7 ms·

I thought Apple Watch was compatible with Android, just not as smooth to use. This is eye opening. At the same time, though I agree Apple Watch has the best sl

I thought Apple Watch was compatible with Android, just not as smooth to use. This is eye opening. At the same time, though I agree Apple Watch has the best sleep tracking (and I work in the sleep space), the difference in sleep tracking compared to others probably isn't big enough to justify jumping through all these hoops, unless, like the author, you enjoy doing this sort of thing. The Whoop sleep tracking is quite good, but a rather expensive (I think) subscription just to get data about a health function you have very little direct influence over. The Xaoimi Bands are inexpensive, and from what I understand, also have good sleep tracking. I also just came across this https://cardiomood.com/ https://cardiomood.com/, which seems to be like a non-subscription, but rather expensive Whoop.

rerx 2y ago
Do you have an opinion on the sleep tracking in Garmin Fenix watches?
- hangonhn 2y ago
  I have both an Apple Watch 8 and the Garmin Fenix and I use the Fenix for sleep tracking. I find the Apple Watch to be too general with the stats. The Fenix gives a lot more detail. You can debate if the extra detail is useful or not. I also like the heart rate variability tracking with the Fenix (it seems to mirror how tire I feel pretty well). Lastly, the Fenix can hold a charge for several days. I can use it to sleep track and run and repeat and it charges quickly. If I sleep track with my Apple Watch, it may not have enough battery for the rest of the day. I run with both -- the Fenix for running specific tracking and the Apple for calling friends, listening to Audible, or podcasts.
  - notatoad 2y ago
    my experience with garmin (vivoactive, not fenix) was that they had all kinds of precision and detail, but it also didn't even notice when i got up to pee in the middle of the night - just a straight line through the graphs as though i hadn't woken up at all. that was the end of my trust in their sleep tracking.
    - gf000 2y ago
      The Quantified Scientist does very detailed, measurement-based tests on all sort of smart watches, you might want to see where your device stands in his charts in terms of accuracy.
    - lloeki 2y ago
      Mine reliably notices that I woke up and immediately go under when my wife comes home late in the night, which happens basically every day (because bartender) so I get somewhat statistically significant results in that regard. It's accurate enough.
    - danielscrubs 2y ago
      Had a Garmin that would say my table had a heartbeat.
      - notatoad 2y ago
        that actually might have been accurate. my garmin was really good at picking up my heart rate. there was one time i had it in a waist pack, and i was wearing a chest strap that was not paired to the garmin, and the garmin managed to pick up a pretty accurate heart rate for most of a bike ride.
  - lloeki 2y ago
    > hold a charge for several days That would be an understatement, are you running/cycling a lot outside, or is it a smaller model (thus small battery because physics)? Mine (Fenix 7) holds charge for 15 days minimum and that's with tracking workouts 3-5x/week (no GPS though, winter so I treadmill for runs). On a couple of months where I didn't do sports it held up 25-30 days. I have SpO2 tracking disabled because it's quite battery intensive and the only use for it would be high altitude acclimation, although I must admit I looked at it during my "stop smoking" process.
- kdmtctl 2y ago
  Data aside, neither are ideal. I can’t sleep with the Apple Watch because it needs to be charged while I sleep to get through the day, and the Fenix is too heavy for my wrist at night. I use an old Mi Band, which tracks approximate data that suits me.
  - aeontech 2y ago
    FWIW, I charge my watch while taking a shower before bed and in the morning, and that seems to be enough to get me through the day and through the night.
  - alternatex 2y ago
    According to reviewers, Mi Bands and generally all of Xiaomi's devices are fairly bad at sleep tracking. So much so that it's almost pointless to use them for that.
    - user_7832 2y ago
      I know it’s fully anecdotal, but my Xiaomi/Huami (former Xiaomi sub-brand) devices have matched up sleep duration quite well with what I feel in the morning - and I’m quite sensitive to less sleep. I think it’s quite good for sleep duration, but I don’t rely on REM duration etc as I don’t have much use for it. When it predicts a good sleep score I’ve definitely slept well, though sometimes it gives a lesser score even when I don’t appear to have slept poorly. (I’ve used a Mi Band 1, an Amazfit Bip, and currently an Amazfit Band 7.)
    - kdmtctl 2y ago
      Could be true. But I have no use for more precise and deeper info. I need it only to fight possible anxiety spikes and attribute them to a bad sleep.
- lawgimenez 2y ago
  I’m still using old Fitbit Inspire, which is not too big for sleep tracking. And it’s very accurate, for me.
- pedalpete 2y ago
  I recently got a Fenix 7, but not for sleep tracking purposes. I find it ok. I definitely think it isn't great at measuring wakefulness at night, but I also have a very low HR and high HRV (while awake), which so this causes the margin for error in the device to be very low. As I usually say, all of the devices are good enough. You're getting historical data about what your body did. You can't go back and change it anyway. I don't see real value in knowing my historical sleep data.
- m463 2y ago
  I had the fenix 7 and I liked the sleep tracking. Because the garmin can function without requiring and acount/online nonsense, it does the sleep analysis and recommendations on the watch.
- draven 2y ago
  Not OP but I have a Fenix 7x. What happens very infrequently is that I would wake up during the night, and then be absolutely still (I'm trying to go back to sleep) except for checking my watch every 15-20mn. This does not get detected as "awake" the following morning. I don't really care because I got this watch so I can upload a track and follow it while recording various metrics during 5+ days, and for this it works perfectly.
  - coredog64 2y ago
    There are two data points you need to accurately track sleep: Motion and respiration rate. With that information you can identify light sleep vs. deep sleep, and sometimes you can differentiate between light sleep and being still. Source: Worked on the ResMed S+ and got a theory dump from the PhDs running the project.
    - mandevil 2y ago
      Sleep versus awake from a sensor on the wrist is always going to be subject to wide error bars. Source: worked on an experiment trying to make people fall asleep while driving (in a simulated environment so it was safe- I built the simulated environment). It took a lot of EEG wires and gel in subject's hair etc. to accurately figure that out.
    - draven 2y ago
      I would think that "pressing the button to turn on the backlight so I can check the time" would be a good indication that I'm awake :)
  - MrMetlHed 2y ago
    Same experience for me. If I wake up but lie still it's not nearly as accurate. What I do find useful is the Body Battery score, that generally maps well to how I feel the next day. And the Stress Score is an eerily good indicator of when I'm getting sick and when the illness is stopping.
oidar 2y ago
How does apple watch compare with the ooma ring for sleep tracking?
- pedalpete 2y ago
  I think you mean Oura ring. I used an Oura for a while, and it is quite good. The thing I say about all of them is...what's the value in you having better tracking? Let's say it's off by 4% and that you got 4% less deep sleep last night than your tracker says? What are you going to do about it? You can't change the data from the past anyway. They're all "good enough" I'd say.
  - dbspin 2y ago
    The value of accurate tracking is comparison. As someone who suffers from chronic sleep issues, being able to accurately compare the effect of interventions on my sleep pattern, as well as account for seasonality etc is invaluable. Accurate tracking also helps forestall habituation - it's like keeping a paper diary, obviously you can't change the past (no one ever suggested you could) but you can make yourself aware of large changes that happened too gradually to be obvious.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    Yeah I'm not sure what I'd use this for. I tend to know if I've had a bad night's sleep, and the interventions I'd try are all things I should do anyway - don't drink, less caffeine, lower stress.
  - matwood 2y ago
    > The thing I say about all of them is...what's the value in you having better tracking? Same reason I weigh myself almost every day. If there are changes or I have some other issue I can go back over the data with my doctor.
- jerlam 2y ago
  The Oura ring does a lot more analytics. There's a "sleep score", a "readiness score", various algorithms to suggest an "optimal sleep time", etc. The Apple Watch just records stuff and throws it in the Health app. That's it. They added a "vitals" app that mostly alerts you when the numbers it records are drastically different than the norm, but it's not really analyzing or suggesting anything. I get the feeling that Apple thought there would be a whole ecosystem of apps that would analyze your sleep data, so they didn't need to build any of it into the watch or the health app itself.
samtheprogram 2y ago
This guy actively went the hard path. He didn’t need to do the for Kids pairing. It’s actually a case study in getting too in the weeds of a problem that’s tangential to what you’re trying to solve: good health reporting. Some of the article you’d probably still want to do with Android, however (e.g. calendar syncing). That said, I got an Apple Watch to attempt to replace my cell phone when leaving the house, but Apple seems to intentionally or nonintentionally wants to sabotage this use case.
- karlgkk 2y ago
  How is the use case being sabotaged? They actively advertise that
  - samtheprogram 2y ago
    I think a perfect example is swipe to type. It’s would actually be easy to type on the watch if it supported this. It’s been a few years, so I might be out of date here, but the last update here was that there was an app that supported this (FlickType, only for Messages because app APIs, sure fine) but Apple banned the app after a lengthy but successful App Store approval and several updates (it appears to be back now). I consistently ran into issues similar to this, where a solution was so obvious but Apple either totally missed it or seemed to actively make the issue harder without a phone. I wish a wrote a blog post at the time about each one but I didn’t. Syncing music also comes to mind — I think you had to sync specific playlists, not your library, and it really, really sucked with almost no feedback. You also needed the iPhone watch app to do it — sync to phone then sync to watch. I was surprised Apple shipped it. This comes from a happy macOS, Arch Linux and iPhone user who buys/uses an Android every 5 years for a year. I’m going to charge the watch and update it to see if Apple implemented it. I just don’t think Apple is interested nor financially motivated to make the watch a first class citizen.
- ngai_aku 2y ago
  Has it been a bad experience? I feel bad about how much time I spend staring at my phone, and I think the watch would be the ideal form factor for me, but I haven’t pulled the trigger because it feels silly spending more money on tech to reduce my dependency on tech
FrequentLurker 2y ago
The Xiaomi Bands are quite poor according this tester[1]. Huawei Bands are slightly better but I guess you can't complain much for the price. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_aS0Q188tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_aS0Q188tY
- pedalpete 2y ago
  The MiBand7 is fairly far on the right, based on the price. But you're right, I thought more of the Mi products where higher.
cchi_co 2y ago
It seems like the "best" solution depends on how much one values ecosystem freedom, data accuracy or simplicity of use
- isodev 2y ago
  Indeed, Apple gadgets work well if your body and lifestyle are close to what Apple tests for. Apple Watch is good “in general”, but for example it would regularly show me to be below sea level, not capture my heart rate (like measure it wildly off by 20-30 units) etc. AirPods as hearing aids — what if I'm not using an iPhone? So yes, the post is quite accurate and there really is no choice at the end, the wall of the garden is impossibly high.
  - cchi_co 2y ago
    [dead]
ctm92 2y ago
From what I've heard, Whoop (https://whoop.com https://whoop.com) has the best sleep tracking, but it is subscription based and the monthly price is ridiculous for a device that has not even a screen
matco11 2y ago
For years, I was an Apple Watch user: I assumed that all medium/top end trackers were the same, and that Apple Watch was pretty much the benchmark. …but now that is have had the opportunity to use extensively Garmin watches, my experience is that they offer far superior accuracy, precision and technical details for activity tracking and sleeping than Apple Watch. My picks would be in the following order: 1) Garmin high-end watches, they are truly a work of love 2) Aura ring, because of great convenience and reliability 3) Apple Watch, because they are great all-rounders 4) Coros, Suunto, Whoops, because they are highly reliable, but lack some of the smart functions 5) Withings, Fitbit, etc…, they are a solid option, but they generally lack distinctive features/capabilities I would stay away from any brands offering super cheap products, due to privacy concerns and lower reliability and lack of advanced features.
- blairbeckwith 2y ago
  I would love to hear more about your opinions on this as someone who has been experimenting with as a semi-serious runner after years of being Apple Watch exclusive. What I see is benefits around battery life, form factor (buttons are awesome), and good native support for "compound metrics" like Endurance Score, Hill Score, Training Status, etc. But when it comes to actual stats and metrics, Apple Watch feels superior in most ways. Garmin sleep tracking anecdotally feels much less accurate. It baffles me that it only shows pace to the nearest 5 seconds during a workout. It confuses me that it only shows a Vo2max estimate to zero decimal places. Then, Apple Watch is at least 10x more customizable via third party apps. Want a Whoop-like experience with strain score, recovery score, etc.? Bevel and Athlytic are there. Want a much more in-depth and customizable workout experience? WorkOutdoors puts Garmin to shame here. What am I missing that makes Garmin so pervasive, while Apple Watch is derided as "not a serious sports watch"?
  - pertique 2y ago
    I'm hardly a serious runner, but I'd say the pros you laid out for Garmin are quite nice, and the cons are inconsequential to your average fitness tracker user. I'd probably argue they're inconsequential to everyone but the absolute elite and, for them, are pointless. Sleep tracking is hard to action on for the average user outside "you slept this long" and none of the writst-based devices are that good anyway. Pace to sub 5 is a little more annoying, but probably not useful for the majority considering most people are just running, not craning over their watch the whole time. VO2 max is also a wild estimate, and I'd hazard it's not particularly accurate for the average person. It's off by close to 20% for me, and I should be a pretty good candidate. On the flipside, you can get tons of data out of a Garmin that costs significantly less than an Apple watch. Plus, the majority of Garmins sold are fitness devices with some smart features, with Apple watches being primarily a smart watch. While maybe not justified (I think the Apple watch features are quite nice) I'd expect that's a major part of the reason Garmin has the rep it does. If someone is buying a device to run, most would recommend the cheaper, light, simple, specialized, long battery life watch over the opposite. If you already have an Apple watch, it's probably a no brainer. For the high-end Garmin devices, it's a little more complex, but not many people are considering a US$800+ device without knowing the nuances of the discussion, or having enough money to not care.

rerx 2y ago

Do you have an opinion on the sleep tracking in Garmin Fenix watches?

hangonhn 2y ago
I have both an Apple Watch 8 and the Garmin Fenix and I use the Fenix for sleep tracking. I find the Apple Watch to be too general with the stats. The Fenix gives a lot more detail. You can debate if the extra detail is useful or not. I also like the heart rate variability tracking with the Fenix (it seems to mirror how tire I feel pretty well). Lastly, the Fenix can hold a charge for several days. I can use it to sleep track and run and repeat and it charges quickly. If I sleep track with my Apple Watch, it may not have enough battery for the rest of the day. I run with both -- the Fenix for running specific tracking and the Apple for calling friends, listening to Audible, or podcasts.
- notatoad 2y ago
  my experience with garmin (vivoactive, not fenix) was that they had all kinds of precision and detail, but it also didn't even notice when i got up to pee in the middle of the night - just a straight line through the graphs as though i hadn't woken up at all. that was the end of my trust in their sleep tracking.
  - gf000 2y ago
    The Quantified Scientist does very detailed, measurement-based tests on all sort of smart watches, you might want to see where your device stands in his charts in terms of accuracy.
  - lloeki 2y ago
    Mine reliably notices that I woke up and immediately go under when my wife comes home late in the night, which happens basically every day (because bartender) so I get somewhat statistically significant results in that regard. It's accurate enough.
  - danielscrubs 2y ago
    Had a Garmin that would say my table had a heartbeat.
    - notatoad 2y ago
      that actually might have been accurate. my garmin was really good at picking up my heart rate. there was one time i had it in a waist pack, and i was wearing a chest strap that was not paired to the garmin, and the garmin managed to pick up a pretty accurate heart rate for most of a bike ride.
- lloeki 2y ago
  > hold a charge for several days That would be an understatement, are you running/cycling a lot outside, or is it a smaller model (thus small battery because physics)? Mine (Fenix 7) holds charge for 15 days minimum and that's with tracking workouts 3-5x/week (no GPS though, winter so I treadmill for runs). On a couple of months where I didn't do sports it held up 25-30 days. I have SpO2 tracking disabled because it's quite battery intensive and the only use for it would be high altitude acclimation, although I must admit I looked at it during my "stop smoking" process.
kdmtctl 2y ago
Data aside, neither are ideal. I can’t sleep with the Apple Watch because it needs to be charged while I sleep to get through the day, and the Fenix is too heavy for my wrist at night. I use an old Mi Band, which tracks approximate data that suits me.
- aeontech 2y ago
  FWIW, I charge my watch while taking a shower before bed and in the morning, and that seems to be enough to get me through the day and through the night.
- alternatex 2y ago
  According to reviewers, Mi Bands and generally all of Xiaomi's devices are fairly bad at sleep tracking. So much so that it's almost pointless to use them for that.
  - user_7832 2y ago
    I know it’s fully anecdotal, but my Xiaomi/Huami (former Xiaomi sub-brand) devices have matched up sleep duration quite well with what I feel in the morning - and I’m quite sensitive to less sleep. I think it’s quite good for sleep duration, but I don’t rely on REM duration etc as I don’t have much use for it. When it predicts a good sleep score I’ve definitely slept well, though sometimes it gives a lesser score even when I don’t appear to have slept poorly. (I’ve used a Mi Band 1, an Amazfit Bip, and currently an Amazfit Band 7.)
  - kdmtctl 2y ago
    Could be true. But I have no use for more precise and deeper info. I need it only to fight possible anxiety spikes and attribute them to a bad sleep.
lawgimenez 2y ago
I’m still using old Fitbit Inspire, which is not too big for sleep tracking. And it’s very accurate, for me.
pedalpete 2y ago
I recently got a Fenix 7, but not for sleep tracking purposes. I find it ok. I definitely think it isn't great at measuring wakefulness at night, but I also have a very low HR and high HRV (while awake), which so this causes the margin for error in the device to be very low. As I usually say, all of the devices are good enough. You're getting historical data about what your body did. You can't go back and change it anyway. I don't see real value in knowing my historical sleep data.
m463 2y ago
I had the fenix 7 and I liked the sleep tracking. Because the garmin can function without requiring and acount/online nonsense, it does the sleep analysis and recommendations on the watch.
draven 2y ago
Not OP but I have a Fenix 7x. What happens very infrequently is that I would wake up during the night, and then be absolutely still (I'm trying to go back to sleep) except for checking my watch every 15-20mn. This does not get detected as "awake" the following morning. I don't really care because I got this watch so I can upload a track and follow it while recording various metrics during 5+ days, and for this it works perfectly.
- coredog64 2y ago
  There are two data points you need to accurately track sleep: Motion and respiration rate. With that information you can identify light sleep vs. deep sleep, and sometimes you can differentiate between light sleep and being still. Source: Worked on the ResMed S+ and got a theory dump from the PhDs running the project.
  - mandevil 2y ago
    Sleep versus awake from a sensor on the wrist is always going to be subject to wide error bars. Source: worked on an experiment trying to make people fall asleep while driving (in a simulated environment so it was safe- I built the simulated environment). It took a lot of EEG wires and gel in subject's hair etc. to accurately figure that out.
  - draven 2y ago
    I would think that "pressing the button to turn on the backlight so I can check the time" would be a good indication that I'm awake :)
- MrMetlHed 2y ago
  Same experience for me. If I wake up but lie still it's not nearly as accurate. What I do find useful is the Body Battery score, that generally maps well to how I feel the next day. And the Stress Score is an eerily good indicator of when I'm getting sick and when the illness is stopping.

oidar 2y ago

How does apple watch compare with the ooma ring for sleep tracking?

pedalpete 2y ago
I think you mean Oura ring. I used an Oura for a while, and it is quite good. The thing I say about all of them is...what's the value in you having better tracking? Let's say it's off by 4% and that you got 4% less deep sleep last night than your tracker says? What are you going to do about it? You can't change the data from the past anyway. They're all "good enough" I'd say.
- dbspin 2y ago
  The value of accurate tracking is comparison. As someone who suffers from chronic sleep issues, being able to accurately compare the effect of interventions on my sleep pattern, as well as account for seasonality etc is invaluable. Accurate tracking also helps forestall habituation - it's like keeping a paper diary, obviously you can't change the past (no one ever suggested you could) but you can make yourself aware of large changes that happened too gradually to be obvious.
- IanCal 2y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure what I'd use this for. I tend to know if I've had a bad night's sleep, and the interventions I'd try are all things I should do anyway - don't drink, less caffeine, lower stress.
- matwood 2y ago
  > The thing I say about all of them is...what's the value in you having better tracking? Same reason I weigh myself almost every day. If there are changes or I have some other issue I can go back over the data with my doctor.
jerlam 2y ago
The Oura ring does a lot more analytics. There's a "sleep score", a "readiness score", various algorithms to suggest an "optimal sleep time", etc. The Apple Watch just records stuff and throws it in the Health app. That's it. They added a "vitals" app that mostly alerts you when the numbers it records are drastically different than the norm, but it's not really analyzing or suggesting anything. I get the feeling that Apple thought there would be a whole ecosystem of apps that would analyze your sleep data, so they didn't need to build any of it into the watch or the health app itself.

samtheprogram 2y ago

This guy actively went the hard path. He didn’t need to do the for Kids pairing. It’s actually a case study in getting too in the weeds of a problem that’s tangential to what you’re trying to solve: good health reporting. Some of the article you’d probably still want to do with Android, however (e.g. calendar syncing). That said, I got an Apple Watch to attempt to replace my cell phone when leaving the house, but Apple seems to intentionally or nonintentionally wants to sabotage this use case.

karlgkk 2y ago
How is the use case being sabotaged? They actively advertise that
- samtheprogram 2y ago
  I think a perfect example is swipe to type. It’s would actually be easy to type on the watch if it supported this. It’s been a few years, so I might be out of date here, but the last update here was that there was an app that supported this (FlickType, only for Messages because app APIs, sure fine) but Apple banned the app after a lengthy but successful App Store approval and several updates (it appears to be back now). I consistently ran into issues similar to this, where a solution was so obvious but Apple either totally missed it or seemed to actively make the issue harder without a phone. I wish a wrote a blog post at the time about each one but I didn’t. Syncing music also comes to mind — I think you had to sync specific playlists, not your library, and it really, really sucked with almost no feedback. You also needed the iPhone watch app to do it — sync to phone then sync to watch. I was surprised Apple shipped it. This comes from a happy macOS, Arch Linux and iPhone user who buys/uses an Android every 5 years for a year. I’m going to charge the watch and update it to see if Apple implemented it. I just don’t think Apple is interested nor financially motivated to make the watch a first class citizen.
ngai_aku 2y ago
Has it been a bad experience? I feel bad about how much time I spend staring at my phone, and I think the watch would be the ideal form factor for me, but I haven’t pulled the trigger because it feels silly spending more money on tech to reduce my dependency on tech

FrequentLurker 2y ago

The Xiaomi Bands are quite poor according this tester[1]. Huawei Bands are slightly better but I guess you can't complain much for the price. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_aS0Q188tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_aS0Q188tY

pedalpete 2y ago
The MiBand7 is fairly far on the right, based on the price. But you're right, I thought more of the Mi products where higher.

cchi_co 2y ago

It seems like the "best" solution depends on how much one values ecosystem freedom, data accuracy or simplicity of use

isodev 2y ago
Indeed, Apple gadgets work well if your body and lifestyle are close to what Apple tests for. Apple Watch is good “in general”, but for example it would regularly show me to be below sea level, not capture my heart rate (like measure it wildly off by 20-30 units) etc. AirPods as hearing aids — what if I'm not using an iPhone? So yes, the post is quite accurate and there really is no choice at the end, the wall of the garden is impossibly high.
- cchi_co 2y ago
  [dead]

ctm92 2y ago

From what I've heard, Whoop (https://whoop.com https://whoop.com) has the best sleep tracking, but it is subscription based and the monthly price is ridiculous for a device that has not even a screen

matco11 2y ago

For years, I was an Apple Watch user: I assumed that all medium/top end trackers were the same, and that Apple Watch was pretty much the benchmark. …but now that is have had the opportunity to use extensively Garmin watches, my experience is that they offer far superior accuracy, precision and technical details for activity tracking and sleeping than Apple Watch. My picks would be in the following order: 1) Garmin high-end watches, they are truly a work of love 2) Aura ring, because of great convenience and reliability 3) Apple Watch, because they are great all-rounders 4) Coros, Suunto, Whoops, because they are highly reliable, but lack some of the smart functions 5) Withings, Fitbit, etc…, they are a solid option, but they generally lack distinctive features/capabilities I would stay away from any brands offering super cheap products, due to privacy concerns and lower reliability and lack of advanced features.

blairbeckwith 2y ago
I would love to hear more about your opinions on this as someone who has been experimenting with as a semi-serious runner after years of being Apple Watch exclusive. What I see is benefits around battery life, form factor (buttons are awesome), and good native support for "compound metrics" like Endurance Score, Hill Score, Training Status, etc. But when it comes to actual stats and metrics, Apple Watch feels superior in most ways. Garmin sleep tracking anecdotally feels much less accurate. It baffles me that it only shows pace to the nearest 5 seconds during a workout. It confuses me that it only shows a Vo2max estimate to zero decimal places. Then, Apple Watch is at least 10x more customizable via third party apps. Want a Whoop-like experience with strain score, recovery score, etc.? Bevel and Athlytic are there. Want a much more in-depth and customizable workout experience? WorkOutdoors puts Garmin to shame here. What am I missing that makes Garmin so pervasive, while Apple Watch is derided as "not a serious sports watch"?
- pertique 2y ago
  I'm hardly a serious runner, but I'd say the pros you laid out for Garmin are quite nice, and the cons are inconsequential to your average fitness tracker user. I'd probably argue they're inconsequential to everyone but the absolute elite and, for them, are pointless. Sleep tracking is hard to action on for the average user outside "you slept this long" and none of the writst-based devices are that good anyway. Pace to sub 5 is a little more annoying, but probably not useful for the majority considering most people are just running, not craning over their watch the whole time. VO2 max is also a wild estimate, and I'd hazard it's not particularly accurate for the average person. It's off by close to 20% for me, and I should be a pretty good candidate. On the flipside, you can get tons of data out of a Garmin that costs significantly less than an Apple watch. Plus, the majority of Garmins sold are fitness devices with some smart features, with Apple watches being primarily a smart watch. While maybe not justified (I think the Apple watch features are quite nice) I'd expect that's a major part of the reason Garmin has the rep it does. If someone is buying a device to run, most would recommend the cheaper, light, simple, specialized, long battery life watch over the opposite. If you already have an Apple watch, it's probably a no brainer. For the high-end Garmin devices, it's a little more complex, but not many people are considering a US$800+ device without knowing the nuances of the discussion, or having enough money to not care.