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Comment by jsbisviewtiful | Hacker News Reader

Hyperbole is Apple’s favorite communication style, but at this point it’s so overused that it’s just a meaningless meme. Apple’s wearable competitors blow the Apple Watch’s battery life out of the water and it’s not even close. Hyperbole is all Apple has in this race.

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On the flip side, Apple blows them away on feature set, and often on data accuracy. There is give & take, different priorities for different people.

I’ve had a previous Apple Watch Ultra, it was nice but after playing with it for a while I used it for notifications and working out. I have a Garmin Epix Pro Gen 2 51mm that will do 31 days of being just a smartwatch and can track my multi day cycling trips. The real killer feature I didn’t know I needed until I had it is a proper led torch on my watch, the light up screen on the Apple Watch doesn’t compare.

I need to see receipts on this claim. 31 days as just a smartwatch would be a stretch. Tracking activities also during that time, based on my experience with many, many Garmin watches, would be a bridge too far. My EpixG2 will last 7-10 days, with 1.5-2 hours of daily workouts during that span. I have most power hungry features turned off, like always on display, pulseox monitor etc.

In any case, it’s longer than the AWU by a long way.

Isn’t Apple famous for faking GPS accuracy by moving the points to roads and paths using their mapping data?

Blows them away? I haven't seen anything that is not just one or two features that other watches don't have. But all the.features require the watch to be on.

Data accuracy most certainly is not in relation to GPS which often cuts distances on the Apple Watch.

To be pedantic it's not just GPS anymore. Newer smartwatches from Apple and competitors generally support multiple GNSS constellations including GPS (USA), Galileo (EU), GLONASS (Russia), Beidou (China), and QZSS (Japan). Some devices also support multi-band GPS which further increases accuracy in areas with degraded satellite signals, although at the cost of higher power usage.

Tracking performance on the previous Apple Watch Ultra 3 was "solid" in an independent test. A little worse than competitors in some activities, a little better in others.

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/11/apple-review-ultra-3-in-...

People like to complain about the GPS but I use it when running and it'll easily show me what side of the path I was on at any given point. And the path distance matches precisely with other sources of truth. Maybe there was a time when Garmin had an advantage on some of their watches but I am far from convinced that this has been true anytime in the past few years.

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