In the event you aren’t subscribed over on YouTube, I’ve posted a full comparison of the Apple Watch Ultra vs Garmin Epix in New York City, on an epic route through the city, including up and down some of the most building-dense streets I could find. This includes starting at the tip of Manhattan near the Staten Island ferry docks, and then working my way up some 80 or so blocks along the edge of Manhattan ducking under expressways and buildings. From there I cut into the densest part of the city before jumping into Central Park for a bit, before heading back into the buildings down towards Times Square.
In this test, I actually had four watches with me:
– Apple Watch Ultra (Multi-band/dual-frequency
– Apple Watch Series 8 (Multi-band/dual-frequency()
– Garmin Epix (Multi-band/dual-frequency)
– Garmin Forerunner 955 (Multi-band/dual-frequency)
Only the Series 8 doesn’t support multiband, the other three were all in a forced multiband configuration. Further, as noted in the video, I actually swapped wrists a chunk of the way through the river/perimeter section, in order to ensure they had equal sky-viewing experiences (turns out it didn’t matter too much).
In the video I dive through each section one by one, including an analysis of the GPS tracks and where they did well…and not so well.
Here are the full distances as recorded by the files, also, a link to the DCR Analyzer where I’ve got all the data loaded up for your digging pleasure:
Apple Watch Ultra: 15.56km
Apple Watch Series 8: 15.50km
Garmin Epix: 15.43km
Garmin Forerunner 955: 15.58km
Finally, in case you missed it, earlier this year my wife and I actually did a Manhattan test run with 7 GPS watches:
– COROS Vertix 2: Multi-band/dual-frequency
– Garmin Fenix 7 Solar Sapphire: Multi-band/dual-frequency
– Garmin Fenix 7S Solar Sapphire: Multi-band/dual-frequency
– Garmin Fenix 7 Base: All Satellites (Basically GPS+GLONASS+GALILEO)
– Garmin Epix Gen2 Sapphire: Multi-band/dual-frequency
– Garmin Instinct 2 Base: GPS+GLONASS
– Garmin Descent G1 Solar: GPS+GLONASS
You can dive into that post here, or the video below:
Having used these watches now for basically a year, I’d say that we’ve seen continued improvement from the Garmin side (though, it was pretty good back then), but especially in the All Systems realm (meaning, non-multiband – multiband is of course great to, but non-multiband continues to impress). And we’ve seen minor to modest improvement in the Vertix 2. I suspect, based on the more I learn from various sources, that the antenna design is a large part of Garmin’s success on their multiband implementation (and, also why Apple’s is very solid too). With COROS pre-announcing today that they’ll announce a new APEX 2 and APEX 2 Pro on Thursday, it’ll be interesting to see what GPS accuracy/options look like there – and specifically, what learnings they might have had from the Vertix 2 released a year ago. I’d presume you’d be able to find that kind of information on Thursday, at you regular sports tech information dealership.
With that, go forth and enjoy, and thanks for watching!
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