Apple Watch Ultra 4 is an AI Powerhouse With Fitness and Health Improvements, But Do You Need it?

Make no mistake, Apple has added some amazing features to the latest iteration of its sports and adventure watch, the Apple Watch Ultra 4. A new Health Sensing System that includes a new, extremely accurate heart-rate sensor, allows the watch to provide a “readiness score” that can help you monitor your training. The S11 chip and doubled memory enables Audio Intelligence and Apple Intelligence features that won’t be available on previous Ultra models. On top of all that, battery life is increased, allowing for continuous GPS tracking for up to 45 hours.

All of which provide some great reasons to upgrade, for sure, but for those who made the jump to the Ultra 3 last year, unless some of the new features on the Ultra 4 are going to be really important to you, you might want to stick with what you’ve got.

For iPhone users who have been thinking about making the jump from their current training wearable to an Apple Watch, the Ultra 4 is certainly worth a look.

Apple Watch Ultra … The Beginning

I’ve been following the development of the Apple Watch Ultra almost since day 1. As I wrote last year in my review of the Ultra 3, I was on a call with Apple reps in 2022 about the upcoming watchOS when it dawned on me that Apple was getting ready to launch a watch that would be more sports friendly. That fall the company announced the first Apple Watch Ultra, which offered a bigger screen and much longer battery life than the Apple Watch, along with Bluetooth connectivity and, most importantly, an additional button (don’t call it a “lap” button) that made the watch more training-friendly.

The first Ultra offered a many more important features for endurance athletes: improved GPS performance, running form metrics including vertical oscillation, stride length and ground contact time, the ability to create customized workouts, pacing capabilities and, for those looking to use the watch to track cycling metrics, the ability to connect a power meter through its Bluetooth capabilities. Those were hardly breakthrough features – Garmin, Suunto, Wahoo and many other companies offered products that did all that. The difference now was that you could get all of that with the features that made Apple Watch the most popular smartwatch on the planet. A watch that could help you keep track of your calendar, listen to music, pay for things with Apple Pay or take an ECG, could now track your workouts and provide all the metrics you’d want to track during an IRONMAN race.

Over the years the Ultra line up has steadily improved the watches while keeping the MSRP the same. (One note for the chart below, we’ve listed Apple’s battery numbers, which were definitely low in the first two iterations of the watch. While it was rated for 12 hours of GPS tracking, we tested the original Ultra in an IRONMAN, and there was lots of power to spare after a 12-hour day.)

Ultra 4 – What’s The Same and What’s New

Over the years there really hasn’t been much change to the outside of the Ultra line up, and that continues with the Apple Watch Ultra 4. This latest version uses the same grade 5 titanium and measures 49 x 44 x 12 mm. The Action button is still there, while the display is the same, too – always-on LTP03 OLED that offers up to 3,000 nits of brightness. There remains 100 m water resistance and scuba support to 40 m. The price remains the same at US$799, while the weight goes up slightly to 63/ 63.1 g.

The “new” features added to the Apple Watch Ultra 4 are huge additions. This watch uses the S11 chip and doubles memory to 4GB. The new chip enables Audio Intelligence and Apple Intelligence features, some of which are available now, and some that will be coming later this year. Included in the Audio Intelligence features are Sound Recognition, which can help users who are deaf or hard of hearing to be notified of important sounds – doorbells, sirens, etc. – and notify them. Shazam, which identifies the name of the song playing around you and automatically displays the song title and artists name, is also working now. Later this year Live Rewind is set to be released, which will show the previous 15 seconds of a conversation, while Siri Recap can create summaries of conversations. (Those two features haven’t been release yet, but have already generated some controversy around consent and privacy laws, so it will be interesting to see exactly how they get rolled out.)

The S11 chip is also said to provide more accurate step tracking thanks to a revamped pedometer model, although I never really felt like there were any issues with the Ultra 3 on that front.

While the Audio Intelligence features are huge, athletes and fitness enthusiasts will be most interested in the new optical and electrical heart sensors. Apple has published research to back up its claims that “the Apple Watch Ultra 4 offers the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable.” DC Rainmaker has provided some interesting background on the system and the research process that questions whether or not the Apple Watch truly outshines all the competition, but there is absolutely no doubt that the new system is extremely accurate, and definitely amongst the most accurate wearable heart rate sensor you’ll find. The new LEDs on the optical heart sensor measure heart rate every five seconds, all day long, which allows for more insight into fitness and physiological status.

HRV (heart rate variability), an indicator of stress and recovery, is measured much more often, and you can check that number as part of the Vitals app on the watch.

All of which provides a lot of the data that is used for the “Readiness,” a new feature that analyzes activity, training load, vitals and sleep scores to provide a single 0-10 score each day. You get a recommendation: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready or Go for It. The readiness score can be added to your watch face as a complication – as you can see in the bottom right corner, I was starkly reminded after a bit of a tougher training day to “pace myself.” Readiness does update through the day, which is why I found it to be interesting to have it easily accessible on the watch face.

Battery Life Boost

OK, before anyone harasses me too much, I am fully aware that there are lots of other sport watches out there that measure battery life in weeks, not hours. (The last Garmin Fenix I reviewed tracked all my data for a two week training camp, then kept rolling through my coverage of the Marathon des Sables, serving as a flashlight at night, and I still arrived home with days of battery life remaining.) That has always been a challenge with the Ultra watches. As has been the norm with all the new versions, battery life gets another boost – the Apple Watch Ultra 4 offers up to 50 hours of battery life. That gets boosted to 84 hours in low power mode. During my couple of weeks of testing I’ve found those numbers to be pretty much spot on.

Since wearing the watch at night is a critical component to readiness scoring, you’ll want to charge the watch at different times during the day. In just 15 minutes you can add up to 18 hours of battery life (with the new charging puck that comes with the watch), a dramatic boost from the 12 hours you would get charging the Ultra 3 in the same time period.

In terms of training time, there’s a new Extended Workout mode that will give you up to 25 hours tracking GPS and HR data. The Max Extended Workout mode will track all that data for up to 45 hours.

So, Do You Need It?

As I said in my introduction, endurance athletes who are also interested in tracking as much health data as possible will definitely find some reasons to want this new version of the Apple Watch Ultra lineup. Continues heart rate data, HRV, readiness and the ability to track GPS and other data for longer are welcome gains. If you’re in the hunt for a new sports watch, own an iPhone and are looking to be able to utilize all the features an Apple Watch offers, the Ultra 4 is very much worth a look.

If you have an Apple Watch Ultra 3, and you are not pushing the battery to its limits all the time, you’d have to really want the upgrades that are possible with the new chip to make it worth the switch. The Ultra 3 still gives you 5G connectivity, dual-frequency GPS and most of the fitness and health toolkit – it’s still an excellent training tool and companion.

At the end of the day, each new version of the Apple Watch Ultra lineup has put the watch closer and closer to a full-fledged training option for even the most serious of triathletes and endurance competitors. You truly have the ability to track and monitor all your training and health data, while getting all the benefits of using an Apple Watch. If you are an iPhone user and endurance athlete, there’s no reason the Apple Watch Ultra 4 can’t become an integral part of your training regimen. If you already have an Ultra 3, you might want to hold off on an upgrade to a one-year-old watch, but for those with older Ultra models, or those who have been hesitant to make the jump to the Apple world for a sports wearable, there’s not much holding you back now.

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