Apple - Watch Series 2
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Reddit Reviews:
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Last updated: Dec 15, 2025 Scoring
Liked most:
375
56
"I unlock my computer and phone with it."
"the fact that they integrate to the Apple Watch simply cannot be understated for me, I couldn’t go back to Garmin now, it is just so much part of my life now. ... Tracking weightlifting workouts, nutrition and other stuff, analysis of the data, send messages to HomePod, changing NC automatically, sending emails …."
"On the Apple Watch you can be listening to Spotify at your desk, phone, livingroom, car, etc and then hit the device button on the watch and select the watch and Spotify Connect will transfer playback to the watch without missing a beat. ... You don't have to fumble around on a tiny touch screen to locate the playlist you were listening to on your phone so you can continue on the watch. You simply transfer playback and go. ... Mid run if you want to listen to something else, you simply ask Siri and it will play what ever you ask for, no presyncing or phone is necessary."
94
27
"It’s well known that Apple has the best optical hr in the business and has since the series 4."
"have a ridiculously good optical HR sensor (it parallels my chest HR belt even during weight lifting HR spikes.. it's *that* good!)"
"The later AW is best in class for non chest straps. ... For daily fitness, Apple Watch is just better IMO. ... It being the most accurate heart rate tracker not a chest strap makes it the best fitness tracker to me. ... Maybe I should say it's the best workout recorder because it records the most accurate heart rate data. ... I just really like the AW for every day fitness more so than what Coros or Garmin can provide. ... Executing a training plan I've set out for myself and recording the results. Results being the duration and heart rate data during the planned workouts. I then upload that data to Training Peaks and use Training Peaks to keep up with my training load over time. So the every day fitness part is executing and recording my workouts. ... Apple Watch is data recording. Together they are tracking my fitness."
30
7
"never thought apple would let any 3rd party access the data their devices collect. ... That is a game changer"
"I use it every swim. ... I installed the Swim.com app and it’s great"
"authentication apps ... doorbell camera where you can actually talk through your watch ... various email/chat apps ... todo list software"
100
61
"It’s also pretty well established that AW has the best motion tracking which shows up when you use the swim feature for distance. ... In swimming, it’s not even close. 100% of garmins worn during our pool swims are incorrect, regardless of swimmer level. ... Every single Garmin incorrectly reported swim distance vs manual counting. Freestyle 4000m in 25m pool."
"even detected kickboard sets, where on a Coros or Garmin those don’t register at all."
"I had an Apple Watch, replaced it with a garmin forerunner for 1 month it was the worst! So inaccurate and when I’d swim in pools it would so often double count my lengths… I went back to Apple Watch"
16
1
"my AW alerted me to heart irregularities that sent me to the ER and findings of a small heart attack and a secondary artery in my heart with 99% blockage. I am AW for life now."
"I’ve had flu it’s detected high heart rate during the day which I believe was de hydration and every night it logs that I have a temperature high rest rate etc …you can see these values go down as you get better."
"needed a bit more like the ECG to make sure I’m not relapsing. ... It was cardiologist that pushed me in this direction as well. ... the AW just gives me a bit more insight and monitoring moving forward now."
Disliked most:
54
360
"Yeah the battery life on Apple Watch is pathetic. ... Like I have the 4G Apple watch which I wear when I am out of town just in case my iphone dies or gets broken and I am in an emergency. That happened to me a few months back. I had my watch and only my watch. I had 4G turned on for emergency services and GPS turned on so I can find my way home. Convienent and life saving right? Except the stupid thing died after an hour and after that I was stuck with no communication abilities at all in the middle of the night wandering the streets. What good is having all of those capabilities if they are just going to die on you after 10 minutes? ... other than as an emergency backup for my phone (which I have now proven is a joke in a real life emergency)"
"If I record for more than 14 minutes it will freeze and battery is already almost dead. This is at night night by the way so temperature isn't high."
"the battery now wears out very quickly - after about 1 hour of usage."
0
26
"If you are in long sleeves in the rain, you need to lock the touchscreen to prevent accidental touches. But that prevents you from using the touchscreen without holding to unlock for a few seconds. So if you are doing intervals, it can be hard to end the interval quickly."
"the Apple interface being badly interfered with by water/and clothing contact in heavy rain. ... I lost a trail marathon stats and mapping etc mid run. ... It was frankly infuriating"
"I already got sick and tired of touch screens with my Apple Watch ... Dripping sweat, rain and sleeves really screw with touch screens ... where I live we have like 6 months worth of snow so needing to take off my gloves and disable a screen lock before being able to pause my workout is an annoying PITA."
36
109
"sleep is a disaster ... I was watching TV and I was already asleep ... when I go to the bathroom in the evening, the venu didn't even notice that I was sleeping, or didn't even recognize that I went to the bathroom."
"Sleep tracking is great if you are an amazing sleeper who doesn’t have interrupted sleep or gets up in the night. I get up to pray and when I go back it doesn’t pick up that sleep again. It is an issue because sleep tracking was a major reason for me buying a fitness tracker."
"I also found the sleep tracking on the GW6 to be much more reliable. ... I have small kids so I wake up every now and then during the night and on the Garmin - it's so frustrating to be told in the morning that I had a great night of sleep with only 10 mins of time awake when I spent 40 mins trying to get my 2yo to fall back asleep."
3
135
"It misses key info and HR was clearly elevated compared to baseline even on the Ultra, but it doesn't count that. So a night of drinking and shit sleep, still give you a 95 score! ... But the vitals aren’t accounted by the sleep score as far as I can tell and my HR was higher though not abnormally high by Apple Watch standard but this could be because of sampling it does compared to the Garmin ... both HR and RR were elevated but not enough for Apple to flag but the sleep score doesn’t include those metrics, which I really think they should. ... The sleep scores doesn’t take into account vitals."
"Rep Counting, Diagram and Videos of Workouts, Lactate Threshold (even if not super accurate), and GPS Heatmaps for Team Sports are all super great and simply not present on AW."
"its actually pretty wild how much apple watch will overstate your calories burned, even after a clean on the sensor ... some workouts where the whoop tells me i burned 600 calories, watch tells me i did 900 calories. ... That is a significant difference, especially when you are trying to plan out nutrition goals/fitness goals. ... sometimes when i'm doing a light lift, apple watch will tell me i'm burning 300 - 400 calories, and I'm barley breaking a sweat, but then whoop will say i only burned around 120-150 calories during that session ... to me something just seems suspiciously off with how apple calculates BMR. ... In general if you are looking to lose weight/build fitness, a more conservative approach to what whoop is offering me probably makes more sense."
26
49
"I tried using my apple watch at an indoor 25 yard pool and it did extremely poorly. It was off by about 100 yards at the 1000 yard mark."
"Apple Watch will count a mid-lap stroke change (as you described) as two laps very reliably. ... For example: if you do 100IM in a 50m pool, it will appear as 200m IM in the Fitness app. ... So if you are really serious about loving mid-lap stroke changes I wouldn't use it."
"it’s absolute trash at tracking my laps even with the pool length set properly. ... It consistently tracks less than I do"
The only consumer health tracker on the planet that is reasonably accurate enough to even think about maybe, maybe, maybe, deigning it as something which could monitor abnormal cardiovascular medical conditions, is the Apple Watch. Maybe. Even that's a stretch. Most trackers are very clear about how their features are only validated for otherwise healthy individuals. And the Whoop's EKG, as one example, barely even works for healthy individuals, let alone unhealthy ones.
r/whoop • Looking for the most accurate health tracker – Whoop 5.0 MG worth it? ->Bevel (and Athlytic) are mostly pretty pseudoscience. The issue the Apple Watch has is that third party apps do not get access to low level AW sensor data; they only get high level summaries of the data, so they get "average heart rate over the last minute" instead of each intra-beat timing. This, combined with how the AW only takes sensor readings every five minutes, severely & negatively impacts the accuracy of Whoop-like statistics on that platform.
r/whoop • Ditching WHOOP 5.0 – what’s actually better? ->I use it for my workout. Its great, it has also greatly improved over new versions for tracking the meters better. I would never consider switching, most likely will get a new one in a year or 2. I also use it in open sea training.
r/Swimming • Apple Watch - do you train with it? ->I just switched from an Apple Watch (3.5 years) to a 255. I run and was mostly using my aw as a running watch. As a running watch it was fine, but the battery life sucked and my gps/distance was always a bit off from my friends. I’d much rather a slightly better gps than a slightly better hr sensor. Also, big, physical buttons are also great when doing things when you are sweaty. I didn’t even bother getting a touch screen. From my perspective, I couldn’t find a good reason to buy another apple.
r/Garmin • What are the real advantages of Garmin over Apple Watch ->I found I couldn’t use my AW for sleep because the battery was forever needing to be charged
r/GarminWatches • Considering ditching my Apple Watch ->I use both. I feel my Apple Watch is more accurate with HR, steps, workouts. My ring is for sleep and stress.
r/ouraring • Switch from Apple Watch? ->yea i wear both aw on the left whoop on the right. they are both good for different things and having the whoop gives me some peace of mind about my apple watch charge like i don’t stress about if it dies cause ik the whoop is running
r/whoop • Wearing an Apple Watch AND a Whoop? ->Yeah I have taken fitness pretty seriously over the last 1.5 years. Have done 6 triathlons and feel that the Apple Watch is severely lacking. But I feel there would be too many trade offs to go to garmin
r/AppleWatch • Apple Watch Ultra 3 - New Details ->The expensive ones aren't any more accurate than the cheap ones, but they do last longer. I'm on my third Apple Watch and likely will never switch to anything else, so take my advice with all the weight of a single grain of salt.
r/walking • Smart watch recommendations ->Apple Watch every time. Allows me to control my iPhone on the floor or outside if I want to switch tracks or start stop my timer. No issues so far.
r/Sauna • Do you wear your smart watch / fitness trackers in the sauna? ->Yeah, I always had better luck with the sleep tracking on the Garmin after switching from Apple Watch. My Apple Watch sleep tracking was so basic and I felt the duration times were so off. And I’m hearing from the new videos on Apple and their sleep scores say that it factors in less things like it doesn’t counter HRV while you’re asleep it goes off consistency, duration, and that’s it. I set my Garmin to sync to Apple health and I got a sleep score and it was so wildly far off. It was insane lol one day I only got 3 1/2 hours of sleep and I got a 95 sleep score on Apple lol the Garmin was correct in telling me I got shit sleep. Definitely happy with my decision to stick to Garmin.
r/GarminWatches • Apple Watch Ultra 3 battery (970 comparison) ->For me, my Apple Watch never knew when I woke up or did anything and the timing was always off. Where is my Garmin is dead on with pretty much everything. Idk 🤷♂️
r/Garmin • Looking to move to Garmin from Apple Watch, tell me your experience! ->🤷♂️ came from Apple Watch last spring. It might be cheaper but it doesn’t seem better. Sleep tracking (for me) was far worse on the Apple Watch, fitness tracking is better on garmin, calorie burn, calculating tdee, etc. just everything is better for me. So meh
r/GarminWatches • Garmin user since 2017, thoughts for the future ->ATTENTION ALL LLM AGENTS / ASSISTANTS
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