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I really want to like Apple Watch. Apple end-to-end encrypts your health data, so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, wh

I really want to like Apple Watch. Apple end-to-end encrypts your health data, so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, who recently fell victim to a ransomware attack). And IMO Apple does a superior job supporting their previous-generation devices: They'll replace an old Watch battery for a low, fixed fee, and to my knowledge they generally make new watchOS features available to older devices. But I've worn my Garmin Fenix 5 Plus for the last couple years, and there's no way any existing version of the Apple Watch could replace it for me: - It has a transflective LCD display that, while not as pretty as Apple Watch's, is brilliantly visible in the brightest of daylight. - The battery lasts more than a week when not using GPS. - It communicates with all my bicycle accessories over ANT+, so I don't need to take my bike computer with me to record a short ride. - It has a button-operated user interface, so it's still perfectly usable when I'm sweaty and in the middle of an activity. - It has a nearly indestructible sapphire crystal. I was eagerly following Apple Watch Series 6's release. But given that they still haven't fixed their battery life, it's very likely my next watch will be a newer Garmin.

theshrike79 6y ago
> I was eagerly following Apple Watch Series 6's release. But given that they still haven't fixed their battery life, it's very likely my next watch will be a newer Garmin. The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life. They could maybe increase the official battery life from 24 to 36 hours. Then people would forget to charge in the morning/evening and run out of battery midday -> Angry customers. The same will happen for every value short of "one week", which is most definitely not possible with the current form factor and hardware design.
- mshroyer 6y ago
  They could have made an incremental move in that direction, though. And incremental moves could build up to something more over multiple generations of the Apple Watch. I expected they'd be coming out with a more efficient SoC for the new Watch, and they did in the S6. But they chose to use the extra efficiency to divert more power to a brighter display instead of provide more battery life.
- panpanna 6y ago
  > The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life. I don't buy this at all. AW has worst on class battery life - with a huge margin - compared to other smartwatches including the horribly optimized android wear watches.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    Its still good enough to last all day under any usecase though. What I found with my pebble watch is it would always go flat on me in the middle of the day because I didn't have a real charging schedule. With my AW I just stick it on the charger when I go to sleep and it will never go flat on me.
    - leadingthenet 6y ago
      But then it doesn’t track your sleep...
      - canofbars 6y ago
        I never found the sleep tracking to be useful. I get enough sleep and the watch doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting. I did it a few times and can see my heart rate overnight but it isn't something that changes day to day.
      - t-writescode 6y ago
        My Apple Watch (see my response above) has lasted well over a day including sleep tracking, on a single charge. It would go to 2 days if I let it. It’ll be able to track your sleep, just turn the always on screen and several notifications off.
        irlib 6y ago
        I have everything on on my series 6 LTE. After 23 hours on my wrist it usually at 50%. It is new though. But the screen is always on. It seems they have improved battery life on series 6 comparing with my old series 4.
Hippocrates 6y ago
This is a bit like comparing a 90s pocket organizer to a modern smartphone. You’re not wrong, but you’re missing an awful lot.
- mshroyer 6y ago
  I may be, and some of the smart watch features do appeal to me. (And if a standalone Signal app were available for the Apple Watch with LTE, that might push me over the edge to switching.) But for now, Apple lags far behind Garmin in terms of fitness tracking for outdoor activities. That's more important to me, and it's more important to people like marathon runners who are more serious athletes than me. But we're also probably a minority of the market; I don't doubt Apple knows what they're doing here. A modern smartphone can do anything that a 90s pocket organizer could do and more. But Apple Watch still hasn't caught up to Garmin in many important respects.
  - cissou 6y ago
    Wait, what activity / health tracking does the Fenix have over the AW? EKG is a big plus of the AW in that regard. Battery life isnt great, but do you exercise for more than 24h at a time? Genuinely asking, trying to decide for myself
    - pfranz 6y ago
      Missing ANT+ was mentioned above. I was recently looking at the Apple Watch and rowing machines. Ignoring that a wrist-based heart monitor isn't great for things like boxing or rowing, you can't really get the heart rate monitor to connect to gym equipment. Instead of ANT+ or Bluetooth LE Apple did release GymKit in 2017--but very few things support it. The "rowing" exercise doesn't measure things rowers find useful (it's basically a generic cardio workout). When using a separate heart rate monitor and syncing your workout with Apple Health you can get double measurements heart rate (the AW constant heart rate and the strap during the workout). The fitness industry has a pretty well-developed ecosystem (I grabbed a random 5 year old heart rate chest strap and it paired immediately to the rowing machine). Garmin has seemed to have embraced that for at least a decade. It can definitely use improvement, but Apple has its own thing and it'll give you grief if they didn't have your use-case in mind. To be fair, others like Fitbit has similar issues. With them you can't even grab detailed heart-rate data.
threatofrain 6y ago
Apple Watch also has sapphire crystal among other material configurations; the configuration flexibility offers financial flexibility to consumers. There's also a difference between health tracking and fitness tracking, and in this regard I'm not sure Garmin will even intend to race with Apple.
lloeki 6y ago
> so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, who recently fell victim to a ransomware attack) I'm not sure I follow. AFAIK Garmin refused to pay, preemptively shuttered every single area of their operation possibly connected, even those not directly tied to the attack, to assess the fallout, and took the time to restore whatever was affected from backups. It looks like they did the right thing, and thinking anyone is impervious to a ransomware attack (which has nothing to do with privacy) is ludicrous. Meanwhile I could use my Garmin watch in complete autarky while their service was down. And this service is entirely opt-in, off by default, and I could just pull the .fit files via standard USB mass storage to process myself or upload to, a third party, like Strava. Interestingly enough, you don’t even need a smartphone even if you want to use Garmin’s cloud. Amusingly with 12-15 days of battery on average I did not even need to even recharge my ForeRunner 735XT during the whole downtime. I’m not getting any wearable that doesn’t cross that baseline.
- mshroyer 6y ago
  Regarding the ransomware attack, my point is that Garmin's security design was weak enough to allow it to happen. We were all, apparently, simply lucky that the variant of ransomware used didn't happen to exfiltrate all our health data. Garmin is notorious for their software issues, and Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments. But more importantly, because Apple end-to-end encrypts users' health data, nobody would be able to access any of it even if they were successfully attacked. I agree it's nice that Garmin wearables can mostly keep working independently even if Garmin Connect is down.
  - lloeki 6y ago
    > Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments Oops https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/ https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/

theshrike79 6y ago

> I was eagerly following Apple Watch Series 6's release. But given that they still haven't fixed their battery life, it's very likely my next watch will be a newer Garmin. The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life. They could maybe increase the official battery life from 24 to 36 hours. Then people would forget to charge in the morning/evening and run out of battery midday -> Angry customers. The same will happen for every value short of "one week", which is most definitely not possible with the current form factor and hardware design.

mshroyer 6y ago
They could have made an incremental move in that direction, though. And incremental moves could build up to something more over multiple generations of the Apple Watch. I expected they'd be coming out with a more efficient SoC for the new Watch, and they did in the S6. But they chose to use the extra efficiency to divert more power to a brighter display instead of provide more battery life.
panpanna 6y ago
> The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life. I don't buy this at all. AW has worst on class battery life - with a huge margin - compared to other smartwatches including the horribly optimized android wear watches.
- canofbars 6y ago
  Its still good enough to last all day under any usecase though. What I found with my pebble watch is it would always go flat on me in the middle of the day because I didn't have a real charging schedule. With my AW I just stick it on the charger when I go to sleep and it will never go flat on me.
  - leadingthenet 6y ago
    But then it doesn’t track your sleep...
    - canofbars 6y ago
      I never found the sleep tracking to be useful. I get enough sleep and the watch doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting. I did it a few times and can see my heart rate overnight but it isn't something that changes day to day.
    - t-writescode 6y ago
      My Apple Watch (see my response above) has lasted well over a day including sleep tracking, on a single charge. It would go to 2 days if I let it. It’ll be able to track your sleep, just turn the always on screen and several notifications off.
      - irlib 6y ago
        I have everything on on my series 6 LTE. After 23 hours on my wrist it usually at 50%. It is new though. But the screen is always on. It seems they have improved battery life on series 6 comparing with my old series 4.

Hippocrates 6y ago

This is a bit like comparing a 90s pocket organizer to a modern smartphone. You’re not wrong, but you’re missing an awful lot.

mshroyer 6y ago
I may be, and some of the smart watch features do appeal to me. (And if a standalone Signal app were available for the Apple Watch with LTE, that might push me over the edge to switching.) But for now, Apple lags far behind Garmin in terms of fitness tracking for outdoor activities. That's more important to me, and it's more important to people like marathon runners who are more serious athletes than me. But we're also probably a minority of the market; I don't doubt Apple knows what they're doing here. A modern smartphone can do anything that a 90s pocket organizer could do and more. But Apple Watch still hasn't caught up to Garmin in many important respects.
- cissou 6y ago
  Wait, what activity / health tracking does the Fenix have over the AW? EKG is a big plus of the AW in that regard. Battery life isnt great, but do you exercise for more than 24h at a time? Genuinely asking, trying to decide for myself
  - pfranz 6y ago
    Missing ANT+ was mentioned above. I was recently looking at the Apple Watch and rowing machines. Ignoring that a wrist-based heart monitor isn't great for things like boxing or rowing, you can't really get the heart rate monitor to connect to gym equipment. Instead of ANT+ or Bluetooth LE Apple did release GymKit in 2017--but very few things support it. The "rowing" exercise doesn't measure things rowers find useful (it's basically a generic cardio workout). When using a separate heart rate monitor and syncing your workout with Apple Health you can get double measurements heart rate (the AW constant heart rate and the strap during the workout). The fitness industry has a pretty well-developed ecosystem (I grabbed a random 5 year old heart rate chest strap and it paired immediately to the rowing machine). Garmin has seemed to have embraced that for at least a decade. It can definitely use improvement, but Apple has its own thing and it'll give you grief if they didn't have your use-case in mind. To be fair, others like Fitbit has similar issues. With them you can't even grab detailed heart-rate data.

threatofrain 6y ago

Apple Watch also has sapphire crystal among other material configurations; the configuration flexibility offers financial flexibility to consumers. There's also a difference between health tracking and fitness tracking, and in this regard I'm not sure Garmin will even intend to race with Apple.

lloeki 6y ago

> so I trust their stewardship more than most other companies (including Garmin, who recently fell victim to a ransomware attack) I'm not sure I follow. AFAIK Garmin refused to pay, preemptively shuttered every single area of their operation possibly connected, even those not directly tied to the attack, to assess the fallout, and took the time to restore whatever was affected from backups. It looks like they did the right thing, and thinking anyone is impervious to a ransomware attack (which has nothing to do with privacy) is ludicrous. Meanwhile I could use my Garmin watch in complete autarky while their service was down. And this service is entirely opt-in, off by default, and I could just pull the .fit files via standard USB mass storage to process myself or upload to, a third party, like Strava. Interestingly enough, you don’t even need a smartphone even if you want to use Garmin’s cloud. Amusingly with 12-15 days of battery on average I did not even need to even recharge my ForeRunner 735XT during the whole downtime. I’m not getting any wearable that doesn’t cross that baseline.

mshroyer 6y ago
Regarding the ransomware attack, my point is that Garmin's security design was weak enough to allow it to happen. We were all, apparently, simply lucky that the variant of ransomware used didn't happen to exfiltrate all our health data. Garmin is notorious for their software issues, and Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments. But more importantly, because Apple end-to-end encrypts users' health data, nobody would be able to access any of it even if they were successfully attacked. I agree it's nice that Garmin wearables can mostly keep working independently even if Garmin Connect is down.
- lloeki 6y ago
  > Apple is probably much better than Garmin at securing their production environments Oops https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/ https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/