Why I Left the Apple Watch Ultra and Went Back to Garmin
Gear · Published 6/14/2023 ·
The dilemma begins
Even the Apple Watch Ultra doesn’t last long on a charge… the daily-charging routine never really goes away. Even at its best, you can’t go more than three days without plugging it in.
When I switched over to the Apple Watch Ultra, I thought at first I wouldn’t have any problems… but on day four, the watch died on me. And of course, I didn’t have a charger with me at the time… So I ended up losing all my tracking data from the moment it powered off.
I don’t like the Apple Watch’s pace display.
This is the pace screen during a workout. It only showed my average speed, not my current speed. So I had no way of knowing whether I should push the pace or ease off.
With Apple, you have to buy a separate app for every specialized area. And that’s exactly where the problem lies. Most of these apps come from small developers or studios, and the moment they stop maintaining them, the app is dead to you. Then you’ve got to go hunt down whatever the “good” app is now, buy it or subscribe to it all over again — the hassle, the effort, the second-guessing, the headache… It eats up a lot of time and money.
The Apple Watch’s smarts didn’t really make my life all that much smarter.
Honestly, I used an Apple Watch for about four years, and a Garmin for around three years, and now I’ve gone back to one. A smartwatch doesn’t change your life or help you in smart ways nearly as much as you’d think.
When you get right down to it, notifications are pretty much the whole show. The way it automatically detects walking and logs it is genuinely nice, but it has a strongly casual feel, and as for the detailed data — is it collecting it but just not showing me??? Or do I simply not know where to look for it? I can’t tell… but if it’s buried to the point where I have to go digging for it in the first place, well, that’s a problem too.
Conclusion… let’s go back…
Garmin, which I’d used before? Or should I go with Suunto? I went back and forth… but in the end I came back to Garmin, where the user experience had been good. I paid a hefty tuition, but I learned a lot for it. I’d used the Fenix 7 for a really long time, so this time I went with the Enduro 2, which is supposed to have at least slightly longer battery life.
No exchanges or refunds once opened…
That’s the printed image… it doesn’t actually look that sharp. The display is kind of drab and dull…
A G-Shock-style design with five physical buttons… you can operate it even with gloves on, which is something I’m really happy about. In winter or out hiking, I can work it without taking my gloves off.
Is this the first power-on… yeah, the display quality really is poor…
And the moment of truth — the battery runtime… 18 days… Even after syncing all sorts of apps, running a firmware update, turning on real-time sync and every other feature, it still says 18 days. It’s obviously not going to hit the 30 or 40 days the maker claims, but the point is it lasts at least two weeks. Which means I can charge it once a week, say on the weekend, and even if I forget and skip a charge during the week or over the weekend, it’ll keep working with no trouble at all.
I went for a run, just to test it out, for the first time in a while.
Sure enough, the big pace display showed only the info I actually wanted to know, so it was easy to take in at a glance. My body’s still sluggish, so I just did a light test run, nothing more.
For folks who enjoy hiking, backpacking, running, trail running and the like, and who want to train toward better times and finishing longer distances, I’d say a sports watch is probably a better fit than a smartwatch.
The Apple Watch has its upsides too, of course… like being able to handle Apple Pay right from your wrist… but in a world where most of us are carrying our phones everywhere anyway, I never really felt how much of an advantage that was. It’s true that Apple Pay was the exact reason I made the switch in the first place… but in practice Apple Pay only works with Hyundai Card, so for someone like me who needs to use all kinds of different cards, I had to pull out a card anyway.. And the gorgeous display, and Siri letting you handle this and that by voice message — all really convenient, but in the end the phone does all of it, so… ㅠㅠ
This is a personal, subjective, biased piece written by a guy who’s always loved swapping out his gear.
Just take it as “there’s a guy out there who thinks like this” and read it that way^^
A review of stuff I bought with my own money.
Thank you.
#GarminEnduro2 #AppleWatchUltra #SportsWatch #UltramarathonWatch #HikingWatch #BackpackingWatch #Smartwatch #GarminFenix
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