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Comment by jsbisviewtiful | Hacker News Reader

> With fast charging, battery life hasn't been an issue

I sold my 10 last year and haven’t missed it. You don’t have reasonable access to a charger during a marathon or a long hike, the latter of which needed me to charge my Apple Watch 3 times over the course of 12 hours of hiking.

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I regularly do long races like marathons and 20 mile trail races and have never had to charge my watch during those events and I am often even streaming music/podcasts from the watch. With an Ultra you should be able to easily do a 12 hour hike.

Marathons and 20 mile trail races are not remotely long. A thru hiking day is usually about as long as the available daylight hours, so 16 hours in summer. A 100K race typically falls in the 10 to 20 hour range, depending on the terrain and the personal fitness. A 100 miler is usually over 30 hours for sub elites. An entry level Coros watch can handle all of these, there is no need to bring up premium priced Garmins, and certainly not much justification for the Apple Watch Ultra.

Few people do those types of races and The ultra 4 can handle the times you are describing.

From apple website: Apple Watch Ultra Workout

Up to 18 hours workout tracking Up to 25 hours Extended Workout tracking Up to 45 hours Max Extended Workout tracking

My experience with the none ultra is that the battery life estimates are spot on.

I don't even know what you're trying to argue. Despite tons of people buying outdoor watches, these people are minorities, so Apple shouldn't prioritize them? An $800 watch that does what an entry level watch is capable of is considered a technological feat? Apple just shouldn't put a bigger battery in normal Apple Watches, and people who want longer battery life should just spend twice as much to get an Ultra?

Apple doesn't generally make products that are for 100% of the market and focuses on specific market segments that it thinks it can make a compelling product. The $800 watch actually does more than what the $1200 Garmin does once you look at all the features available and has enough battery life to cover doing a 100-mile race.

In the end, what I am arguing is that Apple provides a different set of features and provides battery life in the Ultra that covers the needs of most people going outdoors for multiple days. For everyone else, there are plenty of other options available.

Meanwhile Coros Pace 4, a 200 dollar watch, has 40 hours of GPS tracking and offline map. I simply can not understand the pricing strategy of Apple. Do they really expect people who are serious about endurance sports and training to get their ridiculously expensive Ultra? Or they are just fine with Garmin taking the biggest chunk of this market?

Are people serious about endurance sport actually a big market?

Funny this was downvoted: I was thinking the same as I was reading this thread.

True mass market means optimizing your product for the fat part of the population bell curve. This is some point or region in a space of { cost, features, use cases, durability }. The Apple Watch works for everyone from a stay at home parent, stocker at the supermarket, executive, and so on. If you work in a machine shop or spend a few hours every day working out it may not be for you.

There’s a marginal but valuable exception: think of prosumer cameras. There are indeed pros, and the feature set is good enough for some of them to shoot with a prosumer camera (any actual pro can shoot better photos with an instamatic than I can with a phone, much less an SLR). But most people buy the high end aspirationally. Why not? That penumbra pulls more people in who really need the plain old features.

And anyway once you really are at the high end your needs can be idiosyncratic.

The Garmin Forerunner 970 is only $50 cheaper than the Ultra. Then, the Garmin Fenix 9 is more expensive than the Ultra and doesn't have cellular and charges significantly extra for the satellite connectivity.

My Fenix 7 has ~12 days of life, while using it every day for fitness tracking, maps, the occasional LED flashlight, etc. It also is at least IME much more of a beast than an (admittedly older gen) Ultra. I charge before I leave, then spend a week or more living out of backpack and sleeping on the ground. I very much want to go back to Apple Watch but Garmin battery life and durability is just so much better for my use case.

Few people spend a week or more living out of a backpack. The ultra 4 is rated to do 84 hours in low power mode and 45 in workout mode. Few people are going to max that out and those people probably aren’t interested in an Apple Watch and have other priorities.

>You don’t have reasonable access to a charger during a marathon or a long hike

Isn't this the market they made the Ultra for?

Well no, they made the Ultra for very rich people who do long hikes or similar. For most of us, a smart watch isn't so important that the increase in price is worth it, even if we're annoyed by the battery life of the non-Ultra watch which is too poor for any kind of day-long activity.

No one that does this with any regularity or seriousness uses an Apple Watch, they go with Garmin or one of the real fitness watches that can claim battery life in weeks and even months. My Fenix 8 charges once every 26-29 days. I left Apple Watch and never looked back. It's just an inferior product in every possible way.

Guess it depends. I do trail races (usually 25k and 20-milers) and marathons regularly, and Apple Watch has worked just fine for me and has a lot of other features that I use regularly that are largely not available on Garmin. I also prefer the map app I use on my Apple Watch compared to what my partner uses on his Garmin.

I'm very close to selling my S10. I barely use it. All the features are sort of nice to have. The only one I really care about is heart rate monitoring during exercise and the AirPods Pro 3 do that.

Did a long bike ride recently and just used my iPhone to track the workout. Probably suboptimal, since it doesn't have all the heart rate stuff, but it gets the big picture (elevation gain, speed, distance).

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