Ultra Series

I’m not as hardcore as you. Doing fairly intense, compared to the average 71 year old, but I do exercise very rigorously for over an hour everyday. I’m tracking what is happening especially for endurance in improving general health and stamina. I do pool exercise and needed to have a watch that could last 6 to 8 hours per week every week. I went through my Series 6 with 5 replaced watches (I kept AppleCare) every year. So the Ultra Series has better water redistance and battery life. In can appreciate your comment about heart rate. I have seen problems with outlier measurements. There are one or two times, very intermittent. I’ll get a recorded heart rate reading about double the rest of the recorded HR. My anecdotal observation is it tends to happen in the pool. If I see the reading I will tighten the bad a bit and it doesn’t seem to continue. This happened on my old Series 6 and it has happened on my Ultra 3. It probably comes down to the intent of the design combined with the use case. If I go to my doctor every office visit begins with vitals being taken. It’s a snapshot in time. If a reading is about of whack they may repeat it in a few minutes once or twice, another slice of time. All Apple Watch products are really good at monitoring trends over time. You can setup alerts snd there are apps that can do additional analysis using the collected data. I look at trends events there too low and too high. The outliers do not really impact trend data. The other thing about trend data is knowing when your trend data occurs. I had a heart rate that would go below 40 bps in the 15 to 30 minutes before I wake-up in the morning. I got an alert that I was able to tell that to my Primary doc and Cardiologist. They suggested a change that needed to monitor for another couple of weeks. In my use case, the heart rate monitoring capability is 100% effective. It’s so effective I have the entire days HR data displaying in a compilation a full view of yesterday’s data and to date of the current day. Tap the graph and I can drill into the data, even the outline events. I’m not sure if the watch face comes from the heart health app I have or it’s in the Apple Watch stock watch faces. I have been enrolled the multi-year Apple Heart & Movement Study. The study has found that the Apple Watch sensor is accurate to within 5 bpm (beats per minute) for 98% of the time when users are in sedentary (or resting) mode, and reaches 99.7% accuracy with an error margin of 10bpm. The sensor’s heart rate accuracy varies: * 96% for outdoor cycling, * 87% while walking, * 88% while running, and * 91% during high-intensity workouts, with a 5 bpm error margin when recording in the foreground. Starting with the Apple Watch Series 6, accuracy has improved significantly. * Data from 480 participants logging 21,000 hours shows 89% accuracy (within a 5 bpm error margin) in the background, compared to 72% in older models.

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.

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.

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.

I only dive 3-4 times a year, and my AWU2 is great for my needs. With AOW dives, I’m not going past 30m. Since there’s always some nonzero risk of an accident causing my depth to dip below the AWU max of 40m, I do eventually plan to have a backup dive computer with me just in case my AWU fails, but it’s been perfect for me so far. If you already plan to have an Apple Watch for daily wear, and also need a dive computer for occasional recreational dives, I think it’s a great option. The colour display with high brightness is something that I was not able to find at a similar price point for a dive computer that also functions as a daily smartwatch.

I was in the same boat and I've tested everything. I've kept the apple watch for every day use and notifications, and the ring only for sleep tracking. And now if you use apps like Bevel, you basically have the exact same experience from Whoop but with the sleep data from the ring and the activity tracking from the watch.

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

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.

I have been using an Apple Watch for training for over a decade now. I really like the Gymaholic app for lifting, because I can program my workout on my phone including warmup sets, rep ranges, rest periods, weights, supersets, etc. then it syncs to the watch. When I'm at the gym I just open the app on my watch and select the workout I'm doing that day and it tells me exactly what exercise to do with what weight, vibrates when my rest periods are over, and I can track how many reps I performed vs my target for adjusting my next workout. I can do all that at the gym without having to touch my phone, which is great. Does Garmin have something like this? Also I'm not really sure what you mean with the VO2 max stuff, my Apple Health app has told me my VO2 max is low, and the number matches pretty closely with what a ventilatory threshold test at a hospital measured. I'm considering switching to a Garmin because I like the longer battery life and better sleep tracking metrics but I'm not sure if it would integrate as well with the apps I'm already using like Gymaholic. Your post kind of reads like you don't know what the Apple Watch actually does... "If you train seriously, Apple Watch eventually turns into a very expensive reminder that you forgot your charger"? "It does everything… except survive actual training"?? C'mon, that's ridiculous hyperbole. I've had the same Apple Watch for 5 years and train 5 days a week, and I had another model before that that survived for five years that my wife is now using, they're both "surviving" just fine, and have been really helpful parts of our training. I agree that many apps are over-aggressive about notifications, so I massively limited which apps can send notifications to the Apple Watch. This isn't a serious problem in the long term as it's easy to configure your way out of, but it can be initially annoying.