I'm expected to have a reliable watch and hoping I can charge it successfully off a power bank at least once.

Agreed. I’m on my 4th Garmin and the charging cable last about a year or two at most. That said, for me it has always just been the cable and the watch is self last forever. All 4 of my old Garmin’s still work if I get them out of a drawer and charge them up. Now I just small USBC -> Garmin adapter's that normally get lost before they wear out.

I would love a standards based wireless option here.

(1) Actually... I got one of these things

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DX26QV8L

which "just works", like I plug the watch in and it charges... just like that! It's amazing though that Garmin has normalized "it just doesn't work" for its own charging cables.

(2) As for @Cindy HN is boring. I mean, people on Mastodon often assume there has to be something wrong with HN (like there are white people there? somebody cis posted there once? there are people there who care about making money?) but never seem to find the smoking gun. I mean, I could write about salacious things on HN but nobody would believe it. Like one reason I post a lot less to HN these days is that I am doing other things!

I've never had that problem with my solar garmin watch.

> The Apple Watch is definitely fashion accessory first and fitness device second.

Are Apple Watches really fashion accessories? I think a $30 Casio F91W looks better than an Apple Watch, most purpose-built watches do. I might be biased since I am afflicted with an interest in wristwatches, ahem, timepieces.

I don’t know anything about fashion. I suppose it’s possible that with the right wristband, matching outfit, and on the correct occasion - it could be a fashion statement, I don’t know.

But I’ve just always worn watches anyway for telling time, have an affinity for gadgets, and consider the Apple Watch as just a more capable wrist watch. I’m sure the way I wear it - with an extremely worn out and faded “trail loop” band - is extremely unfashionable. But I still like it.

I want it off by default even for calm low HR outdoor walks. Nothing wrong with stopping a few minutes to admire nature during your outdoor walks! This feature was probably designed by the same person who thought it was a great idea not to let us switch off the screenshot sound.

Wild guess is that the screenshot sound is to prevent capturing video frames silently, which would be a workaround of the camera click noise that's meant to prevent covert photos of those unaware that their picture is being taken.

Maybe I'm missing something, but how would that solve anything? Couldn't the offender just take a video and screenshot it later?

If you are serious about health tracking, get a device that specializes in that and knows what they are doing -- get a polar. They publish papers on the science behind their technology. Many professional athletes do heart tracking with polar devices. Even Garmin isn't as good being it is a GPS company first. If you want mediocre, by all means get an apple device. Their goal is to sell you stuff and keep you hooked in the ecosystem with a veil of convenience.

Fwiw, polar let's you tune the parameters of when to start and stop recording.

I got an Apple Watch just before the pandemic. In the winter I love to XC Ski, but it wasn't in there as an activity -- I guess not much snow in Cupertino.

After a year or two of daily charging I went back to my trusty Garmin 935 that lasts ~2 weeks on a charge (used to be more like a month, but you know what I can install a replacement battery!) -- the Garmin does have an XC Ski activity.

I just checked and it looks like Cross Country Skiing is an option now.

But yeah I think Garmin and other smart watches are definitely preferred by serious athletes (and people who don't like charging their watch daily). Whereas I mostly just use my Apple Watch as a way to get notifications and as a glorified step tracker.

Strange. I've never experienced anything like this. I can forget it's on and stop moving entirely for an hour and the apple watch doesn't turn my walk off!

You can disable this (at the cost of having to remember to stop it yourself at the end). I definitely ran into the nag on harder hikes.

Interesting, and I though fitbit's (now google) auto start/end was annoying

(And yes I can turn it off)

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