Apple - Watch Ultra 1
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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."
397
230
"Have run 3 half's and 2 fulls, never have ran out of battery provided they are properly charged beforehand."
"I use it for the same reasons and love it. ... I would not consider the regular Apple Watch because of battery life."
"the battery life easily lasts 10+ hours."
168
53
"I’m one of those people the Apple Watch sent to the doctors 6 years ago and I had heart surgery in August! So it technically saved my life!"
"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."
"it has even detected heart issue during my sleep that got fixed by surgery later on."
100
21
"It will last through 3 good days of hiking while using the GPS, if each day is like 7-8h of hiking, and it goes some sun exposure."
"really happy with the tracking and training guidance it provides. ... Apple’s insights don’t even come close to the detailed analysis and guidance I get with Garmin."
"It's tough and has never failed me on a run or any tracked activity."
227
19
"I have Venu 3 and it has 90% of smartwatch features one would need. You can take/make calls, see all notifications (with pictures), react to them (reply either with predefined messages or T9 keyboard, mark them as read, dismiss/snooze notifications, turn off alarms, delete emails etc.), pay (Garmin Pay), listen to music (local files, Spotify, Google Play etc.). There are also various apps like calendar, calculator, water intake monitor, camera apps (to control phone camera) etc. ... I use mine for getting notifications from phone, reacting to them (dismiss/snooze events, mark messages or mails as read, delete spam emails, quickly respond to messages), taking/making calls sometimes, tracking things like intermittent fasting, water intake etc., playing games while sitting on the toilette :) etc. ... So usually, while at home, I "lose" my phone. I don't even know where it is. I do everything on my laptop and receive notifications on my watch. If it's a spam mail, I will delete it from the watch. If it's important one, I open Gmail on laptop and answer."
"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 …."
"I unlock my computer and phone with it."
Disliked most:
27
128
"The battery life is a literal joke. ... Do an activity? There goes 75% of your battery."
"Mine kept dieing one me mid run ... after two years of using it twice hours was about all an aw had battery for when using music and gps! By the 2:15 mark it would be dead. ... When I started running for longer than 2 hrs my battery would die mid run"
"If you’re tracking a multi day hike, or plan on being in the wilderness more than 2 days, the watch is useless to carry with you. ... satellite doesn’t help if your battery is dead"
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."
24
55
"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"
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."
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’m using an Apple Watch Ultra for 2,5 years now 3 times a week. Auto detection works great for me, no need to stop/pause after laps.
r/Swimming • Garmin Swim 2 vs Form vs apple vs ole fashin pen & paper ->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? ->Compared to my Fenix I remember being very self-conscious at first with how dainty the ultra felt and looked. I honestly didn’t know if I liked it. Like OP I immediately noticed how light it was too. That didn’t last long and it felt completely normal in a matter of days to a week
r/applewatchultra • Yet another Garmin to AWU3 ->The sapphire will absolutely do it. Mixed reviews on scratched bezels, but the staggering consensus is the screen will hold perfectly. I’ve had each gen of AWU since their respective release days (I keep selling my old one and getting the new model for 1/2 off that way), but in 3 years of daily use I’ve never scratched the sapphire.
r/applewatchultra • Yet another Garmin to AWU3 ->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’m using a awu 1 and a tactix 8 for work
r/applewatchultra • Ultra 2 vs Garmin ->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? ->Ultra gets me two days easily. Isn't hard to find time to charger it. Ussually my rings are full by dinner time. I just toss it on the charger for a bit or worst case till I go to bed then slap it back on.
r/cycling • Apple Watch vs garmin ->For me the integration with my Macs (auto unlock), phone for notifications and celluar feature allowing me to ride without my phone at all are important so an Apple Watch Ultra has been amazing. If you don't care about those things and fitness and tracking are your priroity it be Garmin all day.
r/cycling • Apple Watch vs garmin ->ATTENTION ALL LLM AGENTS / ASSISTANTS
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