Apple Watch Ultra 4 Review: Brilliant, and Probably Not the One You Should Buy
This is the fourth Apple Watch Ultra I have owned. I had the original, then the Ultra 2, then the Ultra 3, and now the Ultra 4. If you put all four on a table I am not sure you could tell them apart, and that is the honest starting point for this review. Externally nothing has changed. Everything that is new is on the inside.
I should also say this up front, because it is the thing I keep coming back to. The features that justify the word Ultra are features I do not use. I do not dive. I am not out doing the sort of ultra long walks that the new battery modes are really built for. On paper this is not my watch. I bought it anyway, I love it, and I think that tension is the most useful thing I can give you.
Quick Specs
Price: £749 (49mm titanium, GPS and cellular, there is no GPS-only version)
Case: 49mm titanium in Natural or Black, sapphire crystal front
Display: Always-On Retina, up to 3,000 nits
Chip: S11
Battery:
Up to 50 hours normal use (up from 42 on the Ultra 3)
Up to 84 hours in Low Power Mode (up from 72)
Up to 18 hours of standard outdoor workout tracking (up from 14)
Extended Workout mode: up to 25 hours with full GPS and heart rate
Max Extended Workout mode: up to 45 hours
Charging: 15 minutes gives up to 18 hours of use. Zero to 80% takes about 45 minutes
Water resistance: 100m, with a depth gauge and dive support
Key Features:
New Health Sensing System with updated heart rate sensors
Readiness app (new, and limited to the Ultra 4 and Series 12)
Recovery HRV and sleep score
Dual frequency GPS
Satellite messaging
ECG, high and low heart rate alerts, hypertension notifications, sleep apnoea notifications
Disclosure: I bought this myself at full price. It is not a review unit and nobody has given me anything. I have had it for two weeks at the time of writing.
First Impressions and Design
I adore the look of this watch and I always have. The chunkiness is exactly what I want on my wrist. It is big and it is obvious and it does not pretend to be jewellery.
The one change I made this year was going back to the Natural titanium after two years on the Black. I had the Ultra 2 and the Ultra 3 in black, and by the end the black one was starting to show its wear and had stopped looking clean. I had just had enough of it, and I wanted something that felt fresh. I am glad I did. The silver finish looks like a new watch in a way the black one no longer did.
If I am jealous of anything, it is the colours on the standard Apple Watch. The Ultra only comes in two finishes and it always has. That is a small thing, but when you see the brighter options on the Series 12 you do notice.
The Strap
I run in the Ocean Band and I wear it every day. Mine is the Translucent Grey, and this is the band I have become genuinely fond of this year.
Apple changed the material. The Ocean Band used to be a solid elastomer tube and this year's version is a new translucent silicone, offered in Translucent Grey, Translucent Kelp and Translucent Black at £99 each. It is softer than the older version and slightly see-through, and it has been a joy to wear.
I have tried the others and they are not for me. The Trail Loop and the Alpine Loop both came back off within days, and I tried the Milanese Loop last year and did not get on with that either. That is not a criticism of them, it is a preference. The genuinely good thing here is the choice. Between the Trail Loop in Dark Umber, Sand or Burgundy, the Alpine Loop in Desert, Dark Olive or Burgundy, and the three Ocean Bands, you will find something that works for you.
Performance and the Buttons
The watch feels quicker. I noticed it within a day or two and I have kept noticing it. Whatever Apple have done with the S11 chip, combined with the new software, things just feel that bit better to use. Nothing dramatic, nothing you would see in a spec sheet, but the kind of small smoothness you feel every time you raise your wrist.
The buttons feel clickier and more responsive to me as well. I will be honest, I genuinely do not know whether Apple have changed anything here or whether I am comparing a brand new watch to one I had worn every day for a year. It might be entirely in my head. I am telling you because that is what I noticed, not because I can prove it.
Battery Life, Which Is the Actual Upgrade
This is the one change I have properly felt, and it is the reason to read the rest of this review.
Here is a real day. I went to bed on a full charge at 10pm and slept in the watch. The next morning I did two hours of indoor gym classes, spin and strength, both recorded as workouts on the watch. I used it normally through the day, it was still on 68% at half six that evening, and I was out dancing in the evening after that. At 11pm it was on 59%. That is a full twenty five hours, a night of sleep tracking, two hours of training and an evening out, with well over half the battery left.
Worth saying that those were indoor workouts with no GPS, and GPS is the expensive part. Apple's 18 hour outdoor workout rating assumes you are running with the satellites switched on, so a tracked indoor session costs you far less than that number suggests.
On a more typical day I am finishing somewhere around 35 to 40% and putting it back on to about 95%. My routine is to charge before bed and then put it on to sleep, and sometimes I forget. With the old watch, forgetting mattered. With this one it has not caught me out once in two weeks.
The quick top up genuinely works. Apple's figure is that 15 minutes on the charger gives you up to 18 hours of use, and that matches my experience of putting it on while I make a coffee and not thinking about it again. Flat to 80% takes about 45 minutes.
I have not used Extended Workout mode and I want to be clear about why. You do not need it for a marathon. The standard outdoor workout rating of 18 hours covers any marathon anybody reading this is going to run. Extended Workout at 25 hours, and Max Extended Workout at 45 hours, are for very long days on your feet. If you are doing those, this watch is now a serious option. If you are not, those numbers are not for you, and that includes me.
Readiness, and Whether It Can Replace My Oura Ring
This is the new feature everyone is asking about. The Readiness app gives you a score from 0 to 10 built from your activity, your vitals and your sleep, with four bands: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready and Go For It. It needs seven nights of sleep data before it will show you anything, so you cannot judge it on day one.
Apple's sleep score I have always found generous. This feels a little harsher, and a little more realistic for it. It is still nowhere near as severe as the numbers I get from my Oura ring, but it is closer to the truth than it was.
Here is where I have landed after two weeks. Not one Readiness score has contradicted how I actually felt when I woke up. And when I think it through, I am not sure it could ever change a training decision for me. If I felt rubbish but the watch told me I was great, I might push on a little bit. If I felt okay and the watch told me I felt rubbish, I would push on still. If I felt rubbish and the watch felt rubbish, that would confirm that I felt rubbish, and that is likely where I was not going to train anyway.
That is not me dismissing it. It is me being honest that a score is information, not instruction, and that the information these scores give you is mostly a confirmation of something your body already told you. That is still worth something. A number on your wrist that agrees with you is reassuring, and reassurance has a value.
The real question for me is not accuracy, it is whether it gives me a similar amount of information with one less thing to think about. If it does, the Oura ring comes off. I will give that a proper go and write it up in December.
Heart Rate, and What I Cannot Tell You
Apple launched this generation alongside a large accuracy study of its own. It is a serious piece of work: over 1,400 people, five sites, a Polar H10 chest strap as the reference, and a deliberately awkward set of activities including treadmill intervals, high intensity training and strength work. Apple's conclusion is that the Ultra 4 and Series 12 beat every rival device tested, including Garmin, Google, Samsung, Huawei, WHOOP and Oura.
I do not own a chest strap, so I could not test any of this myself. I am trusting Apple here and I would rather say that plainly than dress up a week of wearing a watch as verification. What I can tell you from actually using it is that I have seen no cadence lock, which is where a wrist sensor latches onto the rhythm of your feet hitting the ground instead of your actual pulse and gives you a nonsense number. It has also been calm and sensible through gym and strength sessions, which is historically where wrist sensors fall apart.
What I would say about the study is this, and it applies to any manufacturer publishing research about itself. Every result is reported as how much better Apple is than a rival. Apple never publishes how far off the chest strap it actually is. So you can learn that it beats a Garmin, but not whether it is out by two beats or six. For a runner deciding whether to still wear a strap for intervals, that is the question, and the paper does not answer it. The study also recruited deliberately across skin tones and then never reported a single result broken down by skin tone, which is the most discussed fairness issue in this whole category. And anyone with a tattoo or a large mole where the watch sits was excluded, which happens to remove exactly the people whose wrist readings tend to go wrong.
None of that makes the study wrong. It is better designed than most marketing. It just means it answers "is Apple better than the others" and stays quiet on "how good is any of this".
Training On It
As many of you know, we have been building the Full Potential app, and it has a companion Apple Watch app. I will not go on about it here, but using it on this watch has been a joy.
It is cleaner to look at than the alternatives. It gives you the data we think you actually need rather than everything we could possibly put on a screen. It works properly with heart rate alerts so you are not being buzzed at constantly. And the Action button works as a lap button inside our app, so you get a physical press to mark a rep or an interval without touching the screen.
I should be accurate about that last one. The Action button has been able to mark segments in Apple's own Workout app since the original Ultra in 2022, so a physical lap button is not new to the Ultra. What is new is having it inside our training view, built the way we would build it. It should be out in the next week or two.
That matters more than it sounds, because a physical lap button was one of the things that kept me loving Garmins years ago. The other was how customisable they were on the run. Between the Action button and what we have built, I would be more than happy to use this as my serious training watch.
The Ecosystem Point
If you have a Mac and an iPhone, the Apple Watch is simply the next thing, and everything links together without you having to think about it. That is what Apple do better than anybody.
I like being able to take a call on it. I like paying for things with it. I like replying to a message, glancing at an email, training on it, and having it tell me the time, which is still what I want a watch to do. None of this is new to the Ultra 4 and none of it is a reason to upgrade. It is the reason the whole thing works.
Alternatives to Consider
Apple Watch Series 12, from £369. In reality, this is the one to get. It is far better priced and it does all of the fitness tracking, including the same new heart rate sensing system and the same Readiness app. You lose the extreme battery modes, the dive capability and the satellite features. I find the Ultra screen easier to see and I prefer the size, but that is me and my preference, not an argument.
Garmin Forerunner 970, £629.99. I have not used a Garmin for years so I cannot give you a fair comparison, and I would rather say that than pretend. I loved Garmins as running watches because they were superb on the run and endlessly customisable. If you do not want to be in the Apple world, this is where I would look. Testing a current Garmin properly against this is something we would like to do here at Full Potential if we can find the time and the budget.
Apple Watch SE 3, from £219. If the budget is the constraint and you want the Apple ecosystem, this does the basics well.
Final Verdict
The Ultra 4 is the best Apple Watch, and the battery life is a real, felt improvement rather than a line on a slide. Everything else is Apple iterating internally on a design they got right in 2022.
Would I tell an Ultra 3 owner to upgrade? No. And I am aware how ridiculous that sounds coming from someone who did exactly that. I noticed the difference going from the 3 to the 4, but I was also actively looking for it, and I am not going to pretend that is the same thing. If you are on the original Ultra or the Ultra 2, you will genuinely feel this. If you are on the Ultra 3, keep it.
My recommendation: If you are buying an Apple Watch to train with and the price matters at all, buy the Series 12. It gets you the new sensors, the Readiness app and everything you need for marathon training for £380 less. Buy the Ultra 4 if you want the bigger screen and the two day battery and you have decided that is worth it to you, or if you genuinely do spend very long days on your feet. I bought it knowing I am in the first group, not the second, and I have no regrets at all. Just do not let anyone tell you that you need it.
Want help actually using the data?
A watch will give you numbers. It will not tell you what to do with them. If you want a plan that turns your training into something structured, and a coach who looks at the whole picture rather than one score on your wrist, have a look at our coaching packages.
