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Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

jooonas.medium.com

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Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#61

Post by ip26 »

ghaff wrote: post #43
enlyth wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find it weird that in their reveal event they portrayed all these people doing extreme sports in the middle of nowhere, climbing some huge mountain with the watch, and then you find out it has a battery life of 36 hours at most. You're supposed to carry a power bank to your climbing expedition and charge your watch constantly? How impractical is that.

Well, if you're climbing some huge mountain in the middle of nowhere you probably need to charge your Garmin as well. Garmin absolutely has better battery life. But if you can see your way to charging the Apple Watch more frequently it seems more interesting for a combination of regular smartwatch use and day activities. And, if you are climbing huge mountains in the middle of nowhere, I assume purchasing a specializ…

You may need to charge… but the Garmin uses something like ~10mAh/day? You could top off the watch for months with a single pair of AAA batteries.

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#62

Post by ip26 »

qualifiedai wrote: post #8

I love my Garmin Fenix 7 watch. Built in surf session tracking is superb. Lots of other cool features, solar charging and over a week of battery for my use. I ditched my Apple watch for it. Having said that, one dangerous area where Garmin is missing a boat is their Garmin IQ store - that ecosystem is basically dead with very few useful apps.

One one hand i absolutely agree. But on the other, has anybody, Apple included, figured out any terribly useful apps for a watch that doesn’t already come built in or partner with a phone?

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#63

Post by spike021 »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #36
majou wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to mention they don’t sunset their products after 12 months Apple still provides security updates for the iPhone 5s from 2013. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT213428

Doesn’t matter. Your applications could choose not to include certain iOS versions anymore. And then you’re SOL, even if you’ve paid for the app but now the online component doesn’t work because they changed their APIs.

Depending on the app, do you really expect companies to devote X resources (maybe even a full, separate iOS team) specifically to maintain a version of an app for older devices?

Maybe that's feasible for the larger tech companies but not the smaller ones.

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#64

Post by jerlam »

xattt wrote: post #13
enlyth wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find it weird that in their reveal event they portrayed all these people doing extreme sports in the middle of nowhere, climbing some huge mountain with the watch, and then you find out it has a battery life of 36 hours at most. You're supposed to carry a power bank to your climbing expedition and charge your watch constantly? How impractical is that.

You mean you don’t snap on the magnetic puck while the watch is still on your arm, cable dangling, while you hold a power bank in your hand?

Does the Apple Watch actually support charging in the middle of a workout?

The first generations of the Garmin Fenix actually supported charging in use with a very overcomplicated charging cable: https://youtu.be/S9haDnwIuSQ

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#65

Post by ghaff »

ip26 wrote: post #62
qualifiedai wrote: post #8

I love my Garmin Fenix 7 watch. Built in surf session tracking is superb. Lots of other cool features, solar charging and over a week of battery for my use. I ditched my Apple watch for it. Having said that, one dangerous area where Garmin is missing a boat is their Garmin IQ store - that ecosystem is basically dead with very few useful apps.

One one hand i absolutely agree. But on the other, has anybody, Apple included, figured out any terribly useful apps for a watch that doesn’t already come built in or partner with a phone?

Well, at least pre-Ultra, Apple was rather deficient in outdoor activity apps including hiking. But that may now be moot with the Ultra. (And the Ultra probably explains Apple's benign neglect of this area prior.)

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#66

Post by ghaff »

ip26 wrote: post #61
ghaff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you're climbing some huge mountain in the middle of nowhere you probably need to charge your Garmin as well. Garmin absolutely has better battery life. But if you can see your way to charging the Apple Watch more frequently it seems more interesting for a combination of regular smartwatch use and day activities. And, if you are climbing huge mountains in the middle of nowhere, I assume purchasing a specializ…

You may need to charge… but the Garmin uses something like ~10mAh/day? You could top off the watch for months with a single pair of AAA batteries.

Just make sure you keep them warm.

It's been a while since I've done any high-altitude mountaineering. I honest don't know what people actually use these days. Certainly GPS watches didn't exist when I was climbing. Not sure if people use power-hungry watches that need to be charged these days or not.

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#67

Post by renewiltord »

exabrial wrote: post #11
greggsy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they’re 5-10 years behind, but I wouldn’t underestimate Apple’s ability to create a thriving ecosystem. Any Garmin app developers worth their salt should be scrambling to port their existing apps to the Apple Watch platform. It’s currently an under-supplied market, and failing to tap into that opportunity is a bad business strategy. Totally agree re: the current state of repairability and support, but I wouldn’t…

Not at all, Garmin is not fashionware like Apple. You buy Garmin because you are an athlete that needs an actual complete product that is tested and bullet proof; where you own the hardware, and you’re not ‘renting’ it from Apple. If you want to flash how fancy you are to your coworkers and have a second iPhone, you buy the iwatch. Apple does not hold a candle to Garmin’s software for sports and training… they have e…

The thing about Apple products is that no serious professional would use a Macbook, no one with a job requiring critical connectivity will use an iPhone, no serious photographer will use an iPhone. Until they do.

They ate the business Thinkpad. They ate the Blackberry. They ate some portion of the SLRs.

And each time they weren't serious.

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#68

Post by trafficante »

macintux wrote: post #30
trafficante wrote: post #24

I’ve been hanging on to my Series 3 for years now waiting on a watch refresh that brings another useful sensor or expands the screen large enough to make the watch usable for at least viewing Twitter-size content. Along comes the Ultra with a massive footprint and a temperature sensor (albeit one only useful for monitoring averages). My time has finally arrived. And then it turns out that the usable screen size is es…

Gruber assesses the size difference more positively. https://daringfireball.net/2022/09/apple_watch_ultra

Huh, I didn’t know about the sleep tracking being able to record wrist temp. That’s something at least.

I suppose I’ll have to see it in person, but the pixel jump between the Ultra and the 7 is sub-2% while the jump between 6-7 was 16-17% iirc.

I also read a worrying mini-review comment on 9to5Mac from an Ultra owner that some of the watch faces are somehow displaying SMALLER than on the poster’s 7. Can’t direct link the comment so I quoted the relevant snippet below. Obv I’m taking it with a grain of salt until I see confirmation but it would be an odd thing to lie about so specifically.

“Face on Metropolitan is indeed smaller on the Ultra. 28mm diameter on Ultra, 29mm on 45mm Series 7!”

Re: Offline map test on Apple Watch Ultra for hiking

#70

Post by nharada »

Comments in this thread are fairly dismissive of the Ultra as a serious competitor for Garmin's high end sport watches, and this article seems like an example of it not stacking up.

But if I was Garmin I'd be terrified of Apple coming into the space. I was at Fitbit when the first Apple watch came out, and we laughed at how inferior it was to many of our products for the first several releases. Then around series 3 we started saying things like "actually it would be really nice if we had this too", and now (series 8) they're clearly the smartwatch leader in most dimensions.

I hope Garmin can remain competitive in this space, but Apple's massive resources and the long term strategy that enables is very hard to compete with.

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