- 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, 11:00 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.
(uptempo electronic music) (whistle blowing)
♪ Hey ♪ (watch dinging)
(water whooshing) (watch dinging)
(birds chirping) (watch dinging)
♪ This is what I'm talking about ♪
So we knew something like this was coming,
We knew there was gonna 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, AirPods 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 AirPods 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.
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 Garmins, 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 ColorWare
is gonna be able to paint these things.
Anyway, that's the build quality,
but the other two things that make the Ultra 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 a 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 an 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.
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 gonna 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 'em 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 charges.
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 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 for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one, peace
♪ Trying to get ♪ (uptempo hiphop music)