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| Apple Watch Ultra |
So
on Saturday morning, I woke up with the Apple Watch Ultra charged up to a 100%
battery, drove to practice. I had Ultimate Frisbee practice out in New York. A
lot of people don't realize how many calories you burn during a three-hour
practice, but there you go. Finished that, drove home, and then went about the
rest of my day. I ended that day going to sleep with about 69% battery, nice,
then slept with the watch on for Sleep Tracking. Then, woke up on Sunday
morning with 60%, drove into New York City, again, had another practice, this
one a little hotter, sun's baking a little more, three more hours, and 2000
calories later, that was over, drove home, went about the rest of my day again,
and then again, I slept with the watch on for Sleep Tracking. Woke up on Monday
morning, drove to the studio.
Now
it's Monday morning, AM at the studio and I currently have 20% battery left. It's
pretty good, that's two days, and two nights, and into the third day, which is
far better than I've ever been able to get out of any other Apple Watch,
period, but let's rewind for a second. This is what I'm talking about So we
knew something like this was coming, We knew there was going to be an upgraded,
ruggedized Apple Watch in some way, and I think a lot of people sort of assumed
it would be called the Apple Watch Pro, but instead, we got this thing, and
it's called the Apple Watch Ultra.
The
thing is though, it would've actually been totally reasonable and probably kind
of perfect if they had also called this the Watch Pro, and that's just because
of the way Apple treats the word pro nowadays like Apple's tossed the name pro around
the highest end versions of almost all of their products iPhone Pro, MacBook
Pro, Air Pods Pro, iPad Pro, Pro Display, and each of these expensive devices has
some set of features that a smaller fraction of the population can actually
take advantage of and use.
Now, whether that makes you a pro or a hardcore user or an enthusiast, or a wannabe pro, like what is a pro Air Pods user anyway? That's a debate for another day but it's the same thing with this Apple Watch Ultra. I've been using it for about a week now, and the way I think about it is there's a core group of people for which the Apple Watch SE actually covers all of their needs, and that's like most of the population, but then there's an additional group a little bigger than that, for which the standard Apple Watch, which is now Series 8, covers all of their possible uses, so, you know, it adds the always-on display, the different sizes, et cetera, it's already a really versatile smartwatch but there's still some people around the outskirts, for whom the regular Apple Watch still wasn't enough, and Apple naturally still wants those people. So, this is an $800 watch that has some extra premium features and specs that are amazing, and definitely overkill for most people, like the ones in the middle of my illustration but it's attractive for the most extreme users, the adventurers who go on serious hikes, or go diving, or run marathons, or do triathlons. So, there's really three main things that they added to this watch over the regular one which are ruggedness, features, and battery, and they all kind of go hand in hand. For ruggedness, well, it's pretty obvious, they just beefed this thing up, so it's now much bigger, 49 millimeters diagonally, but it has the shapes and materials now of a watch that should be much harder to break.
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| Apple Watch Ultra |
It's
a titanium case with a ceramic back. It has much bigger buttons that don't have
quite as much travel as I expected, but they are easier to press with gloves. There's
the bigger crown, and then the crown guard on the side here, it's a very
distinct look, and then the display at the top here is a flat sapphire crystal,
instead of the normal curving over the edges, with this slightly raised lip all
the way around the screen, so it's protected from corner impacts. To me, it's
pretty huge, like this is a pretty massive watch. I will say it is not nearly
as heavy as it looks, which is pretty nice, but it does visually stand out for
a couple of reasons. One, this is the only color, so this is the exposed
titanium, it looks very silver, I wish it came in black because black is
slimming, like you can make a black watch look smaller with a black band, but
that would admittedly require black paint, which would probably get like
scratched, and then the silver would show through, and then it would look
pretty gnarly after a while, so I get it, maybe they could anodize it. I don't
know, but yeah, big silver watch on skinny wrist looks big. But then also, two,
this shape, see like this is a big watch to me. Someone who wears pretty much
only smartwatches, right? And smartwatches are kind of weird shapes sometimes, like
it's a computer on the wrist type of a look, it's sort of just a block, but in
the overall watch world, the Apple Watch Ultra is actually nowhere near the
biggest watch you'll see, like some people are very used to much larger watches
on their wrists actually, and especially those people on the outskirts I was
talking about earlier, they're fairly used to wearing some of these massive Gramin’s,
or Suuntos, or even specialized activity-specific equipment, like dive
computers, that'll make the Apple Watch Ultra look compact. So, the whole like
this-watch-is-huge thing is very much up to context. But the thing is like a
lot of these watches here are bigger than the Apple Watch, but they are watch
shaped, they're circular up front, and then they have this taper around the
wrist at the top and the bottom, so they don't look like they stick out nearly
as much, even though they do. Where the Apple Watch just doesn't taper at all, it's
just like a block, so yeah, the computer on the wrist thing, I don't know, I
actually don't mind the aesthetic, like I said, I just wish it came in black that
would've been nice. I wonder if Color Ware is going to be able to paint these
things. Anyway, that's the build quality, but the other two things that make
the Ultra are battery and capability. Battery being pretty simple, it's a much
bigger watch, and it has room for more battery inside, but we'll get to that in
a second, but the capabilities just come in the form of extra features. So, the
extra microphone and extra speakers for better audio quality in windy
environments the dual-frequency GPS for more accurate and reliable GPS in tougher
settings like forests, or in cities between skyscrapers. The WR 100 water resistance rating for submergence up
to 100 meters. The new 2000 nits’ max brightness for this display, which means
it's the most visible outdoors that I've seen a smartwatch OLED, plus it makes
for a nice flashlight if you need it.
And
most importantly, the new extra button, so that bright international orange
colored button is called the action button, and it can be mapped to, right now,
any one of these eight things. So, I currently have mine to just open the new
Workout Selector. I pick the type of workout, and then hit the action button
again to get it started, and then once you're in an activity, there's again a
layer of customization to what this action button can do.
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| Apple Watch Ultra |
So
maybe marking segments or laps inside a track workout or marking when you
switch from the bike to the run in a triathlon, all kinds of stuff like that. I
really like having I, I did feel like I accidentally pressed it a lot just
because of the way I grabbed the watch, and adjust the crown, but I pretty
quickly got used to that too. I think the most noticeable thing that this Apple
Watch has over other Apple Watches is going to be the battery life. So, this,
like I said from the beginning, two full days, and two full nights, with plenty
of room to spare, that's easily better than, it's roughly double what I was
able to get out of my Apple Watch Series 7.
The
thing is while that is a massive improvement for an Apple watch, it's still
nowhere near the other highest end watches, which many of them are expected to
go weeks, months, even years without even thinking about charging, this one
right here, this Casio watch. It's Casio, right? Casio Pro Trek, which has
solar charging, has never been charged. It has virtually infinite battery life,
it didn't even come with a charge. In this watch world a two-day battery life is
not that impressive. But really that brings me to the ultimate question with
this Ultra, which is how are you going to be using this watch? Like if you're
one of these people on the outside here that doesn't use an Apple Watch, Apple
was trying to find a reason you didn't use it and add the features or
capabilities to make you actually want to use it now, because of course they want
to bring you into the ecosystem.
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| Apple Watch Ultra |
So,
some of these people over here like these are frequent scuba divers, and
they've been using dedicated dive computers ranging from giant watch to tablet
on the wrist to track depth and directions, and a bunch of other safety metrics
underwater. Now the Apple Watch Ultra has added that WR 100 water resistance, up to 100 meters. There's
a new dive app to track some pretty basic stuff, like depth and give you times
for safety stops on your way back up for recreational diving, things like that,
but then Apple also partnered with a third-party company for this Oceanic+ app that's
coming later this year. That seems to do basically everything that the pro dive
computers do, including air integration, pretty much the only thing it doesn't
do that some extreme technical divers might want is tank pressure monitoring and
depth monitoring past 40 meters. Now some of these people way over here, these
people are really adventurous hikers, like not the normal beaten-path casuals finding
popular hikes on Google, I mean these people are going off and carving their
own path for miles and miles in the middle of nowhere sometimes for days at a
time. So the Watch Ultra's got now a bunch of navigation related features, there's
dual-frequency GPS for more accurate pinpointed GPS, even in challenging
locations, but then the new Compass app is pretty impressive. It lets you set
unlimited way points so that you can navigate back to them at any time, and you
can track your exact walking path with a backtrack feature in case visibility
is difficult, or you need the watch to guide you back where you came from. There's
also a super loud 86 decibel siren that can play from the new speaker system if
you find yourself completely lost with no one around, and yes, it is actually
impressively loud, and you can hear it from probably a quarter mile away, and
there's a new way finder watch face by default that sort of puts all this stuff
right at your fingertips, including a live compass that’s super smooth. I think a lot of people will just leave this
face on all the time, even if they don't need it, but then some of the other
people up over here are ultra-endurance athletes, and of course the name sort
of speaks for itself here. Honestly, the
Apple Watch just didn't last long enough for these people's Ironman races, and
ultra-marathons, and Spartan races. So,
the new Watch Ultra's got the dual frequency GPS, which is huge, and the action
button is nice too, but the significantly improved battery life is huge for
these. Now, it's not going to last a
week or a year, like some of the
stopwatches or simpler ones do, but now
it's just about double the battery life of
the standard Apple Watch, and it's
finally up to the task of some of the
most extreme GPS-heavy endurance athletes,
and even if it isn't Apple has mentioned
that there's this battery optimization setting feature coming later this year, that it's not the Low Power mode, that's already existing in the watch, but it's an extra setting within Workouts to ping GPS and heart rate less often. So in a normal workout for me which is it's a
disc sports workout for an ultimate practice, basically it's measuring heart
rate constantly, like every few seconds, which is super helpful, you can see how
quickly you recover, you can see when you're in certain heart rate zones during
the course of a practice, but if you're running like a 00 miles,
or something ridiculous, you
don't need multiple pings every minute. You
just need a broader sense of how it's going, so that's a helpful feature for
these people, and when you turn that on, it should essentially triple the life
of the Apple Watch. Apple says up to 60
hours. I don't have it yet, because it
doesn't exist, so I can't tell you exactly how well it does, but that's a
useful feature. They even have a trio of
new $99 bands for this watch for these activities. So, there's a Trail Band, which looks kind of
sick. Then the Alpine Loop, and the
Ocean Band. As a reviewer, I want to like,
I want to test all these activities, and like go, okay, I guess I got to run an
ultra-marathon now, and like scuba dive, but I can't remember the last time I was
100 meters underwater, let alone 40. So,
I can't test all of this stuff, but I actually reached out and heard directly
from these people on my podcast, a Waveform podcast. I'll link the episode specifically below the
Like button, so you can listen to it. But
I had on a diver, an ultra-runner, and an alpinist. And so, we asked them about the risk computers
they currently use, and whether or not they think this Apple Watch Ultra is
good enough to replace them. And through
those conversations, one by one, they each came to the end with basically the
same conclusion which is that yeah, looks like they kind of did everything that
they were looking for out of an Apple Watch.
I'll link it below so you can hear exactly what they said. And then there's me, so, you know, I'm a tech
reviewer, and an Ultimate Frisbee player.
So, turns out the normal Apple Watch is actually enough for me. Like I said, a normal ultimate workout or any sort of training we do is typically just a ton of heart rate
readings, there's not a bunch of GPS
pings or elevation tracking or anything
like that, so it's not super demanding,
but still on the ultra, I get to reap
the benefits of the battery only running
down 20% during a practice, instead of 40%,
and then the more accurate GPS readings
and the brighter screen are kind of nice to have on other activities, maybe the occasional
bike ride, or a hike, or stuff like
that, and it might be better for you
too. It's one of those things where I
think generally if you have to ask, you probably
don't need it, but it really reminds me
of the ROG Phone, like that thing is
complete, complete overkill for almost
every human on the planet with all its
crazy gaming features and absurdly high
end specs, but also all those features
for gaming also happen to make it better
for media and regular use, and it's
basically the same thing here, like this
is technically speaking the best Apple
Watch they've ever made, it's got the
longest battery life, the biggest,
brightest display, the best microphones
and speakers, and it's the most accurate
trekking package yet. I mean, if your
wrists are big enough, then yeah, you can daily this too, it’s kind of put
itself in this unique category where it's replacing some of these extreme like
dive computers or GPS watches that you'd normally take off when you're done
with your workout, but it's an Apple Watch through and through at the end of
the day, you can wear this thing every single day. I just don't know if you can like dress this
thing down as much as you could a regular Apple Watch. Like fun fact, I wore the Apple Watch Series
7 in midnight with my tux at the Met Gala and it didn't look insane to me
anyway, get a nice, you know, watch band with it, like the leather on at
shop.mkbhd.com. It all works out, great. But yeah, this one just because it's so, it
just sticks out, it’s massive all the time, you can't really hide it as much,
you might have a little more trouble with that.
But hey, if you know what you're getting into, the ROG phone is a pretty
good phone, and if you know what you're getting into, the Apple Watch Ultra is
a pretty good Apple Watch. So that's
been it,
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