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Apple Watch Ultra vs. Ultra 2 Buyer's Guide: 12 Differences Compared
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Wait, I have to do this in the water near my boat? This is kinda confusing.
Some of these people assume the upgrade means you throw away the old watch. The watch might be my most important device. A little upgrade Can go along way and the marginal cost with the sale of the old watch isn’t a huge deal.
Really? Why is that? It's just a factoid. Projection, maybe?
I guess what I was trying to say was — tell us that we get 5 more hours of battery life and we can go with that. How many transistors are inside? Personally, I couldn't care less.
IMO you are making a mistake skipping the Ultra over color. The Ultra (I have v1) is a big step up for those of us unoffended by the larger size.
How? Go to Apple, pick your watch and press the “Buy now” button - problem solved
I am averaging 48-72 hours depending on my usage with WiFi on and cellular off. I average about 30-60 mins per day of workouts.
Agree, I look forward to it if*** it’s indeed integrated into the watch smoothly and just works, vs. the current very inconsistent implementation that requires (usually) a wrist turn to activate the display for anything to work.
It crushes fitness trackers as a fitness tracker. It doesn’t replace gear for elite athletes and ultra marathon runners. The mid range fitness tracker market has nearly died because of Apple Watch.
You have to get the hang of it but Double Pinch actually does work well on my Ultra 1 and IS the same gesture as Double Tap from what I can tell. I view Apple locking out older models from this “new” feature as analogous to the rollout to Stage Manager initially being locked to M1: utter BS and hopefully they backpedal and enable it.
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Yes, apple needs to cave to the 0.5% that run ultra marathons. Congrats being fit
I don't think it makes sense to upgrade from an Ultra 1 to an Ultra 2, but for those holding out on older watches (or looking to get their first Apple Watch) spending a bit extra on the Ultra 2 versus get a discounted Ultra 1 makes a lot of sense as the newer chip in the Ultra 2 will probably result in an extra 2-3 years of software support versus the Ultra 1 (which is basically using the same chip as the Series 6, which has been around since 2020).
Unless you are immunocompromised humans are like 97% effective at being aware they have a fever. Why would you need a device to tell you that? If you are tracking temperature for fertility that’s a different and real problem it would be cool for the watch to solve.
As an AW Ultra early adopter I was really hoping that Apple would put some effort into the sports functionality. I love it as a smart watch but would pick my Garmin Epix Pro 2 for fitness activities every single time.
I've taken to wearing both watches which may well be overkill but the metrics and training side of the Garmin eat Apple's efforts for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day of the week.
I've taken to wearing both watches which may well be overkill but the metrics and training side of the Garmin eat Apple's efforts for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day of the week.
You'd think the A17 has something like 40% more transistors because they are 40% smaller than the 5nm A16? Doesn't that come out to a 10% speed increase though? Perhaps the speed increase is closer to 15% on the S9
out of curiosity, can you go into more detail onthe metrics and training features you feel are missing?
I've been wearing both the AW Ultra and the Fenix 7X for the past year and have come to the same conclusion. Sure they both record workouts, but the AW doesn't do anything with the data other than display it back. Garmin actually gives suggestions on workouts to help you get to a goal, tells you when you are overdoing it, not recovering enough. AW only knows "MORE!!!" "Triple your move goal yesterday? Do it again today! You can do it!" Not very helpful if you are already motivated.
Yea, like that qwerty keyboard that can work on a 41mm S7, but NOT on a 44mm S6.
To me, the most important upgrade for the Ultra 2 is, surprisingly, having Siri processed on device. I have encountered a number of situations quite a few times when the Ultra is not processing my Siri commands, usually having to do with Map navigation and I need to finagle and try and try again. Usually this is while I'm driving too
I think the only meaningful update is to Siri: both for using transformer model on-device for more accurate speech recognition as well as processing _some_ Siri requests on device.
The devil is in the details: What are those "some' requests? Clearly nothing that would need data from outside (like navigation). Probably 'some' will include small tasks like settings timers and pausing the music.
Siri needs a full LLM based overhaul asap. Even if Apple would be able to run a small LLM in iPhone for GPT-3.5 (or even Llama 2) -like performance, that will not run on a watch. This probably will again kill the local on-watch Siri in a year from doing much more than setting a timer.
While Siri is way too often broken for tasks that could be run on watch, upgrading AWU1 to AWU2 just to get them work reliably would not likely be worth it.
Interesting. Me, with my AWUltra I could care less about 5 more hours of battery life but understand that a new chip with 60% more transistors is very likely to present noticeably improved operation.