The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 Just Launched — Still Can't Beat Garmin on These Three Things

New Apple Watch, same problems

Apple's Series 12 and Ultra 4 just launched, and I got excited for about five minutes. Then I remembered why I still reach for a Garmin every morning. Three things haven't changed.

1. Battery life

The Ultra 4 gets the bigger headline here — up to 50 hours, so a little over two days, and a genuine jump over the Ultra 3. The Series 12 doesn't move at all: still up to 24 hours of everyday battery, exactly the same figure as the Series 11. What did improve there is workout battery, up 25% to 10 hours of outdoor tracking, and charging speed — 15 minutes now buys you 12 hours.

Better on the Ultra, genuinely. Still a watch you're charging every day or two. A watch on the charger isn't on your wrist while you sleep, and my Garmin runs for days to weeks depending on the model — which means it's still there at 3 AM recording HRV, sleep stages and resting heart rate, every single night, without me thinking about it once. That's the whole point of a health tracker, and it's the one thing a charging habit quietly breaks.

2. Buttons

Same story as every year: the Action button stays Ultra-only. Series 12, the watch most people actually buy, is still touchscreen-first with no dedicated physical shortcut.

That's a real problem mid-run. A small touchscreen with sweaty fingers, rain on the glass, or gloves on in winter is genuinely hard to use reliably. My Garmin has physical buttons for lap, start/stop and back on every model that matters for training — you can operate it by feel, without looking, without a dry finger.

3. The default watch band

New generation, same small annoyance — Apple hasn't touched the standard band design. You're still wrestling with a loop-through-loop system that's fiddly one-handed, first thing in the morning, half awake. Maybe it's just me, but I've never once thought "this is a good idea" while putting one on.

Garmin's quick-release pins and standard buckles are a five-second job, and most bands are swappable without tools.

None of this means Apple is bad

Series 12 and Ultra 4 are excellent smartwatches, and if notifications, apps and a beautiful screen matter more to you than training data, that's a completely reasonable choice. But if you actually train, or you want your sleep tracked every night rather than most nights, these three things haven't moved.

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