It’s been almost 2 years since I bought a Garmin 735XT to supplement my Apple Watch for running workouts and racing. It was a painful, yet necessary, decision back then. Today, I’m pleased to announce that I am officially Garmin free once again, with one watch to rule them all.

Let me recap the two main issues I had with Apple Watch:

Apple Watch GPS accuracy, while accurate for a lot of “normal people” situations, found itself extremely inaccurate in almost every other scenario, sometimes being completely wrong. Trail runs and races were the most affected, where accuracy was needed most.
Buttons are great, but Apple Watch had two buttons and those buttons were tied up in system functionality. Interacting with a workout, like setting laps, was super annoying, extremely difficult and sometimes downright impossible.

Yes, there were, and still are, a lot of reasons why Garmin is better for runners, but none of them are make or break features for me. My two issues above were purely hardware limitations that Apple couldn’t fix by software alone. That is until Apple Watch Ultra came on the scene.

Superior GPS

If the GPS of the Ultra wasn’t better than my 735XT I’d be very sad, so I had to confirm that it was indeed superior. I tested the GPS accuracy by taking both watches with me on one of my typical trail runs. The particular trail I ran is usually very inaccurate when using my Apple Watch Series 5 compared to the Forerunner 735XT. Sometimes my Apple Watch would freak out and not know where I was on the trail. After running with both the Ultra and the 735XT I took the GPX data and overlayed them together on Google Maps. The first thing I noticed is that the Ultra stores a significantly higher volume of data points than the 735XT. If you zoom in on the Google map you will see this become a lot more obvious. In the more technical spots like weaving, switchbacks and significant elevation changes, the Garmin starts falling on its face, not gathering enough data points to match the complexity of the trail.

The Ultra (blue) follows the actual curves of the trail, while the 735XT (Red) does a LOT of approximation. See data for yourself

In the screenshot above I’ve zoomed in significantly on a very technical part of the trail to highlight the massive difference in both the volume of datapoints and therefore overall accuracy of the Ultra. In another spot on the map I’ve marked where the Ultra was able to track me going around a fallen tree, although it wasn’t 100% accurate both times, the fact that I was only going about 2-3 feet off trail is significant. The 735XT didn’t even register that I had to go around something. I do wish I had a higher-end Garmin to test out how they compare with the Ultra, but I believe the higher end Garmin’s accuracy match the Ultra. But just because the higher end Garmin has what I need, you’ll see later on that it’s just not comparable to everything I need.

Button Lapping

I really hate that this is a “thing,” but yes, there’s a third button and yes it finally lets me press it and set a lap properly. It’s about time 🤦‍♂️

In addition to lapping, a software feature that I seemed to have missed is something called Precision Start. This is nothing new to running watches, but it allows the ability to start the workout when you want, like at the beginning of a race. While the Precision Start feature is tied to the Action Button you have to explicitly turn it on to use the functionality.

Battery Life

Better battery life is always better, but I’ve never really had issues with this other than running marathon+ distances. Since I haven’t run any super long runs with the Ultra I can’t test out how well the extra battery life works out for me. Obviously, comes nowhere close to what you could get out of a higher end Garmin.

Pricing

Pricing is a strange conversation because it’s really easy to tell the story you want based on how you talk about the various watches by feature alone. This is especially true when talking about the cost of the Ultra versus other high-end Garmin watches. The problem is that the Ultra is nothing like a Garmin and I don’t think it was intended to be.

Here is the pricing for what I would consider to be objective data (software features aside) and I chose the low and high-end of both companies. Specifically picking out the Forerunner 945 because it was the only Garmin that had LTE functionality and had direct comparison to Apple Watch Series 8.

  
      GPS
      + LTE
    
      epix™ (Gen 2)
      $999.99
      –
    
      Apple Watch Ultra
      –
      $799
    
      Apple Watch Series 8
      $429
      $529
    
      Apple Watch SE
      $279
      $329
    
      Forerunner 945
      $499.99
      $599.99 1
    
      Forerunner 735XT
      $199
      –
    
1 NOTE: No text messaging, calls or voice functionality. LTE connectivity (monthly service plan required) enables phone-free safety and tracking features, spectator messaging and live event sharing. No need to switch phone providers.

Based upon what you get in a smart watch, the Series 8 and 945 are similar in price, but the Series 8 blows the 945 out of the water in both LTE functionality and smart watch functionality as a whole. BUT, the 945 excels in most other dimensions when it comes to tracking activities with both software and hardware. This is where Apple doesn’t meet the bare minimum hardware requirements to be a great watch for tracking and is sub-par in certain software features. But for $200 extra dollars, the Ultra fixes the hardware requirements, especially if you need a watch with LTE. It should be noted that Garmin’s high-end smart watch comes in at a whopping $1,000 and has no LTE functionality, and y’all were griping about how expensive the Ultra was 🤡

The question is, does that extra $200 for an Ultra make it worth it? I’d say “yes” because of two very important reasons:

I use the Apple Watch for my day-to-day life, but I also bought a 735XT (the cheapest I could find at the time) for run, race, workout tracking. As a whole I paid $729 since neither watch did exactly what I needed. Keeping that in mind, the Ultra merges both of those devices, in a MUCH better package, for an extra $70.
I rely on LTE for my job so that I can be phone-less and still be reachable. There is no other watch that can compare to the Ultra’s LTE support and GPS accuracy and have those merged into a single device. The 945 doesn’t even come close and not even Garmin’s most expensive smart watch has LTE.

The Future

Apple is just beginning their foray into watches that work really well for serious athletes. Based on Apple’s track record for how they release their products, software and hardware features trickle down to the cheaper more popular models. This means that most runners who love Apple products will eventually have no need to think about purchasing a dedicated running watch like Garmin. They’ll be able to stick to a single smart watch that is already an amazing, fully featured running watch.