Apple Watch Ultra Review Worth It Or Nah part 2
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 wanna bring you into the ecosystem. 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 a 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 gonna 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 100 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, 'cause 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 wanna like, I wanna test all these activities, and like go, okay, I guess I gotta run an ultra marathon now, and like scuba dive, but I can't remember the last time I was 10 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, thanks
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