Review: Apple Watch Ultra 2

The best, and worst, part about reviewing products is when your experience takes a hard right turn. Last week, I went on a trail run with the Apple Watch Ultra 2. At home, I had set the orange Action button to start Backtrack, Apple’s navigation feature that creates a virtual breadcrumb trail in the Compass app for you to follow back home. I connected my headphones and started my playlist. I tapped the watch face and started an Outdoor Run.

I like going on trails by myself, but I find it mentally taxing. I stop at every trail crossing. I study familiar landmarks and check the time as I pass them. I checked Backtrack a few times as I was running and saw that it was working. It even gave me a time estimate for my return on the topographic map! Secure in my ability to find my way home, I let my brain shut off. I started mentally composing this review with an intro on how the watch has made going outside so much more accessible. I was flying through the sun and air in the trees, as happy as I’ve ever been.

Then I got to my turnaround point. I flipped back through my watch screens. Somehow, in between checking my heart rate and mileage and checking my music, I had … turned Backtrack off. I turned off my music. The deep woods around me were totally still. Luckily, I had previously downloaded the topographic map of the area on my phone, and I was able to check the watch's Compass app even though I didn't have a data signal. So it wasn't like I was lost. But it wasn’t hard to imagine how I could have been.

Even the best of tools occasionally succumb to user error, and being alone in the woods is still a bad time to make a mistake.

Photograph: Apple

The Watch Ultra 2 looks pretty much like last year’s Watch Ultra (8/10, WIRED Recommends), with a few key differences. This year it has a faster S9 chipset, which among other things powers some of the basic Siri interactions right there on the watch. You no longer have to wait for simple voice commands—start a workout, set an alarm, log your weight—to travel up and down from the cloud. Machine learning tasks are also completed twice as quickly than on the original Ultra, which theoretically extends the battery life of the watch. The extra power enables new interactions like Double Tap, which uses the watch's sensors to detect when you tap your thumb and index finger together twice. That gesture can be used in place of the primary watch button on any screen, or open your Smart Stack. There are other gestures too, like covering your watch to mute it.

The new Alpine Loop watch band is made from recycled materials, in this case polyester and spandex.

Photograph: Apple

The new Ultra's display maxes out at a brightness of 3,000 nits. That is shockingly bright; for reference, the iPhone 15 has a max-2,000-nit display. You can also configure the watch with its new Modular Ultra watch face, which lets you set an additional real-time metric along the bezel of the watch—pick between seconds, elevation, or depth if you’re diving. There’s a second-gen ultra wideband chip inside the latest model that makes the precision finding features more accurate, so it's easier to locate your lost iPhone using your watch. (It slipped behind the snacks in your backpack's front pocket.)

And finally, when paired with the new trail loop, which I’m wearing, the Watch Ultra 2 is what Apple claims as one of its first carbon-neutral products. The case is made of 95 percent recycled aluminum, and the loop itself contains 32 percent recycled content, made in factories powered by 100 percent clean energy. Of course, we urge you to take these (and any) environmental claims with a grain of salt.

Photograph: Apple

I’ve tried pretty much every loop the Ultra has to offer. The trail loop is my favorite so far; not a surprise, since trail running is one of my favorite sports. Other people have remarked that on my 150-mm wrist, the 49-mm case size looks enormous. But I don’t find Ultra 2 unwearably huge. I also now appreciate the enormous screen, especially when it comes to examining topographic maps.

I cycled to a nearby river on a sunny day to see if the 3,000-nit display did anything to increase the screen's visibility when viewed among the bright reflections of sunlight bouncing off the water. It was not noticeably more difficult to see the iPhone 15's screen in the sun next to the Apple Watch Ultra 2. However, I do like the Modular Ultra face very much. I have my bezel set to elevation. It can get pretty wonky—my poor watch showed me as being several hundred feet under sea level when I got off the plane. However, it recalibrates pretty quickly and comes in handy when I find myself getting inexplicably tired on the back half of a run and discover that I’m actually running uphill. I also use the real-time compass a lot.

With what some might consider normal use—one GPS-tracked run per day, along with some walking and swimming—the Watch Ultra 2’s battery life can stretch almost four days. However, with what I would consider the expected use of the Watch Ultra 2—a trail run with GPS-enabled workout tracking, playing music, and running Backtrack (sort of)—I can drain the Ultra 2’s battery by about 25 percent in two hours.

Topographic maps can be loaded onto your iPhone for use on the Watch Ultra 2 when your devices are offline.

Photograph: Apple

It’s hard to discuss how well the Ultra 2 works without taking into consideration that it’s not really a stand-alone unit. Apple has mostly given up on the idea that people are ever apart from their phones, which, fair. If I’m wearing a trail running vest or a cycling waist pack loaded with water, snacks, my car keys, and wallet, I am definitely putting my phone in there too.

Although the Watch Ultra 2 has its own onboard precision dual-frequency GPS system, it’s mostly there to more precisely map and track your workouts. The watch doesn’t have its own onboard offline maps to navigate independently of the iPhone. Instead, you click into Apple Maps on your phone while you're at home, download the offline map, and then keep your iPhone charged and within range of your Ultra 2 to look at the map on your wrist.

The latest version of watchOS has improved tracking for bike rides and cycling workouts.

Photograph: Apple

Likewise, watchOS 10 now shows cycling as a live activity on your phone screen so that you can use your phone as a de facto bike computer. I did this on a bike ride to the beach and it’s very handy! However, unlike with a dedicated Garmin unit that crams all your relevant data onto one display, Apple's workout data and mapping functions are all very siloed into various apps. You end up toggling quite a bit between Workouts, Maps, and Music or Podcasts. That’s in addition to the toggling you have to do between Apple Health and Workouts when you want to check your running statistics versus, say, the amount of hours you slept.

It’s all there, and accessible, but it’s a little annoying that you can’t see everything in one place, and it introduces the possibility of user error. Who among us has never accidentally closed a tab? Let them cast the first stone. I’ve never accidentally shut off Garmin's breadcrumb feature, because that’s why I wear a Garmin watch. It’s for workout tracking and navigation, not all of the things all the time.

In this context, the second-gen UWB chip makes a lot more sense. It has to be easy to find your phone, because you need it for everything. I’m constantly switching my phone and wallet between the handlebar bag on my bike, the pocket in my gym bag, my running pack, my cycling pack, etc. Being able to use precision finding to locate it perceptibly lowers my stress levels.

The Double Tap gesture will be enabled on the Watch Ultra 2 and the Watch Series 9 in October. Apple sent an additional Series 9 model that has Double Tap, and I've written about that feature in my review of the Series 9. I couldn't access Double Tap on the Watch Ultra 2 during my testing period, but I did come across a situation where I wished I could have. I went rock climbing and, as usual, forgot to start my workout. I waited to get to a small rise in the face and leaned my full body against the wall. While trembling as I clung to the rock with my hands, I tapped my sweaty nose on the Ultra 2's screen to launch Workouts and then press the Climbing button. Hard to picture Alex Honnold doing this, and yet here we are.

The Watch Ultra 2's codependency with the iPhone skews the wearable's value proposition a bit. When you’re considering whether you should buy a Garmin Epix Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends) or a Watch Ultra 2, it’s not one watch versus another. It’s one ecosystem versus another, one fragmented and one integrated. Do you want to buy a Garmin Edge and an InReach Mini and a Forerunner and a regular degular smartwatch? Or just one watch and an iPhone (and probably a portable charger) to do all the things, all the time. I consider that this equation now balances out in favor of the Watch Ultra 2, especially since, well … I love outdoor adventures, but I do spend most of my time at work and doing family stuff. The equation might not balance out for many outdoorspeople—not being able to access offline maps without the phone is, unfortunately, kind of huge—but it’s getting there faster and faster.