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I Wear an Apple Watch Ultra Every Day and Still Pack a Suunto Core
An Apple Watch Ultra, a Garmin Fenix, and a Suunto Core walk into the backcountry. Only one of them needs nothing from me.
I have owned several Apple Watches, currently own a Garmin Fenix 7X Pro Sapphire Solar, and a Suunto Core I bought in 2012 and never fully retired. I still wear the Apple Watch every day. The Suunto comes out for a different kind of trip.
The smart ones are better at nearly everything, and I'm going to spend most of this article being fair to them. Then I'm going to point out that the Suunto runs on a watch battery I change about once a year, and that I have never planned a trip around its charge level.
I've been like this about watches since third grade. I don't remember exactly when it started, only that I have not been without one on my wrist for something like 35 years, and that somewhere in there I've owned a pretty absurd number of "nice" Swiss and Japanese watches, both analog and digital, that never once had to survive a bike trip. This article is not really about smartwatches versus a dumb one. It's about the one watch in the rotation that's never given me a reason to think about it.
The Apple Watch Ultra: Great Until Day Three
I wear an Ultra 2 every day, and before that I had the original Ultra. They're legitimately impressive. The Ultra 2 is rated to 100 meters and lists 36 hours of battery, or up to 72 hours on low power settings. That's a good number for a computer strapped to a wrist, and a bad one for day three of a trip with no wall outlet.
It isn't a brick when the signal drops. GPS, compass, and altimeter all keep working. What it lacks is the Core's weather sense.
What does die without a connection is the stuff on the watch face that actually needs one. The weather numbers go stale, messages stop coming in, and the whole thing starts feeling less like a tool and more like a very expensive dumb watch that happens to still know which way is north.
The watch has a barometric sensor, but as far as I can tell the pressure trend and storm alarm come from third-party apps. One of them can run independently of the iPhone and turn the watch into an altimeter, barometer, and compass. That's nice, except the Core came that way.
Apple has kept going. The Ultra 4 starts at $799 and offers up to 50 hours of everyday battery. The Ultra 3 and later also include satellite Emergency SOS, free for two years after activation, which mine doesn't have and which is a real safety feature. One review noted that the newer offline maps lack the terrain detail found on Garmin or Suunto watches.
The Garmin Fenix: The Correct Answer, Mostly
I have a Fenix 7X Pro Sapphire Solar, and it's a genuinely great watch. It's also 51mm across, which is big enough that my wrist keeps pressing its buttons while I ride. That's a strange flaw for something marketed to people who do things outdoors.
I picked the 51mm myself, nobody talked me into it. I have the wrists for it, so it looks fine sitting there. The actual problem is bike-specific: the wrist motion of riding is exactly the motion that walks a button into the case. Drop down to the 47mm and that problem disappears, and in its place you get a screen where the maps and complications are just a little too small to read without squinting. Smaller case, worse map. Bigger case, worse buttons. That is the whole paradox, and there is no version of this watch that does not hand you something to complain about, which is probably why I own as many watches as I do, not just Garmins.
On paper it's the strongest case against the Suunto. Garmin claims up to 37 days in smartwatch mode with solar charging, and up to 122 hours in GPS mode with solar. It has an altimeter, a barometer, and a 3-axis electronic compass, plus preloaded TopoActive maps. As a training watch, I'd put it ahead of the Apple Watch Ultra, and I'll defend that in the comments.
Unlike the Apple Watch, none of that depends on a phone being anywhere nearby. The GPS, the compass, the barometer, the altimeter, all of it runs off the watch's own sensors and actual GPS satellites, not a cell network. I can leave the phone in the truck and the essential stuff keeps working, which is the entire point of carrying a dedicated outdoor watch instead of a smartwatch that happens to track a run.
It also has a flashlight built into the case, which is one of those features people take for granted until they actually use it. Full power white mode is bright as heaven itself. Dial it down and it's dim enough for just reading a map without blowing out your night vision. There's also a red light mode, which is exactly the right setting for taking a piss outside the tent at 2am without lighting up the whole campsite. No headlamp needed.
The catch is what happens when you push the battery further. Battery Saver Watch Mode is listed at up to 90 days, or over a year with solar, which sounds like a win until you notice what it is. At that point the Fenix has voluntarily become a very expensive Suunto Core.
It also doesn't integrate with my Apple setup as smoothly as I'd like. I'm the sort of person who cares about whether I can find the trail, not what my recovery score is.
Garmin has since announced the Fenix 9, on August 25, 2026. The 43mm and 47mm sizes start at $999.99, and the 51mm, the size I'd actually need, runs $1,099.99 and up. That's a lot of watch, and I'd rather not scratch it.
The Suunto Core
I bought it in 2012 because I was doing adventure racing, and the races I was doing didn't allow GPS watches. That narrowed the field to a watch that knew its altitude, the barometric pressure, and which way was north, and not much else.
It was also on my wrist for my first date with my wife, for what that's worth. She married me anyway.
She asked, "Is that a Suunto?" which is the only time in my life a woman has ever asked about a watch on my wrist. Men apparently buy nice watches under the impression this attracts women. In my limited sample size, it mainly attracts other men who also own too many watches.
Not much else is the appeal. It's an altimeter, a barometer, and a compass. Suunto made its first Altimeter-Barometer-Compass watch in 1998, and the Core descends from that idea. It also has a weather trend indicator and a storm alarm, which are the two features I'd miss most.
It is not a gentle device. The compass is only active for 40 seconds at a time to conserve battery, so if you want to keep checking your heading, you restart it. It needs careful calibration on first use and again after a battery change, and you have to set your reference altitude yourself or it will confidently tell you something wrong.
The power source is a user-replaceable CR2032 that lasts about a year in normal use. I have never needed a charger, an app, or a firmware update. I have also never needed to remember where I put the charger, which turns out to matter more than any spec.
The one modification I have made is the strap. Suunto ships the Core on its own proprietary lug width, so a while back I put on a JaysAndKays Fixed Lugs adapter kit, which lets the watch take a standard 24mm strap instead. Mine currently wears a Maratac. It is the only part of this watch I've changed on purpose.
The River
I should mention that this watch has been through things. One July around 2015, on the Moab Daily upstream of town, I misread a rapid, and an inflatable kayak turned out to be a much less stable place to be wrong than I'd assumed. I went into the water and stayed in it, swimming a bad rapid's worth of cold river and bouncing off the rock walls a few times, until we reached a resort with a dock. It felt like it took forever. The Suunto went with me for all of it.
On paper, it shouldn't have been fine. The Core is rated to 30 meters of water resistance, with a mineral glass crystal. The Ultra 2 is rated to 100 meters, and the Fenix has a sapphire lens and a 10 ATM rating. Neither has ever been asked to survive my judgment, and I'd like to keep it that way.
The Core kept running. It didn't fog, it didn't reset, and it didn't ask me to sign back into anything. I don't have a technical explanation, and the spec sheet doesn't support one. It just kept telling me the altitude, which was not the information I needed at the time, but I appreciated the consistency.
What It Comes Down To
All three keep their essential functions running without cell service. Only one has never needed sunlight, a charger, or my attention.
To be fair about the rankings: the Apple Watch Ultra is the one I wear every day, and it does everything I ask of it there, which is exactly where cell towers and chargers both happen to be. In real use, not the spec sheet, it gets me about two days before it wants a wall outlet. The Garmin gets close to a month, which is close enough to its own 37-day claim that I was almost suspicious. The Suunto gets about a year off a coin cell, and I keep a spare in a drawer I haven't opened in a while because I haven't needed to.
That's the actual breakdown, battery and range both. Daily wear, in cell range: Apple Watch Ultra, not close. Shorter trips where I'll mostly still have reception, a long weekend, a day that might run late: Garmin Fenix, and the better navigation and training tool of the two by a wide margin. Anything genuinely out of cell range, or anything pushing past a week: Suunto Core, and nothing else gets considered. It has no maps, no recovery score, and no opinion about my sleep. It has a 40-second compass, a storm alarm, and a battery that will outlast the trip, the next trip, and possibly the phone I'm carrying right now.
There's also the matter of what each one tells you about yourself, which ends up saying as much about the watch as it does about me. The Garmin tracks more about my body than I know what to do with: recovery time, training load, stress score, a VO2 max estimate, numbers that read like they were built for a professional athlete, or possibly an Olympic hopeful, not someone who is, by any honest measure, old, fat, and slow. Ask anyone who rides with me. The Garmin isn't wrong about any of it, which is sort of the problem.
The Apple Watch tells me things I can actually use, and it does it like it's on my side. It will tell me when I'm slipping, but it's not a dick about it, and it also tells me when I've actually improved, which keeps me wanting to check it instead of dreading it. The Suunto doesn't weigh in on any of this at all. It has no idea how I'm doing. It was never built to have an opinion, and some days that's the nicest thing about it.
Durability is its own argument, and it isn't close. If I hit a rock hard enough to crack the Apple Watch Ultra's screen, Apple's own out-of-warranty repair runs $499 on an Ultra 2, a full display assembly, not just glass. With AppleCare+ that drops to a $79 service fee, which is the entire reason AppleCare+ exists, but without it, a cracked screen is a genuinely bad day.
The Garmin is probably the toughest of the three, and the build backs that up. It's MIL-STD-810 tested for shock, thermal, and water, wrapped in a titanium or stainless bezel with reinforced lugs and metal guards around the buttons, and a sapphire lens that shrugs off scratches that would mark up anything softer. I haven't broken mine yet, and I suspect that says more about the watch than about how carefully I treat it.
The Suunto, I genuinely do not worry about, and The River is most of the reason why. When it finally does break, a used Suunto Core runs $85 to $100 on eBay, no integrated battery to worry about degrading the way you would on a used smartwatch, just a CR2032 I drop in myself. If it breaks, I don't fix it. I replace it, and I do not think about it again.
Navigation is where the differences get real. The Apple Watch does cycling directions through Apple Maps, bike lanes, paths, roads, turn-by-turn haptic taps on the wrist, the whole thing. It is also, functionally, a city tool. It knows bike lanes. It does not know singletrack, and the cycling directions only work in a short list of countries and metro areas to begin with.
The Garmin actually understands trails. Drop a route on it and it gives you turn-by-turn prompts at the actual intersections, not just the ones with street names. Get turned around and TracBack walks you straight back out along the exact path you rode in on. Round-Trip Routing will even build you a loop of a given distance from wherever you're standing. This is the one category where it isn't close.
The Suunto does not do navigation, because that is not its problem. It's your problem. It has a compass. Lock a bearing and it'll tell you if you're drifting off it, and that's the whole feature set. No turns, no trails, no hand-holding.
Lifecycle is the one nobody thinks about until the watch they bought two years ago starts acting like it's on its way out. Apple actually puts a number on this, in writing. A given model gets roughly five to six years of major watchOS updates, then Apple classifies it "vintage" five to seven years after it's discontinued, meaning repairs are possible if parts still exist, and "obsolete" at seven-plus years post-discontinuation, meaning no hardware service at all. The Ultra 2 on my wrist already has a shelf life. I just don't know the exact date yet.
Garmin doesn't publish anything that formal, which somehow isn't reassuring. The real-world pattern, going by past models, is feature updates for two to three years, bug fixes for three to five, and Connect IQ app support out to five to seven. The hardware itself keeps working well past all of that. The GPS and sensors don't care what year it is. But the software experience quietly starts degrading a lot sooner than most people assume when they buy one of these expecting it to last forever.
The Suunto has been running since 2012, fourteen years now, with nothing resembling an update schedule because there has never been anything to update. The only lifecycle event that matters is a coin cell, and that one is entirely up to me.
The Old Suunto Wins
This one is actually two years older than the desert photo up top. Fewer scratches, same case, same watch.
It's a strange thing to say about a watch that makes me restart its compass every 40 seconds, but it fits the rest of what I ride. I chose one gear because there's less to break, and I made the same argument about a Trangia stove. The best piece of equipment is the one you understand completely, and I've had fourteen years to understand the Suunto Core.
If you're the kind of person who rides a single-speed on purpose, none of this should surprise you. You already made this exact argument about gears. One chainring, no derailleur, nothing to index, nothing to break in a way you can't fix with a chain tool and a bad attitude. The Suunto is basically a single-speed drivetrain wearing a watch face. No apps, no firmware, no subscription, no charger, just the parts it needs and nothing else.
If you've read this far and the words "12-speed cassette" made your blood pressure rise a little, do yourself a favor and go get a Suunto Core. You already know exactly how you feel about unnecessary complexity. This is just that same feeling, strapped to your wrist.
I'll keep wearing it until something finally breaks. So far, the only thing to fail on that river was me.
- gear
- apple-watch
- garmin
- suunto
- navigation