the bathroom and kitchen both have faucets! You can potentially trek from the bedroom to the living room

Those are not exclusive statements — as long as parts are available for a lifetime

The only IP ratings that I trust are on dive computers and dive computer watches (but I've read mixed results about Apple Watch Ultras for diving). The Garmin Descent Mk3i dive computer and smart watch is a solid performer.

I too destroyed my "7 melodies electronic watch" back in the 80's by taking it for a swim at the beach .. man, that was so disappointing. Did get me on the CASIO Data Bank train, though ..

Or middle-aged me swimming with my "10 ATM water resist" ~$400 Hamilton watch...

My first (and the original) Apple Watch, I won at the company Christmas party. My kid dropped it in the tree sap water under the Christmas tree and I didn’t find it for two days. After a lot of cleaning, it worked perfectly fine for years. I’m on the series 10 now. They’re very tough little devices.

1st gen is 1P7X, and 2nd gen and later are certified to depths of at least 50m.

Way beyond IP5X.

Got an SE 2 a year ago to track my daily swimming in the sea and it's been working great.

Not at all. 2.5 year old Apple Watch, glue gave up after warm pool in aquapark (40 deg Celsius), water got in, dead.

my first apple watch (6th gen) died when I was using it on a water slide ending in a pool on a holiday... since then I'm wary of using it in water...

I wash my iPhone like every month. As I do with all of my phones for the past decade. Zero issues. I had a problem only once a long time ago, when I was in water with one of my Sony, but they replaced it immediately. No issue with the replacement.

Yes, this happens to people all the time. The seals that keep water out degrade over time. New phones are generally ok, but heat, dirt, detergent/salt in water, etc. wear them down until they are not water resistant anymore.

This is also why almost none of the manufacturers will fix the device under warranty when there is water damage, despite the IP rating.

Even Apple themselvers recommend against submerging and iPhone in water:

To prevent liquid damage, avoid: [...] Intentionally submerging your iPhone in water

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108039

The water resistance in these phones exist so that the phone hopefully survives when they get wet accidentally (heavy rain, pool drop, etc.). Not to shower with the phone, cleaning it by putting it under the tap, or doing underwater photography. Usually, it survives, until the seals fail.

Most water rated devices will warn against wearing them in the shower/bath because surfactants (soaps) let water penetrate a lot easier.

I take photos underwater (<2m) with my iphones all the time, all the way back to the iphone 6, never had any issues.

My old iPhone 13 I used to take swimming daily in a salt pool, it was still running fine after 2 years of that, although the contacts in the lightning port did eventually corrode (now I can only charge it wirelessly)

I've used my iPhones for underwater photography with just a normal clearcase and never had any issues

Dropped my iPhone in the toilet , never skipped a beat after that.

I felt while running next to the sea and my iPhone bounced on the ground and ended up somewhere in a levee under water. We could call it until the battery ran out of power. So I guess it depends.

What? I have never had an issue with this with my iPhone.

OS is listed as FreeRTOS.

Couldn't you clip it to the little lane dividers or hang it from the edge somehow ?

I agree completely! Our Garmin Descent Mk3i dive computer smart watches are the best watches I've ever seen. They just work. You can charge it for an hour or so and it's good for 25 days. I hated having to charge previous watches every day. It has a double-tap light on/off feature with a very bright LED, four light levels, and a red light mode. It automatically starts tracking my dives and is rated to 200 meters. It can also do diver-to-diver messaging, air tank tracking, and group tracking using subwave sonar. And it has all the normal pulse ox, heart rate tracking, step tracking, sleep tracking, and smartwatch stuff. Just don't enable the one touch kill-switch ;-). Apparently it's a feature for military divers to erase their data (but sounds like a marketing gimmick).

Pebble Time 2 is available again! I bought one.

It doesn't have all the Garmin features, but it's free and I don't have to worry about it's software getting redesigned.

If only the map rendering wasn't so terribly slow. I often use mapping when cycling and panning or zooming the map is just unbearably slow.

I'm now usually taking the Coros Nomad because it has super-fast maps and still a battery life of three weeks.

They are really great otherwise and I love my Coros Nomad and Garmin Fenix so much more than the Apple Watch Ultra.

He's talking about an 11 year old device of a 15 year old (long since discontinued) design, even flagship devices were less featureful then than some mid-market devices are now. Imagine expecting a review of such a device to be enticing to someone comparing modern options…

Also, not everyone with a GPS watch cares that much about heart rate. I am a runner (well, less so now that I used to be, but working on fixing that) and have a Feninx7, not for the health tracking features but for route tracking and the long battery life (for “ultra” events covering many hours or even multiple days).

GP is talking about a model that was released 14 years ago, and is closely based on one from 2009.

Seems to me that "still working well after more than a decade of use" is a more useful piece of info than "newer models include additional features".

The price is also insane nowadays though. IMO they are very vulnerable to the likes of Coros, who also have MIP watches that last for weeks, have much faster mapping and are less than half the price.

Yes, mostly because the Garmin app on iOS is pretty bad at keeping a live connection up even for weather =)

Not that it changes any of the rest of your comment, but from their Kickstarter campaign updates it seems like there are at least ~800 watches out there (and the public store just launched).

It's not as simple as just dropping a heart rate sensor though. It also took Garmin, Coros, Apple, etc. several generations to make good-enough heart rate sensors and most of them are very proprietary.

that's the thing about these "open" devices, there's always one "would absolutely be considering" use case that they never meet. makes it real easy to not buy one ;)

Body battery is amazing. I had long COVID/ME/CFS, and looking at the body battery when waking up was an outstanding predictor of how my day was going to be. When I hit 5% body battery, I was really feeling horrible.

It matches my lived experience.

My body battery and stress often starts declining for no apparent reason and then 12-24 hours later I feel the symptoms of an illness. Similarly, when in a tough training block, HRV is a great tool to gauge how hard I ought to be able to go: I've tried to push through and just do a tough workout anyways when it's out of range, but failed to complete the workout in good form, or felt superficially crappy but had good training readiness according to the watch and was able to do better than expected.

The same holds true in the other direction, I don't log into Connect or scroll through the multitudinous widgets of data often enough to really keep tabs on this stuff, and when I get sick or feel good or bomb a workout or succeed at a workout when I felt off, the metrics consistently back up the actual results.

Personally, I've been thinking about jumping ship to a Coros Apex 4 if my battered Fenix 6 ever gives up the ghost - Garmin's prices are insane these days. At $270, this is cheap enough in comparison to a $1200 Fenix 8 Pro to take the chance. I could buy this and a $480 Apex 4, and then decide I didn't like either of them and go back to a used Forerunner 955, before spending as much as a new top-end Garmin.

Sadly I think you're right.

You can plug in a Garmin to a computer with a cable and pull the files off the watch, as it acts like a USB drive. No app required.

Epix Gen3 is $500 w/ Garmin Discount. iWatch ultra is $800.

And iWatch doesn't have a flashlight. And iWatch doesn't have the same battery life.

Same. Both have plenty of scratches here.

I also don't see why an Apple Watch wouldn't survive all those mentioned things. Pretty sure I did all those things with an Apple Watch on, except for the specific 108 mile gravel race. But I don't see why it would fail that.

And both might absolutely scratch while climbing, and if you're unlucky and hit it in the wrong spot, also crack.

That said, if I were an athlete in any of those categories and did it all the time, I'd still absolutely choose a Garmin.

i have one too with a sapphire screen (fenix 7). the watch is beaten up but the screen looks brand new. really phenomenal watches.

Apple certainly doesn't let you.

There are several apps[0] off the top of my head that pull data from Apple's HealthKit. Apple even has a framework for it: HealthKit. That said, I've never written to that API myself, but it observational evidence indicates that you can pull data from Apple just fine. The app I use to pull data off Apple and ship to Strava says as much.

[0] RunGap and HealthFit

I ran into the same issue when building ProForta.com. My solution was to build a companion app that pulls data (including Garmin) via Health Connect. Right now, it seems that every hardware platform from Oura to Garmin is trying to build their moat around user's data. That's not OK - users need access to the combination of all their data to derive meaningful health benefits. Thats the guiding principle behind lifecare.id (https://lifecare.id)

you can use https://github.com/cyberjunky/python-garminconnect to pull your data from garmin, I've been using it daily with no issues

There's a Python API that's "unofficial" but has worked well for me for ages. I've got it hooked up to NextCloud tables and it imports everything once a day. I've now got years of queryable metrics in NC.

Polar has an API where you can get more or less anything out. That bit is fine - sadly you can't put things in (like virtual cycling, or any activities not recorded on the Polar).

Depending on what data you want, you can try Withings watches. I'm currently reversing the protocol and it mostly works.

And it's always been terrible, as long as I've been using Garmin watches (their bike computers seem to charge fine, mainly because they use whatever the standard USB plug is at the time). I remember the 410 had some suckass plug that didn't work well. I think it was the 610 with that gawd awful clip. And the 9xx series continues to use that delicate snowflake plug that has to plug in juuuuust right, maybe wiggle the cable a little, otherwise no 5 hour Sunday run for you.

Whereas I throw my Apple Watch in the general vicinity of the magnetic charger, it locks into place, and charges just fine, 100% of the time. Fine, don't use induction like Apple, use two exposed, flush pins and a magnet like my Coros armband HR monitor, because that works 100% of the time, too.

I have an Amazfit Balance, and previously several Amazfit Bips. I really like being able to use my watch as a BLE heartrate monitor with iSmoothRun on iPhone. I gather that being able to do so is not typical for smartwatches.

Wireless would be ideal, assuming there's still some way to connect to my PC.

> considering that every modern smart phone is both usb-c and waterproof?

I doubt that modern smart phones are waterproof. Who would trust use their smartphone while showering or being in a bathtube (including submerging the smartphone a few centimeters into the water)?

Talking about a 6s pro and got at the beginning around 10 days without much GPS enabled exercise, after 6 years I get about 9 days!

Good thing with the Fenix line is that you stop the updates which I did a year in so I don't really care about them, but I do think they stopped firmware updates for the 6series about a year ago.

Garmin doesn't really upgrade the firmware after the next model release.

But you'd be a fool to believe a hardware startup would do so anyway.

I have a 7S and it still gets updates regularly.

> without uploading it all to surveillance capitalists

I by now often see the term "surveillance capitalists"/"surveillance capitalism" on HN.

While it is a great thing to fight surveillance organizations, don't forget that communist countries had/have (for the latter: People's Republic of China) much worse surveillance in place.

I love the Garmin pogo chargers. I've got a few of their $3 puck cables scattered about my home, car, and office, a USB-C to Garmin adapter in my keychain and backpacking kit, and someone recently made a neat little portable battery that I wore under my strap in an ultra to recharge mid-activity.

Yeah, if you only use the stock Garmin cable (why isn't it at least right-angle?!) it kinda sucks, but there are lots of products that do it really well:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F5L632HM

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D4F71WQC

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N18DX6Y

I would much rather these totally waterproof surface-level pads that put the spring pogo pins in the cable than give up internal device volume to a USB receptacle or magnetic charging coils.

When the port pins break and you have no way to recharge it until a new USB port arrives, yes.

garmin cable thing became non-issue as cheap garmin cables came out.